Establish Your Time Archives

#48: Coping-through-Chaos

Dianne / December 14, 2023

Today, we’re delving into the challenges that resonate with every parent in the trenches – the holiday hustle, strikes, and the constant threat of illness.

🌟 Exploring Current Challenges with Compassion

Beyond the decorations and festivities, we’re acknowledging the stress many of us are grappling with. From navigating the complexities of holidays to the weight of dealing with strikes and sickness, it’s a tumultuous time for us all.

🤒 Navigating Health Struggles with Shared Stories

In this episode, we share a personal journey of recent illness and the ongoing struggle to recover. Through these narratives, we aim to foster a sense of understanding and solidarity as we collectively face the daunting challenges of illnesses, flu, and the looming presence of COVID.

⚠️ Strikes, Work, and the Overwhelming Reality

As strikes disrupt the familiar routines, parents working from home find themselves in an even more challenging balancing act. The chaos at home and the interruptions at work are all too familiar. We’re here to acknowledge the difficulties and provide a virtual shoulder to lean on.

🛠️ Empathetic Coping Strategies for Parental Survival

In the face of chaos, we share three practical coping strategies – creating personal space, tapping into creativity, and reconnecting with your support system. Our aim is to provide a supportive environment and practical tips for alleviating stress and overwhelm.

🔊 Tune in for a Compassionate Discussion

Whether you’re nodding along or seeking a moment of solace, join us at “Parenting Unplugged” for an empathetic discussion. We’re not just a podcast; we’re a community sharing the weight of these challenges, acknowledging the struggles, and offering a compassionate space for parents to connect.

👂 Because Parenthood is a Collective Journey, and Your Struggle is Validated Here.

woman holding her head looking overwhelmed

Establish Your Time

#43: Adjusting To The Back to School Overwhelm

Dianne / September 28, 2023

In this episode I talk about this crazy period in the parenthood journey and that’s Back To School.

Back to school isn’t just a one day event. This is actually the starting off point of when things start to change dramatically for everyone, not just the kids. As our schedules fill up, things need to be taken care of on top of all the things LIFE is throwing at us, it’s easy to get lost, confused and overwhelmed.

This is a huge adjustment period most of us go through at least once a year. Unfortunately, some go through it alone. Listen to this much-needed-to-be-talked-about podcast episode to help you cope with the overwhelm. I give you ONE simple strategy as well as guide you to do this 1 thing, so you don’t feel like you’re at this alone.

Hope you find this episode helpful – Enjoy!

XO – Dianne

To show the end result of overcoming the overwhelm and frustrations when maintaining our home

Establish Your Time, Home organizing

#38: Reduce Overwhelm and Frustrations When Maintaining Your Home

Dianne / May 27, 2023

Managing your household tasks can be a lot on your mental health and well-being – especialyl if it falls on 1 person most of the time. As busy parents, we tend to truck through the every day grind on top of all our other obligations such as work, taking care of the kids and trying to squeeze in time for our own projects and passions. But WHAT IF, we had a system that could alleviate, even a little, the amount of overwhelm and frustrations we have when it comes to maintaining our home?

In this episode I take you step by step through a process that I’ve done myself for tasks that overwhelm me the most. If you have tasks that you wish would just disappear, then have listen to this episode now and get ready to take action.

Enjoy friend!

Establish Your Time

#30: Work-life balance for moms

Dianne / February 3, 2023

Work-Life Balance for Moms
In this episode you’ll learn the reasons why it’s so tough to balance out all the things related to motherhood, work, homelife and our own personal goals. First off, I’ll give you a glimpse of HOW to balance things out using the insight from an article I recently published. Then I’ll also talk about my secret strategy when trying to prioritize the ever-growing to-do list and gain some perspective on what’s eating most of your time. Finally, you’ll get access to a free resource I created to help you get super clear on what to do next.

Basically, I guess it’s fair to say this episode’s going to be like a free mini training for how to deal with the very challenging work-life balance. So you’ll want to grab a pen and a paper, my friend, to take notes. Or, you can save this episode, listen to the replay and get to work.
Work-life (im)balance
We all know as a mom we play many roles: chef, driver, counselor, referee, judge and jury, therapist, friend, builder and finder of toys, artist, teacher, etc. It’s constantly changing from one moment to the next, and often without notice.

Ironically, we have all the answers to problems, struggles and challenges. But at the same time, have no clue what to do, or what we’re even doing for that matter. Motherhood is a constant push-pull on our emotions, energy, patience… and it’s all worth it. Because this whole adventure is for the most beautiful and wonderful creatures on earth, our children!

