(soft music) Welcome, friends, to this episode of the Everyday Educator podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I am excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I'm so excited to be with you today. As we begin the second semester, as we're all kinda getting back into our routines, we hope, after the long Christmas break, I was thinking the other day, so many of us fully believe that big goals or big dreams have to involve big plans and big changes and big steps.

Somehow, we have bought into the thinking that being successful involves changing our whole mindset or shifting our whole way of living and that it has to be really hard and that there are all these steps that you have to follow. Well, I am here to tell you that that kind of thinking can discourage us before we even get started, especially in the gray days of January or really, y'all, any time that we have gotten off track.

So today, I want to explore a different way of thinking. I want us to consider the power of small habits on our roads to success. I have one of my bestest friends, one of my best classical educator friends with me today, and we are gonna be really honest right in front of you and talk about the power of small habits.

Kelly Wilt, I am so glad that you agreed to be with me today. - Oh, absolutely, Lisa. This is a topic that, as our homeschooling journey has unfolded, has grown nearer and dearer to my heart. So I am so excited to talk about this today with you. - And I'm excited to explore with you the ways that I have changed.

I tended to be a real, and I still am. Let's be real about this. I still am a very type A, driven, make a list, set a priority, and have interim goals and all these steps. That is who I am naturally in my personality, and the Holy Spirit is helping me to recover from the worst of that and keep the best of that.

But it has been a journey for me, like you alluded to. All the years of homeschooling, the Lord has used to sand off a lot of my rough edges. I'm sure I have plenty left, but I am learning a lot about the power of small habits. So let me start, I wanna ask you, just kinda set the tone and let some of my online friends get to know my in-person friend.

What are some of the big goals that you have set in your life? And you can go as far back as you want to, or as recent as you are comfortable with. What are some of the big goals you've set in your life? - Well, let me first, before I answer this question, say that you and I are cut from the same kinda cloth.

- I know. - That I am a reforming type A. I used to say that I was a type A plus. How terrible is that? - I know, right? It fits your personality though. - Yes, but I think I was born setting goals for myself. The one that comes to mind that I can distinctly recall was probably the first time in my life that I set a goal and took steps to achieve it was when I was in high school my freshman year, and I discovered what a valedictorian was.

I was an academic to the core, and I delighted in learning. I loved learning. I've always loved learning. But when I found out that the valedictorian of our senior class would get to stand and give a speech, and wear a medal, and that that honor would be bestowed on the student who had the highest numeric grade point average, oh, I wanted so desperately for that to be me.

And so, it's humorous when I look back on it. At that time, it was very serious. But in high school, in my class, I had two very dear friends, and the three of us were neck and neck. That was our goal. And it was a good thing for the three of us because we kept it from being a bad thing.

We would encourage each other on. I successfully learned how to calculate a GPA. (laughing) - We're timely, no doubt. - Yes, so that's a skill that, as we're now graduating our children from homeschool, has come in handy. But it was a goal that I remember I would, I worked hard, Lisa.

I mean, I kept that goal in mind, and praise the Lord to His glory, and not to my own. That was an honor that I achieved when I graduated from high school. And I still have the medal from that. And at that time, I thought, "Oh, I'm going to cherish this forever." Well, let me just tell you, it's been sitting in a box in my parents' house for the past, I won't say how many years, but the ability to set goals and build habits to achieve those goals is something I still keep with me now, which is infinitely more valuable than that sad little medal.

Absolutely, and I love that. There are valuable lessons that you learn when you set big goals. But let me ask you this. How did you achieve this goal? I mean, were they all, you made a plan, I'm sure, knowing you. I know that you had a plan Were the plans very detailed?

Were they big? How often did you change them or alter them? Well, because my goal was academic, I knew that I needed to study. And so I needed to give myself accountability to study well and perform as well as I could on the quizzes and tests so that I would have a higher average.

But I soon realized that it wasn't merely the performance and the numeric grade that would help me to reach my end goal. I needed to have better study habits. I needed to prioritize different things in my life. And I will admit to you, at the end of my freshman year, I felt very overwhelmed.

Partially because I knew I would have to work hard for three more years. And then I would have to continue to be consistent. But I felt overwhelmed because at first, I did not break this goal down into small, manageable steps. It was simply do better. And that thought was not helpful to me.

That was the goal I wanted to reach. I wanted to do better. But I really had to spend time thinking about what were the habits that I needed to build in order to be that valedictorian? What were the steps, the manageable small steps that I needed to take in order to reach that end goal?

And when my focus changed from do better to what is the next thing that I need to do? What is the next thing that I need to be consistent and disciplined about maintaining? Then suddenly that goal seemed doable and not quite so daunting because I could take action. And I think that was a major key for me in being successful.

