In today’s episode we’re getting into rhythms. This is something that I talk about a lot but there are always questions about it, because it can feel really complicated. I’m going to expand on what rhythms are, what they actually do, why you need them, and how they can be such a solution for you. Let’s dive in! 

In This Episode Allie Discusses:

• The difference in rhythms and routines 

• What rhythms are 

• What anchors are 

• The benefits of rhythms

Mentioned in this Episode:

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Unburdened

EP 130: Sunday Night Prep: The Key To Purposeful Weeks

Mom life. We’re surrounded by the message that it’s the tired life. The no-time-for-myself life. The hard life. We’re supposed to get through it. Survive. Cling on by the last little thread. And at the same time, Carpe Diem—enjoy every moment because it’s going to go by so fast. The typical mom culture that sends us all kinds of mixed, typically negative messages. We shouldn’t take care of ourselves; it’s selfish. The more ragged you run yourself, the bigger your badge of honor. But also, ditch your mom bod and work out. Don’t yell. Make more money. Show up. Be better, but not at the expense of time with your kids. I am putting a hard stop to all of this. While being a mom, running a business, and whatever else you might have going on is hard, it is a lot and there’s lots of giving of yourself, the idea that motherhood means living a joyless, nonstop-hustle-with-zero-balance kind of life, where you give and give and give and never take, needs to stop. 

I’m on a mission to help you stop counting down the minutes till bedtime (at least most days). Stop the mom guilt and shame game. Stop cleaning up after your kids’ childhood and start being present for it. I want to help you thrive in work, home and life. I believe in John 10:10 that we are called to living an abundant life and I know moms are not excluded from that promise. Join me in conversations about simplicity, some business and life hacks, spirituality and lots of other good stuff that leads to a life of less for the sake of enjoying more in your motherhood. I’m Allie Casazza and this is The Purpose Show.

Hi friends! Welcome back to The Purpose Show! In today’s episode we’re going to get really detailed about something that I discuss a lot. There are always questions about it because it can feel really complicated. 

It doesn’t have to be. It can certainly remove complications from your life and make things so much simpler for you. It perfectly ties into some amazing things we have going on in my business this week, so we’re going to talk about it. 

What we’re going into today is rhythms. Maybe you’ve heard me mentioned rhythms. Maybe you’ve heard me talk about them, but you haven’t really understood it. If you’re not in the Unburdened program, then you wouldn’t really have gotten a full, deep dive and that’s because it’s a lot. There’s a whole entire section of that program that’s about rhythms because it is so much. 

Today I’m going to expand on what rhythms are, what they actually do, why you need them, and how they can be such a solution for you moms that are listening and really anybody. We’ve got a couple of dads in the course. We’ve definitely got women who are not mothers that are in the course. It’s helpful to streamline and simplify. 

The misconception that happens when I speak about rhythms is that people are not understanding where to put them in their day. How to attach them to the things in their week that are already happening to really fully automate their lives. I’m going to dive really deep into that in this episode.

The first thing you need to understand is that rhythms are not routines. Typically, routines are a list of things that you typically do. For example, Wednesday is kitchen day; Thursday is bathroom day or bathroom & laundry day. And that’s a routine you stick with all the time, no matter what else is going on, no matter what else you’re doing. 

It’s really rigid. It’s not customizable by the other things that you’re doing in your day. They are typically things that somebody else made on the internet that you download, laminate, and pin to your fridge. 

Or it’s something that you create in your mind when you’re thinking, “Okay, I’m done! I’m so sick of being overwhelmed. I’m so sick of things not working out the way I want them to. I’m going to create a routine and I’m going to stick with it.”

This could be for your business. It could be for running your home. It could be for your kid’s schooling. It could be for anything. I have rhythms for homeschooling because routines don’t work for us in homeschooling. 