For these reasons alone, there’s no doubt the toll on our mental load is quite heavy. Oftentimes, we get the short end of the stick. But we keep going and push through it all. In essence, it all comes from love. Now, if you ask any mom out there, anything short of a 100% effort on our part results in guilt and/or worry. This vicious cycle of selflessness, joy, love, guilt and worry is far from healthy and putting it out there like this, just raises the question, why? Undeniably, mothers would walk to the ends of the earth for those we love most.

With the joys of motherhood, come the challenges of having to balance everything out: all the things involving the kids, the house, our relationships with others, our passion projects, trying to fit in our own personal needs and then there’s our regular job!

How do moms get a better work-life balance?

Establish Your Time

#27: How To Prevent Holiday Burnout

Dianne / December 9, 2022

To many, holiday preparations start after Halloween, others push it to the start of Black Friday or like us, I start putting stuff up somewhere around the first week or 2 of December because our decorations and tree stay up for a good week into January. Basically after the 6th when we also celebrate Armenian Christmas. However, there are quite a few people, and I know some friends who do this. Their holiday season starts as early as summer vacation is over! That’s a full 3 months of conceptualizing, preparing and implementing!

So, with this in mind, as well as being mindful of my own feelings and reasoning why I wait well into December to put up the decorations, – which I’ll share with you later on. But it got me thinking about the impact this season has on our mental health, emotional wellness and overall well-being. Let’s agree, this is a busy time of the year on TOP of it being the holidays. For many it’s year-end so work is demanding to get all our numbers in, all the sales accounted for and working for that big bonus. This is also a time where the heaviness from losing someone can be felt so deeply or the feelings of guilt and self-worthiness can come creeping in and stinging some of us. It’s enough to get burnout… but let’s not get to that point.

In creating this episode, my hope is to arm you and give you tools and strategies of how to go about the holidays that won’t lead you to burnout. To give you tips and tricks on how to manage the overwhelm and be present and in the moment so that you can enjoy the holiday season amidst all the chaos, demands and spreading the joy.

So in this episode I’ll be talking to you about:
How to set the tone so that your intentions are established and used as your guiding light to get through this season.

With setting the tone, you’ll learn ways to pace yourself so as to avoid the overwhelm that can lead to burnout.

Next, I’ll talk about creating space so that our mental health is always in check.

And finally, I’ll talk about something many of us struggle with and that’s: Setting boundaries because we know what lies ahead of us but how can we manage and control our tendencies as well?

Establish Your Time

Podcast #17: Let’s Talk Mental Health – Stop Spreading Yourself Too Thin

Dianne / May 5, 2022

When I became a mom and went through all the first time mom-feels: joys, discoveries and all the challenges. It REALLY became apparent on my mental load after I had my second baby.

I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt that I was spread way thin.

I was still adjusting to knowing my daughter, a very different baby than my first, and all the tricks that were working before, didn’t work at all or as effectively with her. I felt, as millions of moms out there also felt: like crap. I had no idea what I was doing. Well, I knew the basics but this was a whole different personality. It’s as though I was starting back at square one; but STILL trying to be present and attentive to my son and at the same time be a loving and supportive wife: 24/7 , 365.

My mode was either OFF, which felt like a blink, or ALWAYS ON: there for everyone AND everything. Doing things on my own and trying to figure things out, is just who I am. It’s part of my ‘being’.

Now, this isn’t to say that my husband didn’t help or wasn’t present. Not at all. He’s a very involved parent and husband. When I was in massage therapy school every second weekend, he was perfectly fine taking care of our son. And our son…. knew no difference!

But, while Onnig was asleep, call it stubbornness on my part or just wanting to ensure he’s at his best for his employees and business partners, I would rarely wake him up overnight. I tended to all the wake ups from either one or both kids.

Now don’t get me wrong, we had many conversations about me needing to wake him up, even if it was to bring the baby to me, wait for the feed, and bring her back to her crib – he was so on board with that. But my thoughts were about taking care of him too.
In hindsight, I wanted and needed to do the work: feel all the feels, gain the experience and knowledge about myself. As much as my babies were growing, I was too.

But my mental health was also taking a toll. I didn’t know or didn’t pay much attention then, but I do remember one night, annoyed after a quick feed, standing by the corner of the bed, awake but exhausted. What felt like months and months and months of trying to keep it all together, while feeling like I was being pulled in all directions, I felt resentment brewing.