89: Why Women MUST Do Habits Differently with Monica Parker

I’m joined today by Monica Parker, host of the About Progress podcast, as we talk about habits. Specifically, our discussion focuses on why the habit-forming advice out there written by men does not work for women. Join us!

Show Highlights: 

●      Monica’s background as a blogger and podcaster who had to “learn how to fail”

●      Understanding that perfectionism is a spectrum that affects our ability to form “good habits”

●      Monica’s lightbulb moment: “Maybe our methods are broken.”

●      The biggest difference between men’s and women’s habits: invisible labor

●      How invisible labor is defined–and what the statistics show

●      Examples of the mental load that women carry

●      Popular culture advice (about forming habits) that DOES NOT work

●      Monica’s tips for forming habits: redefine consistency, shift your view of habits, and start with the smallest and simplest form of the ideal

●      Bedtime Revenge Procrastination is real for many women!

●      The goal of habits is to support you—so do it YOUR way!

●      Understanding trade-offs and how they work for most women

Resources and Links:

Connect with Monica Packer: Website, About Progress Podcast, Instagram, and The Sticky Habit Intensive Course

Books mentioned by Monica: Fair Play by Eve Rodsky and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

 Connect with KC: Website, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook

Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning

We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes.

• Transcript

  KC 0:00

  Hello, you sentient balls of stardust. Welcome to struggle care. I'm your host, Casey Davis. And today I'm with Monica packer, who is the host of the about progress podcast. And we're going to be talking about habits today, and specifically why it is that all of the habit forming advice out there written by men doesn't really work for women. So Monica, thank you so much for being here. Happy to be here to discuss this light topic.

  Right? So tell the audience a little bit about yourself. You know, I know that you have this podcast, but it actually started as a blog write. Well,

  Monica Parker 0:37

  it kind of started as a blog, the blog was more me having an early midlife crisis and trying to rediscover who I was again. And as part of that I made this list of 30 things I wanted to do before I turned 30. So that's why it was an early midlife crisis. I'm now approaching 40. So I can officially have another one. And at that time, while my list was started blog, because I thought about it for eight years, and it was just one of those things I always thought about doing and finally tried. And it was not a success. I mean, nobody read it. And what it did, though, Casey is it gave me this weird kind of confidence in the failing of it, and then the trying and then the doing. And that's why my podcast started because I was already in that place of it's okay to not be like amazing at things. And for you to not be an overnight success is in the doing that you find joy and fulfillment. And now I've been a podcaster primarily for eight years, just about I love

  KC 1:25

  that story. Because I feel like when we fail at something, however you want to define fail, right? Like in our mind, it's so discouraging. And like, that's not parts of our story that we like to tell. But I love the idea that failing at something can be really freeing.

  Monica Parker 1:41

  And that was for me then and it has been ever since. And actually this all goes back to why I started that list in the first place is I realized that I was on the sidelines of my own life as a perfectionist. And I didn't think I was a perfectionist because I thought I was too lazy to be one. And that was actually something I realized was perfectionism. I was waiting for the perfect time the perfect energy, or I just wanted to be an overnight success or be good at things I did. So I just waited. So that whole list was partly me discovering who I was, but it was also me challenging myself to be mediocre at things and that be okay, I actually almost called my blog and then my podcast mediocre Monica, but it became something much bigger, it was more about like, wow, how can we actually grow and progress outside of perfectionism? Like how can we leave the all or nothing model that is served up to us all day, every day by social media and the personal development influencers? Which I guess I am one now, you know, how can we grow outside of that model? And that's been the experiment the whole time. You know, I

  KC 2:36

  don't remember where I heard this, nor do I know if it's even accurate but it's always stuck in my head somebody because I'm like you like I thought oh, I'm not a perfectionist, because I'm you know, like you said like, Oh, I'm too lazy. I don't start things. And I heard someone one time say that a perfection they're talking about like perfectionists and idealists. And they said both of them want things to be perfect. And they said they're the difference was that a perfectionist? Never stops, because they want it to be perfect. And an idealist never starts because they want it to be perfect. That's like a snap. And I was like, oh, that's me. Like, you know, a perfectionist is the one that like works on their homework for hours and hours and goes back and goes back in and really won't stop like tooling with it. And like I was an idealist, though, like I wouldn't even start the homework because what if I didn't get it? Right. But like, that's still perfectionism