Basically if routines have not worked for you or they never stick, rhythms can definitely help you. Of course you still have to show up and do the work, but they’re definitely more for people who are not super Type A and don’t do really well with extreme rigidity like doing all the laundry every Wednesday. They’re for people who feel unhappy in routines like that like I do. 

I’ve talked a lot about how I felt when I had a set day that I was supposed to do the laundry. I was dreading Thursdays because who wants to dedicate an entire day to something as mundane as the frickin laundry? But when I switched and shifted it to just doing a small load every couple of days in the morning, changing the load after I ate lunch, and then being done, that was a game changer for me. 

Now I pretty much have a load of laundry going every morning because our family is so big now. I wash our curtains and extra things that normal people don’t wash because they don’t care because we have a kid with allergies and stuff. Taking it out of a routine that has to be “just so” and letting it be rhythmic basically removes the rigidity. It removes the need for you to follow something that was written by you or for you. It removes the box and boundaries around what you do every week.

Basically, with routines we would have a day where I really wanted to take the kids to Legoland   with our Legoland passes but it was laundry day. And, because of my routines, if I don’t do the laundry today then we’re going to be super behind, everything’s going to fall apart, and we’re not going to have enough clean underwear. I’ll have to do all my laundry tomorrow and all my grocery shopping, because tomorrow is grocery shopping day. One piece of life happens and the whole routine is ruined and goes out the window. 

That’s not going to work for me because I need to be able to be fluid, flowy, and spontaneous. I don’t like to react at my life, react at my kids, and freak out when something doesn’t go as planned. I like to be able to have wiggle room to say, “Oh, I feel like doing this today,” or, “This happened in my business today; I really need to address it, work on this problem, and not do the  laundry today.” I need everything to be simpler. I really need it to be bite-sized and automated away from me. 

The other thing about routines versus rhythms is your mind. For you to have to think, “I have to prep all of our meals for the week. But I have to go grocery shopping before I can prep the meals because I don’t have any groceries. What day am I going to go to the grocery store because I have this doctor appointment or this thing is happening?” 

Rhythms automate everything. You always know when you’re making your grocery list. You always know when you’re meal planning. You always know when you’re going to the grocery store or ordering your groceries to be delivered. You always know when you’re meal prepping. You always know when the laundry is going to get done. And if you miss a time, it doesn’t matter because it’s bite-sized.

It’s bite-size automation. The brain work is taken out of it for you. You never have to think, “I totally forgot to meal prep,” or, “I totally haven’t done laundry in a week and now we have no clean underwear.” 

It doesn’t happen because it’s automated. It’s automated so bite-sized that if you miss a time, it’s literally no big deal. It gives you room to live your freaking life, skip a day, make a mistake, or focus on the kids instead of the house for a couple of days or whatever it is. 

Does that make sense to everyone? Okay, good. I’m recording this episode live, so I might check in on the comments every now and then. I hope that gives you a decent picture of routines versus rhythms. 

I feel like I need to say this now because someone on my team told me, “Oh my gosh, you must love James Clear. I love him too. You must’ve read Atomic Habits.” And I said, “What the heck? I don’t even know what that is.” 

Apparently there’s this amazing book called Atomic Habits by James Clear and he talks about rhythms, anchors, and all of these things. I’ve never read that book so I don’t know how I got the same idea in my head, but there’s a book about this for business and productivity if you want to go and check that out. I’ve not read it. This is something that I have figured out for my own personal home life and apparently it’s totally a thing, so props to James. 

However you want to learn about habits, rhythms, and setting things in automation, go and dive all the way in. There are lots of people talking about this kind of thing. I’m going to help you take it and apply it how I applied it. 

The story for me with rhythms is I had totally decluttered my home. I’d been living as a minimalist for years. I had turned my blog into a business. You guys probably know that story. 

I was moving from being a fully stay-at-home mom to not only being a working mom, but being a work-from-home mom. And not only being a work-from-home mom, but being a business owner and having a company to run. I was hiring people. Things were moving so quickly and so rapidly. 

