Building Your Parenting Motivation Muscle

Anyone start off the new year low and slow on motivation?

Being an effective parent means putting in time and energy each day to accomplishing your parental aspirations. Some days it will be easier to summon the skills required to be at your best.

Thankfully parenting doesn’t require perfection but it does need a decent dose of motivation to sustain you.

Our mindset has final say on the day. No matter how well you eat, exercise or sleep, how you perform as a parent is heavily influenced by how you think about yourself.  When you feel confident and capable, you are more likely to act in accordance with your best self.

Setting achievable tasks is a great way to feel competent about nailing your bigger goals. Instead of expecting yourself to be the next Pink McKay of baby settling, pick a task to do such as settling your child for their day nap at a set time and praise yourself for doing so. Whether they go to sleep for 5 minutes for 2 hours. The same goes for domestics, putting the washing on or unstacking the dishes, are micro tasks towards the ultimate goal of a tidy home. 

Ask yourself if you are acting in line with your parenting values? Sometimes we act out of unconscious core beliefs laid down in childhood and don’t know who exactly we want to be. By reflecting on what you want to stand for as a parent and what you want your children to say about you when they are all grown up, can summon new energy to behave differently.

 Start today by visualising yourself being how you want to be with your kids.  Practice visualisation each day to the lay down a new brain pathway.  It is not easy to change old patterns but motivation to do so and setting realistic goals, optimises your chances of moving closer towards a parenting version of yourself that you are satisfied with.