  Monica Parker 3:24

  it is. And that's one thing that has been so eliminating both for myself, but so many women in my community that there's a spectrum to perfectionism. I think we talked about this in other ways. There's a spectrum to so many things like everything, honestly. And to be able to identify yourself as a perfectionist, even if you are the underachieving kind is very freeing because you get yourself better you understand why you are working the way you are. And a lot of times people find they're the kind of going to pendulum swing of this to like, they can be the overachieving and then they get burnt out and then go to the underachieving to kind of stay safe, you can be all across that spectrum and apply to you. So

  KC 3:56

  where when we talk about like habit forming, which I don't know about you, but like, I even just like hate the term. There's so many things in the like, personal development therapy world that like I have just like gotten a sour taste in my mouth about and maybe it's that perfectionism, like maybe it's that like, Oh, this is always just this thing that's been used to like, bludgeon me about like, how I'm not good enough, or, you know, things that people keep insisting I need that I can't seem to get the hang of, and I know now that my ADHD plays a really big part in a lot of my struggle to form habits. But what part does perfectionism play in, in our ability to perform due habits? Well, I'm

  Monica Parker 4:35

  just gonna say that block kind of feeling is what I shared. And mostly because I thought in order to have in quotes, good habits, it had to look certain ways like in order to be an exerciser, I knew what that looked like. It looked like a certain amount of days, a certain amount of time, a certain amount of activities. Same thing with journaling, meditating, getting up early, going to bed like the list is long, right? And because of that, I never thought I quantified as a habit person, because here I was not de planning or meditating or journaling and doing all those things, when really it was because that standard was so impossible that I really think I was just smart. Like, I was just smarter about it to realize that's not practical. And that's not sustainable for my life as is. And this whole experiment, which really started as an identity thing, and experimenting outside of perfectionism, I really grew a lot like internally, I really came to a better sense of knowing who I am. And I know you as a therapist, you know, just how important a sense of self is. And I was really getting clear about that in ways that I had long neglected, and it was so transformative. But then I reach this point in that progress, where I hit a big plateau. And it was because my values like who I am, was not in alignment with how my life was all day, every day, my life was almost getting in the way of that. And that for me was primarily with lack of sleep, you know, prioritizing my sleep was one of the biggest habits that I struggled with forever. So me as a non habit person. And also in this on this place of trying to experiment outside of perfectionism. I kind of tried this on as a next level of an experiment like so how can I try to look at habit formation in ways that line up with everything else I've learned about progress outside of perfectionism. And at this time, there were so many best sellers. And I think we can all let you know, name them off, I typically don't, but you can if you want, but I mean, they're all the ones we think of Kay that we all read, and they're very helpful. They're all in the airport. They're all in the airport, still. I mean, and they're still huge. And I like I read those books, I dug it, I highlighted, you know, I did all the things, and I practiced it. And I kept failing at them even then, and it was so demoralizing. And at the same time, because I was in this place of already trying to be in this mediocre Monica place. I just kept trying to think well, how can I play with us a little bit more. And the weird thing for me, Casey, and I'm sorry, this is turning into story is what was helpful is I was coaching women on more about fulfillment and hobbies and trying to get a better sense of like, Well, who am I now after all these years of neglecting myself, and they similarly had the same experience of hitting a plateau and it being coming so obvious that in order to feel more like themselves regularly, they had to have habits that help them do that. And so we tried to do the same methods that we were learning from these books, you know, as a good student, I was trying to pass on those things. And they were also failing. And what was so interesting to me is that this was true for all the women I worked with whether they had children in the home or didn't, some of these women were retired grandmas, others were single, never married. Others were the typical stay at home mom, others were working moms like it was all across the board. And that's when I had that lightbulb moment that all these books on my nightstand like my Bibles for habit formation, were written by men. And that's when I thought maybe this isn't me. And maybe it's not these women, maybe it's the methods that are broken. And the biggest reason why that was and is still the same today is because women's lives are different from men's lives. And we can talk about this in so many different ways. I mean, hormones alone, is a huge factor. And there's so many great people who are very skilled at knowing how to teach the cycle. And I'm not one of those people, but that is one but the biggest one that unifies all women is invisible labor. And that's why we have to do habits differently. That's the bomb. That's a bomb right there.