I was feeling like, “Oh my gosh, my life is so different. It changed from one extreme to the other so quickly. What do I do?”

This is when I really started to feel like my old routines were just really stagnant and they weren’t helping me anymore. And if a routine isn’t serving you, what is it even for? I started to feel like I needed something different. 

I have business decisions to make. I’m planning webinars. I’m planning launches. I’m creating programs and helping women. I’m going live. 

I started to see how valuable my brain is. All of our brains are, not just mine. I started to see that my brain is so valuable. I only have so much mental energy every day. 

I don’t want to spend big pieces of my mental energy figuring out when I’m going to do laundry. Remembering to check if everyone has clean pants. Remembering when to prepare meals. Or when to do anything! I didn’t want to do that. 

My brain calories could be saved for the things that are going to move the needle forward in my business, make me available to be a better mom, to be a more present mother, to answer my kids’ questions more calmly with more patience. I’d rather spend my brain and my mental energy on those things. I knew I had to find a way to do this. This is when I figured out that bite-sizing things and automating things is everything. 

It felt very, very rhythmic so I called them rhythms. It changed again when I started attaching rhythms to anchored events that happened in my day or my week. And that’s what I am going to walk you through right now. 

I feel like we have explained the difference between rhythms and routines. What you really need to understand about rhythms is that they are basically things that must get done. You want to rhythmatize the things that have to get done for your life to function smoothly. 

You could have personal rhythms. You could have health and wellness rhythms. You could have business rhythms. You could have household and family rhythms. You could have rhythms for your kids and they can learn to follow those.

You can do this with anything and everything. But just know that it’s overwhelming at first and you want to start small. Rhythms are anything that needs to happen for everything to feel good and run smoothly. You wouldn’t want to set rhythms for extra things that would be nice if they were done. 

You have to have clean clothes so you have to wash those clothes to get them clean. You have to have clean dishes. You have to have food on the table. You have to feel like you have enough internal energy to show up for all the hats that you wear in your life and all the different roles that you’re in, right? Rhythms are for things like that. 

Fitting in exercise, making food for your family, doing the laundry—all of these things have to get done for things to go smoothly. You have options. You can either do them yourself or you can delegate them to somebody else. 

Something that I’m delegating to somebody else is deep cleaning my house. I hired a housekeeper. We even have a house assistant now that comes in and helps with all kinds of things now. But that was way after I did all my rhythms and when I needed to do all of this myself.

When it comes to things that have to get done for things to run smoothly, you’ve got those two options: delegating it and paying someone else to do it, or doing it yourself. For a lot of us, we’re doing it ourselves, right? So if you’re doing it yourself, you can either be reactive or you can be proactive. 

Reactive means, “Holy crap! I didn’t even realize no one has clean underwear and we are going back to school tomorrow.” Proactive is, “I’m thinking ahead, bite-sizing my tasks down, I’m automating it so there’s always clean underwear.” 

That’s how rhythms work.

Guys! This is the moment we have been waiting for for months! Unburdened is open for enrollment!

Unburdened is my signature course. It is life-coaching school with me. You will walk out the other side of this program a completely renewed, different, lighter version of yourself. I guarantee it if you do what is in this course. 

Nothing is crazy. Nothing is like, “Oh my gosh! It’s so insanely time-consuming. How am I going to do this with kids, doing their school, and working?”

It’s simple. It’s bite-sized. And it packs a frickin’ punch!

Unburdened is a fan favorite program. It only opens a couple of times a year and this is it. 

The doors are closing on October 2nd at midnight. Please take advantage of the fact that it’s here right now. The price is going up next time. It’s normally not available at all, so not only will you miss out on a lower cost, you will not even be able to get to it. 

Unburdened will go over everything in your life, your internal, your mindset. It is a motherhood lifestyle coaching program. 

The lessons pack such a serious punch. They are so pointed. They are so life-giving. 