The change in my mindset really helped me to make that goal attainable. - That is awesome. That is awesome. Okay, so listeners, what I hope that you wrote down in your mind, if not on a piece of paper, from what Kelly said, is that it's not just the big general goals of do better and study harder and finish more assignments.

It's the specific measurable goals that lead you to be consistent and persistent and to take action. That's really good. Let me ask you this, Kelly. Do you feel like you are generally a productive person? - I think so. When I think about the word productive, I think that there's another P word that is associated with that and that's progress.

And if you're productive, you should feel like you're moving forward in the most positive of ways to near a goal, to accomplish a goal. And I think over time, though, productivity has looked different in our homeschooling years based on the ages of our children. When my children were small, I would take out a notepad each day and I would write down three main things that I wanted to accomplish.

And if I did those three things, that was a productive day. As my children have gotten older and more independent, my definition of productivity has changed because of how much I'm able to accomplish over the course of the day as that independence has grown in my children and I've transferred that over to them.

So if you're a listener who has really small children, you may look at what you're able to accomplish and think, oh, I don't do that much. Well, there's a lot of invisible tasks that right now you are investing your time and energy into that is productive, that is creating progress, but you might not see the end result right now, but you are helping to create habits even in your children that will down the line help you to feel that you're being more productive as an individual and that truly your family is more productive because of the training and the skills that you were investing that time into when they were young.

- Oh, I love that. It is so easy for us to say at the end of the day, we did half a math lesson. We read one story together and they each probably did 30 minutes of reading and we went through the memory work one time. This was not a productive day and you're right.

I had days like that when my girls were young and I would have to force myself to look back and think, but we also baked muffins for the invalid neighbor next door. I taught my children to set the table correctly and they brought down their dirty laundry and carried their basket up.

We memorized another verse of scripture together this morning. We played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego with Daddy and we learned some more places in the world. There are small habits that we are inculcating in our children every day that are part of progress and part of our goals and part of being productive.

Here's another truth. I was gonna ask you, are you always productive? You productive woman, you are. You always productive in all of your areas at the same time or do you have to take turns being productive in your work or in your tutoring or in your homemaking or in your Bible study?

- Yeah, I mean, productivity is intensely personal because there will be different areas of your life that demand immediate attention at different points. And are we really being productive if we ignore the things that truly are the most important? I could be in the midst of doing a deep dive declutter of my kitchen, but one of my children runs into the room and says, "Oh my goodness, I just cut my hand open on a piece of glass." Well, you better believe my priorities are going to immediately be rescheduled because there is productivity but with productivity, there also is prioritization.

So sometimes we can set out to have a day filled with the best of intentions, but life does happen. And we have to be willing to, as a good friend of mine says, hold the marbles that represent our day very loosely in our hands and to not determine our success or failure based on which marbles are still in our hands by the end of the day, because we have to be able to reprioritize based on need.

I do believe though, that if we're thinking about a long-term goal, as opposed to the goals over the course of a day, that those habits that we intentionally build over the course of one day, spill over into the next day, and then the next week and the next month, and before long, in true habitual form, we don't even have to think about them, they become a part of who we are.

And they can radically transform who we are as people, they can transform who we are as homeschoolers, they can help us to transform our children even and how they prioritize and how they think and how they plan and grow. So I think there's daily productivity, but also there is that intentional act of establishing those habits and building them one on top of the other, almost like building blocks, so that we can build that habit that becomes a part of who we are.

Just like the five core habits that we promote in classical conversations, we want to practice them with intentionality to the point that they become a part of who we are. I may have to consciously think about naming things or attending to things or, oh, I need to memorize this.

But after doing that for so long, eventually, I look at those now and I think, oh, I do that, I really do that, but I don't have the conscious decision any longer because those habits are a part of who I am as a homeschooler, which is the same thing.

If we want to establish productivity, it's building those little habits so that eventually that productive person that we want to be is who we are without even having to really think or plan. And that's so much better than the wearying thought of having to consciously make every single choice to help us to accomplish a goal, right?

- Yes, yes. I have a friend that I have homeschooled with for a long time, her kids are younger than mine, but we've known each other for years and years. And she has a really great perspective on trying to be successful. And it's really hard, let's just be honest, you and I have talked about this before, that coming back in January is hard for a lot of us as families because we look back and we can look back at the fall and think, oh, this went really well and some of these things did not go as well.

But we're starting fresh and we're starting over and you think, well, I have the opportunity to really do great things. And sometimes you spend all these great plans in your head, but then the reality is that, man, we all got used to sleeping in and having snacks whenever we wanted to and not really having to do things that were not our favorite things.