  KC 8:26

  Yeah, I mean, that really is like, that's the spoiler, right? Like, habit formation is different for women. And in your saying that the biggest difference is the invisible labor. So tell me that like that resonates with me like as a mom and a wife. But you mentioned that like you were seeing this difference between all the spent like single women and retired women. And so tell me about how it's different. Even if we're looking at like single women. Yeah,

  Monica Parker 8:52

  how it's not just those in the caregiving position, right. And this is what's fascinating to me, I love to learn, I love to read so I went on this years long binge of materials on invisible labor, mental load, whatever you want to call it. And I you know, there's decades of research on this. I'm not the first to be interested in it. I think two good books for people to consider are a Brodsky's fair play and Caroline criado Perez, invisible women. And from there, what we see is that invisible labor transcends culture, it transcends politics. It transcends whether or not women have children in the home or they work or not, because this is what invisible labor is. And I'm going to give you my definition, which is kind of like a conglomeration of everyone else's invisible labor is the literal and mental, emotional labor performed to keep homes, communities and institutions afloat that is largely undervalued, underpaid, and unseen. And one of the things that comes up from that is like even if you are that like single working woman climbing the career ladder, just ask yourself who plans your work parties. If you are a churchgoer? Who is making sure that the church is being maintained that the social events are going on, you know, this is everywhere. It's in our schools, it's in our workplaces, it's in our institutions is in our neighborhoods. I mean, I'm thinking about two years ago, I hired childcare, childcare for the day. So I was off the childcare clock, right, went up to my office and was just sitting down. And I get this text from my elderly neighbor, who was deaf and needed some help with some rodent issues she was having. So I went over and I was so happy to help her. But by the time I got back, you know, it had taken an hour of the three hour block I had. And this is what we deal with as women all the time. It's everything that has to do with home maintenance, and beyond that make it so we have less time we have lower energy. And we also have limited support. And that means a lot of things.

  KC 10:47

  Yeah, and I'm also thinking about, like families, like family isn't just if you have children and a partner, like it's your parents, it's your siblings, it's your nieces and nephews, it's all of those things. I mean, I literally got chills when you read that, because you know, I talked so much about home labor, that I think we forget that even if you don't have other people living in your home that like as women, it is also about the community and society in general like that, it demands a lot more of that labor, and that a lot, not all of us, but a lot of us are even raised differently. And you know, to think about our spaces differently, I know men that are kind of neat freaks and things like that. But at the same time, I also know that like a woman living alone in their home probably is spending more time and energy and money on making their home their home than perhaps the average man that is living by themselves.

  Monica Parker 11:42

  You are right. And actually how about I share a couple of stats. And these are the ones that I like hold on to. And I'll tell you the story in just a second about this. It's making me chuckle as I remember it. But let's start first with if we're thinking about this as a societal thing, not just the childcare thing. So the New York Times did a study on this, and it was in 2019. And they came up with this number of if we were to put a price tag on what women do to make homes and communities run including workplaces, right? It would be a $10.9 trillion a year industry. And that number is based on $7.25 an hour, which we know is already undervaluing what that work entails. Right? So that's one stat. And another one. This is fascinating. In the US. This is from a Mashable article. But the US alone, married mothers spend nearly double the time on housework and childcare than American fathers do. The average number that Melinda Gates discovered in her research is four and a half hours is what we do on household chores. So if we're going back to the household route, that is it. And men spend less than half as much time now I have a very supportive husband. And I believe you have a supportive partner too. And even then, like there is disparity, and it's one that we've chosen because I'm primarily the stay at home parent, you know, and that's okay. So it's less about trying to split hairs. It's and it's not about like men are the worst, although there's a case for that. It's more about let's validate why women are struggling, let's really honor that this isn't because they're broken or weak. It's because they are set up to fail.

  KC 13:12

  You know, this reminds me of I don't know if you saw it, but I did a tech talk recently that I want to play for you because I feel like this is like 100% exactly what we're talking about. And it got a lot of views. And it really resonated with people. I mean greens every day, at least once. It's at work, yes. And at least 20 grams of protein with every meal. Excellent. So take those meds once a day. And I'll send you the list of breathing exercises and just do that once a day, like 15 minutes. You can handle that, right? Yeah, that's not. That's not to

  Monica Parker 13:46

  say I'm gonna just prescribe a cream. You'll just put on the effective area twice a day for her. It's really important that that happens. And it's time I can put your mouth once a week. This is totally fixable, actually to do these exercises twice a day and we'll check in. Oh, honey, you just need to get in the habit of doing one small load of laundry a day that we will be overwhelming. It's just and just every time you leave a room, take a minute to look back and see what you can put away before you go. So just do that three times a week. That way she gets the most out of our sessions here. skincare routine. It doesn't have to be complicated. Just three simple steps to them every night and then twice a week exfoliate.