You are going to want to go back, reference, and relisten to this course over and over and over again. I know because this is what my students have been telling me for years.

I love this course so much. I believe that this course is an absolute game changer for moms who are feeling like things have to be a little bit overwhelming all the time. 

Your mindset is skewed. The way that you’re interacting with your family and your kids just doesn’t feel quite how you want it. You feel like even though maybe you have some things kind of simplified, things are still really heavy. 

You need to be Unburdened by getting enrolled into this program now. Absolutely this is for you! 

If you are a woman, if you are a mother, and you feel like your lifestyle could be lighter, please go to unburdened.life. That’s the website. I want you to check out the info page. See if it’s for you. 

There is a payment plan for you. I have got you so set up for success this time, guys. I am so excited about this!

Go and check it out. 

I want you to stop overthinking. 

I want you to stop spending money on everybody but yourself and think for a second what would happen if you were a better, lighter, less stressed version of yourself? 

How would that affect you as a person? How would that affect your faith? How would that affect your marriage? Your relationships? How would that affect your relationships with your children? 

How would that affect how you show up everywhere you show up every single week? If everything was simplified? If there were rhythms that were supporting you and how you live your life? 

If you looked forward to every day? If you looked forward to every week? If the things on your calendar that make you drop a little bit inside because you’re just over it, you don’t feel right doing it, something is off, or something in your day just always feels stressful? There’s a particular time of day that you just always kind of dread? If everything was just lighter? 

There is always a way to figure it out! Don’t think that the way that your life is heavy on you is an exclusion to what I am saying. There is always, always a way to figure it out and make things lighter. 

Guys, Unburdened will change your life. It’s here! The doors are open! They close on October 2nd. Get in there! 

Unburdened.life. I’m obviously super passionate about this. I want to see you in there! 

I want to walk you through these next few weeks of your life taking one step at a time, one bite-sized chunk at a time of removing stress, infusing your life with intentionality, peace, life, and joy so you can stop living in this cycle of constant, breathless overwhelm.

Unburdened.life. If you’re a woman, if you are a mom, this course will change your life.

Note: The audio of this episode says that Unburdened closes October 1st, but I decided to extend it to October 2nd at midnight PT.

Let’s talk about anchors because anchors are the next piece in teaching you rhythms. Anchors are basically events. They’re things that happen that you want to attach the rhythms to in order to automate your brain not having to remember every single thing. 

I always give the laundry and dishes as an example. I’ll give you some more examples in this episode, but for now let’s start with that. Every night when I go to bed I put in a load of laundry and I run the machine. Every morning when I wake up I switch that load. 

Every day after lunch I switch it again, finish the load, fold and put away. I actually have the kids fold and put away now. Every day a load of laundry is getting done. You could do that every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. You could do that twice a week, depending on your family size and what your needs are. 

That’s a rhythm. I attached the thing that needs to happen (the laundry) to an event (bedtime). I’m going to bed; I put a load of laundry in. Going to bed is the anchor. The rhythm is putting a load of laundry in. 

Every time I wake up I switch the laundry. The event is waking up and the rhythm is switching the laundry. Every time I eat lunch I finish a load of laundry. The anchor is the event: I ate lunch. The rhythm is getting the laundry switched again and finished. 

Here’s an example of a weekly rhythm. I don’t work on Mondays; I take care of my house. Mondays are a house day. It’s a chill day. I start the week really slow and easy. 

It’s the day that I’m focusing on my house. Are we out of cleaning spray? Do we need new sponges? How is everyone doing? 

Does anyone have any broken shoes that have holes in them that I don’t know about? Do I need to sit down on Amazon and order a few things? What are we out of? How are things feeling? 

How’s it going? Has anyone changed the kids’ hand towels? Things like that. Things that need to be checked in on, that’s my Monday. That’s a rhythm for me. 

