5 ways to shift your focus

Moms have one of the toughest jobs in the world—to be intimately involved in helping their children become who they were created to be. The family’s relational fitness is important toward supporting this effort.

Relational fitness is a readiness to tackle life, and a growing capacity for life, and what mom doesn’t need increasing capacity as her children’s needs increase? But since mom is usually juggling many cares and duties, relational needs tend to get pushed to the side, beginning with how she relates within her own self.

Don’t you find sometimes, that due to the overwhelming demands of children, your potentially fulfilling purpose as a mother can lead to the neglect of your own personal growth and development? I get that. I was there once too.

The demands of serving multiple little people as soon as you rise in the morning can drive your day forward so fast that you barely have time to think about anything except to meet the urgent needs and hope for a bit of time to escape into quiet and calmness. I know you don’t want your family’s relational fitness to suffer. This is why you need to find a way to focus a bit of effort to starting with you.

It’s easy to excuse yourself from personal growth and development. You think there’s always tomorrow to get serious about some area of your life that needs attention.

A New Perspective Changed How I Approached

My Stay-At-Home Lifestyle

Let me give you a perspective I’ve held since my children were ranging between 3-11 years old. I knew I wasn’t equipped to homeschool let alone ready with wisdom to form my children’s character in the Lord. I was deeply concerned about ruining my children. Somewhat intuitively, I knew I was relationally unfit, and that I had to change if I was going to experience any success in this endeavor. I knew that to become a better parent, personal growth and development would be absolutely essential. I had to shift my focus toward relational fitness for my family’s benefit.

Here Are 5 Shifts in Focus I Made Toward
My Family’s Relational Fitness

Here are five shifts I made for my family’s benefit:

2. My Sense of Responsibility—I didn’t wait for my husband to change. I took personal responsibility to the best of my ability along the way. I stretched myself (by God’s grace) far beyond my previously self-imposed limits while continuing to pray for my husband and influence him to the extent it was fruitful to do so.

4. My Time—I challenged my appetite for how I spent my time. I began learning the overcoming life in Christ as I practiced letting go of self-centeredness, and learned how to give out of myself to know my children and to add value to their lives. Eventually I helped Jim to improve his relational habits with our children.

5. My Thought Life—I brought my thought life under immediate self-discipline. The dialogue that played in my head was unhealthy and it all had to change. I began educating myself and renewing my mind to learn different ways of thinking about preconceived ideas and culturally held assumptions. I accepted the season I was in and committed myself fully to the work God wanted to do in me. I encouraged myself with specific prayers and thanksgivings. I became the real me, a person I never knew before. These soon became established disciplines in my life that were no longer uncomfortable, but familiar and welcomed.

I grew up so much in those first three years. I became a different person in the Lord. The old had passed away and all things had become new. The Lord had helped me to a beautiful place in Him and showed me how to bring my children into that place with me. My capacity as a mother and a home educator had increased exponentially. Life became a wonderful adventure in vital purpose, learning how to love and achieve goals and dreams.

I think the most central lesson we learned and have continued to learn these past 30-plus years is that personal growth and development is essential for relational fitness, for parenting, and for homeschooling and life success.

I practiced an intentional personal morning routine that caused growth and drove my life toward relational fitness. All of it points back to my day-to-day decisions to become a bigger person for my family while I received the parenting of a lifetime from my loving Heavenly Father.

Do you need to become more relationally fit in one of these areas? Which of the five areas can you begin to shift your focus toward now? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!