  KC 14:33

  So, this Tik Tok got 382,000 views and that is exactly like what I was trying to describe in that tick tock is what you just said where it's like there's all of these like little things to like, make life and family and society and every community like move and by themselves. They all seem small. And it's like I Having some sort of framework to like make those things happen as habits feels like it just doesn't exist for me. And I know some of that is ADHD. But I also know that there are so so many women that don't have ADHD or executive dysfunction going, Okay, I'm still having this problem. And

  Monica Parker 15:20

  I would say that is reflective in the woman I've worked with, I've worked with women who are neuro diverse and neurotypical, and they all have issues with this. And I think your Tiktok they're so expertly highlighted just the mental load that takes and one of the biggest reasons why that can make it hard for us to form consistent habits is because even the things we're carrying around mentally require so much energy for us to constantly trying to be remembering and being on on top of and reminding other people to do, like we talked about having your family contribute. But most women report that they have to then be the director of the ship, like they have to captain the ship, rather, they have to make sure like who's doing what and direct. And that is, so energy draining. So even the small habits that you shared in that video require energy, and it's the energy that a lot of us just may not have very much of if at all, by the time we're done with all of our responsibilities or even trying to keep up. So what are some of the like,

  KC 16:13

  big habit forming advices out there in like popular culture that you have found, like, do not work for women?

  Monica Parker 16:22

  So the biggest one, to me is this whole idea of consistency? And I'm gonna say it the way that they often define it, as you know, let me have you answered this question. Just said whatever number comes to mind, how many days does it take to form a habit? Gosh,

  KC 16:37

  I feel like popular culture, like the eat the mythos is like 30 days. So

  Monica Parker 16:44

  I almost always hear 2128 30, or sometimes very rarely 100 days. But the point there is, we all have a number, right. And we also know that that number means we have a habit, we start on day one. And we do it every day, in the same way for just that certain amount of days. And by the end, we have the habit. But for women, that doesn't work, because our lives are different. Our lives demand so much flexibility from us, we are in more reactionary roles. And again, this is true for even if you don't have kids, and you work outside of the home, we are in more reactionary roles, because of the nature of the gender roles that we are a part of right. And so this is how we're gonna re reframe this because we've kind of been leaning into the pain a little bit. And I know many women are listening, and they're finally feeling validated. But they may also be feeling overwhelmed like, well, then what do I do? Just give up? And my answer is no. And let's start with that first one I just shared, I want us to redefine consistency, because it is true that habits still live and die by consistency, but not in the way that we're taught, which is basically perfection, you have an ideal habit, even if it's small and simple. And you do that same habit every day. And you have the habit no instead this is what consistency is consistency is doing your best most of the time over time. And what we're going for women here in particular, is we are creating flexible habits that make it so we can be consistent. And I can break that down more in just a moment. I bring this up because this is what this is like the poll we beat ourselves over the head is with that consistency thing the most I find women being like I just I did it for 21 days, and then I stopped and then I couldn't. And it's because that 21 days took superhuman energy and willpower to do because it wasn't realistic. It was so it wasn't sustainable. It was too rigid. It was too idealized. Instead, we need to have our habits to be designed to be flexible so that on some days, we can do the same habit in certain ways. And other days, we can do the same habit in different ways, depending on our life circumstances. And that doesn't mean we don't have consistency. No flexibility is what makes that consistency possible. So let's start with redefining consistency.