The anchor is the event, that it’s Monday. The rhythm is that I don’t work. I start the week slow and I take care of general housekeeping. Not cleaning, but running my home, because I’ve delegated the house cleaning. 

Another example is that every time I take a phone call, a phone meeting I take a walk. A lot of my meetings are on video; they’re on Zoom. Every time I get a phone meeting, I take a walk. I either walk outside while I’m on the meeting or I get on my treadmill and I walk. 

That’s a rhythm. That I have to fit in movement and wellness in the middle of a very busy life of raising kids, working on projects, and running a business. That’s a really simple rhythm. 

The anchor is that I have to take a phone call, take a phone meeting. It’s not just like my phone rings and I get my shoes on and run off. I know when I have this meeting with this person and that it’s a phone call, not a zoom video call. I will even try to get meetings to be on Zoom as little as possible and try to push them to the phone so that I’m getting a lot of steps in.

That’s the rhythm that I set up to take care of myself. The anchor is that there’s a phone meeting happening. The rhythm is that I’m moving my body. I’m walking. I’m getting outside if possible.

Here’s another idea of a rhythm. This is a weekly one again. Every time it’s Sunday night we have a family meeting to prepare for the week ahead, which we call Sunday night prep (there’s another episode of The Purpose Show about that). The anchor is that it’s Sunday night. The rhythm is that we have a family meeting in order to look ahead at the schedule. 

We figure out what we’re going to eat. Who’s going to cook what nights? What’s going on? Who needs support where? Do we need a sitter? All that stuff. 

Your rhythms will be personal to you. These are just examples from my life. My life is going to be a lot different than your life, even if we’re both moms and even if we’re both moms and business owners. The things that I need to rhythmatize are going to be a lot different than what you may need to rhythmatize. 

Think about your life. Maybe one of your children has some really crazy medical needs and it’s a lot. You could put into a rhythm things that you need to check in on. Your rhythms can be simple household things. They can be business management. They can be anything that you need them to be. 

A lot of things in my life are set into rhythms and it works really great because I’m not a routine person. I’m very relaxed and spontaneous. I like things to be easy. And what makes it easy for me is to have things bite-sized and automated off of my plate, out of my brain, I don’t have to do it. 

And the more I grow and the more my business grows, the more I delegate and get things off my plate so they don’t need to be rhythms at all anymore. That’s the goal: the easier, the better. 

And this can be for you even if you work three jobs and you have nine kids and you are a single mom. I’ve seen it happen. People in Unburdened have really, really crazy lives and they are doing this and it just looks very different for them. 

This is a simplicity hack that literally changes the game. You literally don’t have to think as much. That’s like a huge win. You’re saving so much brain space. 

You’re saving yourself energy. You’re sparing yourself stress. Your whole life can be automated and easy. 

Remember, let it be easy; let it be good. You don’t have to overwork and run yourself into the ground in order to prove that you’re a great mom. That you’re worthy of that bubble bath at the end of the day, that glass of wine, or night out with friends.

You don’t need to overwork and prove yourself. You are already enough. It’s good for things to be lighter on you. 

When you’re lighter, when things are easier, you are more freed up to show up as the best version of yourself for yourself, for your relationships, for your family, for your kids, for your faith, for your friends, for everything and everyone.

Let it be easy. Let automation come in and play a role in the way you run your life, your house, your business, your wellness, everything. Rhythms have helped me so much with my health. The health and wellness industry is so wildly overcomplicated. 

Set things in a rhythm. Just fit in movement like my phone call rhythm. Fit in movement where there’s an anchor that happens basically every day. 

Every time the kids are in the bath, you drop on the floor, turn on a Yoga video and do Yoga. Every time you take a drink of water, you do two squats. Every time you use the bathroom at work, you do wall pushups. Figure out whatever works for you.

Rhythms are everything. Bear in mind, this is such a simplistic, surface explanation of rhythms—what they are, why they are important, and why I teach them so much. 

