3 Secrets To 33 More Hours A Week: Finding More Quality Time To Spend With Your Child

In only a few short months I have achieved the ultimate parenting “fantasy” of freeing up tons of quality time to spend with my two highly-aware children. Starting from scratch, I found an additional 6 hours a week for myself, and within 4 months had moved that number to an impressive 25 – 40 hours a week.

I never quit my job. My children have had me at the dinner table each night.

I have not missed a skating practice…nor have I given up going to playgroups with my young daughter.

Now today at age 35, I’ve gone on to:

• own several successful businesses
• manage a staff of employees
• write a book
• present seminars and workshops all across North America
• publish articles in major publications including Jane, Human Spirit, Birthvine, and York University’s Association for Research on Mothering’s quarterly academic journal

I can also run a half marathon in under 2 hours.

How do I manage to have such a busy, heavily-committed life and still have so much free, uncommitted time?

To do what I did, you really need these inner secrets to time and energy management. This has nothing to do with to-do lists, prioritizing your life, or reorganizing your closets. It doesn’t have anything to do with that action-oriented stuff. It has to do with what goes on inside your head.

Secret 1: Cheerful Expectancy

I learned from one of the masters. His name is Earl Nightengale and my mother loaned me her dog-eared copy of Think and Grow Rich when I was still in high school. Then she attended a seminar from Bob Proctor and found out about a book by Nightengale called The Strangest Secret. I devoured this amazing read in two hours.

Earl Nightengale talks about cheerful expectancy when he talks about one’s approach to life. Ultimately, it does not matter what happens to you in life, it is your attitude toward it that matters.

So no matter where you are at in your life, the personal power is in the moment. Your attitude determines the outcome.

There is a great saying by Richard Carlson: “Circumstances don’t create a person, they reveal him.” What are your circumstances revealing about you? What is your attitude to the things happening in your life?

Having a cheerful, expectant attitude that you will have all the time and energy you need will move you in that direction. It is the law of attraction at work.

It is when we start believing that “there is never enough time” or “I can not do it all” that we don’t get what we want out of life. That is when we find ourselves struggling and feeling powerless.

Believe that you do have, or soon will have, the time to spend with your children and you will. Don’t become a passive victim of untrained thinking. Focus on changing your attitude for the positive and then let the circumstances of your life reveal the powerful you that is your true self.

Secret 2: Do One Good Thing for Yourself Each Day

As busy parents, we have a really hard time with this one. We usually put ourselves last, behind the children, our partners, our house, our job, our extended families…heck, even the dog gets more personal attention than we do.

But airlines are on to something when they tell passengers to put their own oxygen masks on first, before helping another. If we can not breathe, we can not really be of much help to someone else.

Time-strapped parents really need to do one thing for themselves each day. Otherwise, they become irritable and frustrated about their life circumstance.

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst, the famed psychologist and ethicist, advises mothers and fathers to “Parent by principle, not mood.” Busy parents often default to “moody”-style parenting, simply because they are too busy to really stay in the moment with their child. But if you do one thing for yourself each day, then you have elevated your mood substantially and can see your child through more compassionate eyes.

I have a list of things I like to do (not a have-to list, but a want-to list), and each day I pick one thing from that to do for myself. It takes more discipline than you might think, because we have to give ourselves permission to feel good.

But when I do it, I feel so much better about life. Then I feel better about the time I share with my children. And each day I do something good, I build up momentum to move forward in a positive way. Life gets better and better.

Secret 3: Decision

A lot of people do not like to commit to making a decision. I used to be one of those people. I get it honestly; my Myers-Briggs personality type is ENFP. The “P” represents “possibility.” I used to believe that I had to keep all my options open. I worried that if I made a decision, I would be closing a door on a possibility that would never come my way again.

So I scattered my energy. I was in a million different places at once. I bounced around from idea to idea, becoming a jack of many trades but a master of none.

Then life’s circumstances brought me up short. I had just had my son and was struggling to manage my professional life with the turbulence of my personal life. I was running on auto-pilot for months because I was so sleep and energy-deprived. Deciding what to have for dinner brought me to tears.

I realized that I simply had to cut out the things that did not make my life work. I had to decide which things brought me pleasure, happiness, and energy. If I had to do something that did not fit in one of those three categories, then I did not do them.

And amazingly, within a short period of time, my outlook on life changed. I still had many sleep-deprived nights, but things started to feel better inside. I felt less overwhelmed because I had made a decision to change my life.

It does not matter how you come to your decision-making either; just make a decision.

Successful people make decisions. That does not mean they don’t change their minds, but at least they are moving toward something.

The amazing thing is, once we become decisive, we start attracting better opportunities that are in line with our new way of thinking. Things come to us that we never thought possible.

Six months after my son was born I made the decision to quit my job. Amazingly, I received a $25,000 cheque within weeks, which obviously helped finance our household expenses until I found something else (and nobody had to die to give me the money, either. It came almost completely out of the blue.)

The universe works in many mysterious ways.

Are you ready to see what it can do for you?

© Teresa Ottewell, M.Ed.

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Teresa Ottewell, M.Ed. is a busy, working mother of two young highly-aware and highly-energetic children and a yellow Labrador retriever (who’s also a Taurus). Discover how she finds 67 hours a week to spend how she wants...and still work and sleep. www.MoreTimeForMom.org www.TeresaOttewell.com Teresa Ottewell, M.Ed. is a busy, working mother of two young highly-aware and highly-energetic children and a yellow Labrador retriever (who’s also a Taurus). Discover how she finds 67 hours a week to spend how she wants...and still work and sleep. www.MoreTimeForMom.org www.TeresaOttewell.com Teresa Ottewell, M.Ed. is a busy, working mother of two young highly-aware and highly-energetic children and a yellow Labrador retriever (who’s also a Taurus). Discover how she finds 67 hours a week to spend how she wants...and still work and sleep. www.MoreTimeForMom.org www.TeresaOttewell.com

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