  KC 18:56

  I feel like I accidentally did this. Like when I started doing like closing duties, which was like this little practice of like, you know, right when my kids went to bed at seven, I would do like this small list of things right? Like I would do the dishes, I would clear the counter, I would take out the trash, I would like to set the coffee or whatever. And you know, but the way that I did it, it was the first time in my life I did something different where like I had those things and I wanted to do it at that time. But I also had like the second list that I called my like survival day closing duties where it was like, if I don't have it in me or if I'm tired or if the schedule was weird or someone is sick or I'm too overwhelmed like then all I had to do was go and find like the milk cups from the day and like shove them into the clean dishwasher and rerun it. Yes. And then like because it gets those get gross. That was smart. Yeah. And like it's not like there was some rule like I'm bad if I don't do it, but it was like having something that was like doable on Barrowman. I'm on energy, that was still me participating in the like habit, like allowed me to flex for that day. And I did the same thing when I came up with my first like, quote unquote, like cleaning schedule where I was like, I was a stay at home mom and I was okay. Every day, I have something on the schedule. So it'd be like Mondays bathroom, Tuesdays kitchen. But I, what I basically made up for myself is that like what I was supposed to do on that day, I had, I think, three bathrooms in my house. So like, on bathroom day, I was just supposed to clean something in a bathroom, like there was no prescription for like, clean all of them clean one of them, rotate them every Monday, it was just whatever, because some Mondays, I could clean all of them, and some Monday's I could clean one of them. And some Mondays, I could go in and take a piece of toilet paper and wet it and wipe the like toothpaste out of the sink. And that was it. But it allowed me to like repeat the same thing while giving me the flexibility to meet my like energy needs and levels and like meet myself where I was for that day. Whereas before if it was like it has to be these three things. And if you can't do those three things, and you just don't do it, and then you have like that feeling of like, Oh, I'm not consistent. I'm not doing it.

  Monica Parker 21:15

  Well, this is amazing. I love that you came to this on your own, especially because a lot of us don't give ourselves permission to do that. We just think we're failing. And so we lean into thinking like, I'm bad at this. I'm not a habit person. And I would say it was one of them for sure. But changing the way we view habits will also help us show up to them differently, which means we can maintain them better. And that's actually something maybe another thing I have two more that I think this is what we're told, and this is what actually works versus women is it okay if I go through those, and they relate to what you just shared. Okay, so the first is that we are given prescriptions, I talked about exercise, right, that when we're told exercise regularly, we all could say what that looks like. And that's a prescription. And this kind of goes into this idea that habits are balls and chains, they are metrics that we have to meet in order to prove that we are a good person. And we all know what those metrics are without even people having to be so direct and telling us it's just in the air we breathe. But instead of looking at habits as balls and chains, we need to look as habits as the small and simple ways we support ourselves. Another way to work this is habits are supportive. That's their only purpose, they are there to support us not the other way around. And when we shift that view of habits, that means we can go from looking at habits as prescriptions to personalizing habits. So that means we can choose what a good nighttime routine looks like, for us my nighttime routine. I like my ideal one that is personal to me is watching Netflix, that is an amazing way for me to wind down at night. You know what I'm sure other people be like, that's a bad habit. No, for me, it's a good habit, because that supports me and helping me detach and get my brain to slow down. So let's do that. Let's move from prescriptions to personalization. That's one of them.

  KC 23:01

  I love that that habit is about just your pleasure and recreation. Because I think you know, you mentioned like we think of habits as ball in chains. Like we think of habits as just the things we don't want to do, or those things that are like good for us, but not fun to do or whatever. And I love that you include like all things that are supportive to you. That's really cool. So what's the third one?