In Unburdened I teach you how to go deep. Deep into how to implement this. What is it going to be for you? And then of course in the community you can talk and bounce ideas off the other moms that are in there working through this at the same time as you.

Rhythms aren’t going to do you any good if your mindset is warped about your role, about your life, about you as a person, or about you being a mom. So, of course we cover that. Everything has to be wiped clean. 

When you’re overwhelmed and you’re feeling like you’re just not good enough, it’s not going the way you want it to go and you feel that incredible heaviness that doesn’t leave. You’ve read the articles. You’ve read the books. You’ve tried all the things. 

You’ve printed out the to-do lists and laminated them. You’ve walked your family through how life is going to be now, and it falls apart in a day or less because you didn’t fix the root issue. You didn’t wipe the slate clean. 

You didn’t really look at, “What got me here is not what I want to keep going with. But I also don’t want to try something that’s not even going to work for me, because I’m not considering the root issue—that this is all too much for any human being to manage. The way that I’m going about this is too heavy.” 

You need to lighten your load. Your brain will work better. You will be happier. And you can show up as a much better version of yourself. And I know that’s what we all want, right? We always want to be on the up and up and showing up as a better version of ourselves. 

If you need help with this. If you need help with rhythms. If you need to set your life on automation. If your mindset about yourself or your role as a mom is warped. 

If you feel like you are not worthy. If you feel like you have no idea how to let things be easy and even saying that makes all kinds of resistance come up in yourself. If you feel like you dread your days. Your weeks are really hard. You hit the pillow at the end of the day not a good kind of exhausted but a “I kinda don’t want to wake up tomorrow exhausted.”

If you feel like your life is just this massive title wave that you’re trying to control, but you know it’s about to hit again. And here comes another mom meltdown, here comes another breakdown. It’s just that cycle over and over again. Please know that this is what I do. This is where I shine.

I can step in. I can pick you up. Walk arm in arm with you. Walk with you down a different path. I know what to do. I’m right here. I’m ready to help you, but I can’t make you say yes. 

Know that if you are listening to this episode and you’re “heck yes-ing” and you’re feeling so seen and so understood, you need Unburdened. It’s open now. It only opens up once or twice a year and here it is. I would love to see you guys in there. I would love to walk you through.

Unburdened.life. That’s the URL. Go check it out before the doors close.

I love you guys. You’re so seen. You’re so supported. You are so special. 

You don’t have to live even one more day feeling this weight, feeling the heaviness of, “My God, I must just really suck at this. I must be the wrong girl for this job. I must be doing this so wrong.”

It’s not that. It’s not that you’re doing it so wrong. It has nothing to do with your value. It’s just that you’re overwhelmed as any human would be if they’re doing all the things that you’re doing. 

This can be solved with simplicity. Let me help you! Accept the help that’s right in front of you. Accept the help that you’ve been demanding from your family. They don’t know how to give it to you, okay? They don’t know. I can come alongside you and help you. That’s what I’m here to do. 

Unburdened.life. We’re launching now. Don’t miss this window. 

Ladies, if this is speaking to you and your heart is beating out of your chest because you know this is the thing you need, please go and get in there. Please go!

I love you guys so much and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.

Thanks so much for hanging out with me! In case you didn’t know, there’s actually an exclusive community that’s been created solely for the purpose of continuing discussions around The Purpose Show episodes. It’s designed to get you to actually take action and make the positive changes that we talk about here. I want you to go and be a part of it. To do that, go to alliecasazza.com/facebookgroup. 

Thank you so much for tuning in! If you’d like to learn more about me, how I can help you, how you can implement all these things and more into your life to make it simpler, better, and more abundant, head to alliecasazza.com. There are free downloads, online courses, programs, and other resources to help you create the life you really want. 

I am always rooting for you, friend! See you next time! I’m Allie Casazza and this is The Purpose Show.

Hey mama! Just a quick note, this post may contain affiliate links.