  Monica Parker 23:22

  So the third one, and I mean, I could talk about this for hours. So I think we'll just kind of focus on those three. The third one really connects to what you just did organically and you shared with us about your nighttime cleanup routine is we often think as part of those prescriptions that we start with the ideal. So this is where we get the toxic positivity in the universe, right? We're saying, today's your day you decide only you can make this life work for you, your habits are reflective of who you are. And we think okay, well that means I'm going to start exercising on Monday, and I'm going to make this simple, I'll just do a 30 minute walk. This is actually even if you think it's small and simple, it's actually an ideal version of your habits still, it's where you want to go. And the problem is is that we are taught to start there on Monday you do 30 minutes and then you do that for 30 days and you have the habit if you aren't walking 30 minutes that is going to require a lot of energy and for some time some habits there are things that you do need to start with that ideal and I want to honor that that is that can be very true for certain things like when your kids start school and suddenly you do have to wake up earlier like the whole family. So you just have to start with the ideal because you can gradually till the school will just be coming to school five minutes earlier day for the next month. So thanks. No, sometimes you do have to start with ideal but actually most of the time instead of starting with the ideal you start with the smallest and simplest version of the ideal and this is what becomes what I call is the baseline and this is the foundation to your habit so that you can be flexible with it and still have the consistency you need both to have the support you need from the habit but also to build because baselines Bill Old, where you start with a baseline habit doesn't mean you will stay there, it gives you the consistency, you need to also build over time, and actually quicker towards your ideal. I have been working with the client on exercise, and she has this habit that she wanted to have for here. So it wasn't like a prescription like I told her, Well, you need to have exercise in there, it was more of a habit that makes her feel like herself feel in her body. And she had not been doing it because she wanted to do strength training. You know, she just said three days a week, I just want to do strength training for like, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 minutes. And what we did is that was a great ideal. But we started with the baseline, which was for her still three days a week. But it was a 10 Minute. And that was the smallest and simplest version she could do meeting the version of the habit that she could do on her worst of day, maybe when her energy was the lowest she homeschools her child, so maybe when her child needed something from her, she could still do 10 minutes. And let me tell you, not only did she have that habit, she's now up to five days a week of at least having a baseline and more times than not, she's doing 20 minutes. And here's the thing though, baselines might actually show you, that's all you need. I had this other woman tell me I have been putting off journaling forever. I have wanted this habit desperately helps me reflect and makes me better make sense of what's going on in my life. And I have been wanting to do it forever. But I've been telling myself I have to write a full page. And when I taught her that baseline, she decided she would just write one line a day in the doing of that. It turned to like into like one paragraph pretty soon. But she told me actually, Monica, you know what I discovered? I don't need to write the page. I just need the baseline most days. That's all I need.

  KC 26:37

  Yeah, that to me is like one of the bigger breakthroughs about like people talk about like habit stacking where they're like, start small, and then make your way up. But I think what always tripped me up was like, I would start small. But then you feel as though like that's still not good enough, like everything you do is just a ladder up to the platform of good enough. Or, you know what I mean?

  Monica Parker 27:00

  Yes, you're always climbing. I mean, that sounds so exhausting. But like

  KC 27:03

  this idea that like do the smallest possible steps not as one step towards always a larger goal. And like you said, sometimes there's things that we have to get to a certain goal, but like, you know, if you start with walking five minutes, once a week, or whatever, instead of having in your head, like, okay, so how when do I need to go to the next level? When do I need to go 10 minutes, what ends like, well, maybe just chill, like, we've got so much going on in our life, if you could manage to walk five minutes for a week, like, I find that when I make that step like enough in itself, instead of just a leapfrog to a next step, then my body and my life almost like organically lets me know, when I have the capacity to push more instead of being like, well, when do I do that, like push, it's just like, one day I'll be walking and then be like, I'm gonna go another two minutes, because I have the time and the energy and the desire and that organic, like slow push forward, I think is so key, especially for women, because we're so conditioned to, you know, look at everything as a step towards whatever that goal is.

  Let me ask you one more question. I think all three of those were like, perfect, like tips or steps. And I want to tell you like, what I kept thinking about, as you were talking about them is that I feel like one of the things that gets floated around with talking about habits when men talk about habits, they're always talking about waking up early, always it's like I wake up at four, I would have three, I wake up at 11pm Like, you know, this idea that like that's when they go and do their cold plunges and journal and run and whatever. And I was thinking about you saying, like, women are giving so much more and connected it to this idea of like how a lot of times we will procrastinate going to bed. And it's called like revenge, procrastination, because for a lot of women, nighttime is like the only free time that they get, right. And so for me, it's like after my kids go to bed, but even if you don't have kids, it's like you have this whole, you know, you're working. And then you have things you have to get done. And then there's things that maybe are involved in your community. And then at night, it's like there's even if we're tired, it's like we're pushing and pushing and pushing, because we're like trying desperately to reclaim some time that we can just be and that's one of the reasons why I find myself like going to bed really late and being tired. And I just connected those two things in my head of men being like, yeah, man, just wake up at 4am and do XYZ. Well, that doesn't take into account the fact that like, I'm not I can't go to bed early enough like my brain won't turn off. And I don't I won't get any free time to myself if I do that. It's

  Monica Parker 29:41

  funny you brought this up because this is I am literally in the middle of preparing a workshop called How to Beat bedtime revenge procrastination, because it was such an issue for so many women and I would count myself among them. I mean, this is why sleep was such a huge habit that I had to start with, because that's what I was doing. And that's still the habit I can easily get sucked into. So with that, are you wondering like, what does that mean about habits? Or what does it mean about bedtime?

  KC 30:06

  Yeah, I'm kind of thinking about like, you know, okay, if we're not going to listen to the men saying that it's like the golden rule is you wake up at four to, like, reclaim time, then like, how do we as women reclaim that time or energy or whatever

  Monica Parker 30:17

  it is? Okay, so I want to start by saying, sometimes it gets really hard for me to not Yuck, a man's yam. Like that. When I see that, you know, it just reminds me of this ad that I saw that, oh, my gosh, it was an Instagram post where a man was like, I have six kids and I have a multimillion dollar business. Do you want to know why? Join me my workshop. And then like, all the comments are women like it's a wife. So I don't want to get people's Yemen's like, if going to bed early and waking up early is your thing. That's how you reclaim your time, then Yum, that like that is amazing. And actually, to be honest, that's is where I am right now, it hasn't always been the case. But that the morning is My reclaim time, because that's the easiest for me to do with my family life. But let's just say the point of habits, again, is to support you. So if you need that time, the goal is to do it in ways that match your season and your life. And if that means it's nighttime, or it's in the middle of the day, or it's in the morning, you get to choose where you're going to claim that time to give back to yourself. And there's a huger I mean, I don't even know if that's a word, there's a much bigger discussion on this in terms of self care and how that's often taught to, but to me, self care is just showing respect to ourselves, it's about giving back to ourselves. And oftentimes, the number one way to do that is with time, so it's trying to find other smaller pockets of time earlier in the day, I think a large part of why we lean into revenge, bedtime, procrastination is because we're not just an empty well, we are an empty, leaking well. So at nighttime, we're trying to pour in pour in pour in. And the reason why it's not helping is because it's all kind of going through the cracks there. So I like to try to encourage women, and I know this may seem hard, but I'm not talking about huge habits, I'm talking about small moments, where you are giving back to yourself in some way where you are kind of putting concrete on those cracks, so that later on or if your time is afternoon, or morning, or whatever it is that you're giving yourself more of a space of a chunk of time, you actually are filling the well. So it's not just leaking right away. And that again, that's good, bigger discussion, but

  KC 32:29

  it's not just triage what you say? Yeah, and listen, when you said like, reclaiming time during the day, like it immediately rocked back around to me to perfectionism. I bet. Yeah, we're so hardwired for it. Right? Yeah. And there are things I mean, admittedly, like there are there are things in our lives that can't be changed that are because of larger power structures and things like that. I mean, we're not even touching, you know, marginalization, disenfranchisement, poverty, things like that. So I don't want it to sound like we're just saying, Oh, just like, you know, be less of a profession show up all this time. But I don't want to ignore the fact that for many of us, like, the only way to reclaim some time is to start making some things in our life, like, just good enough.

  Monica Parker 33:11

  Yeah, making trade offs. And that's actually one of the biggest things I that's one of the biggest threads, and all of my coaching, when I help women is coming to terms with trade offs. The thing that really helps me and other women, the most of them are considering trade offs is that no matter what they're happening, and when we're not choosing what trade off it is, it's usually means a trade off is us. And we can choose to make ourselves a trade off. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think it's the choosing, that makes a difference when we say okay, right now I have this need, but this family member, or this part of my home, or this workplace thing has this need, I'm going to choose that, but I'm choosing it and that feels different. It doesn't feel as depleting. Not that it's going to be that way all the time. But that can

  KC 33:54

  help. Well, that is that's super helpful. Monica and I really appreciate your feedback on this if people want to hear more about you and I mentioned your podcast at the beginning, but can you just plug yourself for a minute, like where can people find you online and your podcast and all those things? Well,

  Monica Parker 34:08

  I'll say I'm not normally so fiery. Like what people don't know like typically people say I'm there my approach is gentle. And but this is the topic I just get like 10 out of 10 Fiery about, but I would love for them to come and join me on my podcast is called about progress. And I'm also on Instagram at about progress. And one of the things I've been doing is teaching a live habit course it's a 21 day course and it's a very supportive community. We do live weekly lesson than a what a live coaching call and you have a private community. It's called the sticky habit intensive so they can look into that get on the waitlist if it's not open at about progress.com/intensive Awesome.

  KC 34:47

  Well, thank you again, Monica. This was really wonderful conversation.

  Monica Parker 34:50

  Well, thanks for letting me get nice and passionate today. It was nice to be here.

  Transcribed by https://otter.ai