And now it's time to get back to the grindstone and oh my goodness, we have community next week and I have this many lessons to read or I've got to finish this book and somebody's gonna ask me about my science project. And there are all of these things and we can get really discouraged before we even begin.

And so my friend said, I know that establishing a routine is what leads to productivity and productivity leads to success in whatever you are trying to achieve. Now my friend is a self-proclaimed loosey-goosey. Her mom, she says that she, and she learned this lesson about establishing a routine, she says the hard way because she did love the loosey-goosey life where you just follow your child's interest and you just do, you wake up every morning and see what grabs you or see what seems good and you just let that kind of take you.

The tide takes you where it will. But she said, she discovered that that was not her friend and it was not actually the friend of her children. It's very difficult for your children's temperament sometimes to have no routine because I have discovered through years and years of working with my own kids but with a lot of other kids too, that children by and large actually thrive with some measure of predictability.

They actually like, there is comfort for those small people in knowing that these same kinds of things are going to happen every day in pretty much the same order with basically the same people and these kinds of things will always be expected of me and these kinds of things will never be expected of me.

And there is comfort in those boundaries. And so I found that to be true with my own children but my friend said, so when we came back from the long break at Christmas, I woke up and thought, oh no, this is gonna go, I don't know, this is not gonna go well.

I feel like this is gonna be really hard. We're so out of our routine. And then she realized, no, we know what to do when we get up on a school week and on a school day and we are just, it is so rote, our routine is so well established.

It's a habit that we do without thinking about it. And she said, she realized that because everybody knew what to do and when to do it and they were just kind of on autopilot even when they weren't feeling it, they were doing it and that that was going to result at the end of the day in a productive day and a whole string of those productive days were gonna add up to success.

And she said, that was so reassuring. And I'm here to tell you that that is really the truth. One thing I've learned is that big detailed plans as much as I love them, Kelly, I do love me to make me some plans, but those big detailed plans don't have the power that small routines do.

And sometimes my lofty goals and my big picture plans can just make me tired and they can get too complicated to be managed when I'm overwhelmed or when we are out of our regular routine. Why is that so true? Oh, because life happens, doesn't it? And regardless of what plans we have ahead of time, like I said, we have to, especially as homeschool parents, be prepared to reprioritize based on a moment.

But we also have to know how to reserve our best yes for those things that would contribute to that end goal. If my goal is that all of my children do A, B, C over the course of the homeschooling day and a friend calls me up and says, it's beautiful outside, let's go to the park.

Well, you know what? If I have established routines, our family may be in a place where on that day, I can say, yes, we can take time away. It will not detract from our goal because we are stepping out of the routine. But you also have to be able to, on the flip side, look at what your children have accomplished and go, you know what, maybe that is not the best yes for today.

- Yes, good, that is really good. - That is the thing about routines, I think that it is so beneficial. Because when we make big goals and we don't establish the habits to build the routines, then the first time we hit a roadblock, we're derailed. - Oh yeah, oh yeah.

- And we might as well throw in the towel and say, oh, woe is me, I can never accomplish anything. And that's just not so. But when we build small habits, one on top of the next, then if we have something that happens that derails us, well, we pick up again, and we continue to work that habit until it's established and then build.

Kind of like, I guess if I'm thinking about Legos, when my children were young, they would build these huge Lego towers. And then one of my sons who will remain nameless was the more mischievously inclined, he would come and he would take one Lego out of this huge tower.

And then the whole tower would tumble down. And his brother would say, oh no, my whole tower is gone. And I would say, well, let's build it back up. And he would sit there for a few minutes and bemoan his tower. But then he would start to rebuild it again.

And somehow as adults, I think this kind of thinking doesn't transfer to us. - Isn't that funny, you're right. - We just bemoan the whole plan and think, oh, I can never do this thing. No, we have to take a lesson from our kids. - Yeah, we tend to throw out the whole plan and make a new one instead of saying, that's just a momentary blip, okay?

So I still want the same plan, but I took a time out. And so I just need to get right back on it. I need to get right back to the plan. I love what you said about serendipity, those serendipity moments. Just because you have built habits and routines in for your family does not make you a lifelong stick in the mud.

It does not mean that you will never say yes to suddenly offered fun, that you will never chase the rabbit, that you will never throw out the course guide for the fun activity hands-on. It doesn't mean that. Actually, when you have established routines, like you were saying, and you've established good habits, then you can say yes to the silly, or yes to the unexpected more easily, because you know that a momentary derailment is not permanent.

You have not plunged over the cliff. You just jumped the track for a minute and you're gonna get back on. - That's right. - I love that. - Yes, do not sacrifice the fun and the spontaneous, but the routines are what allows that to happen without you feeling as if your whole habit tower is completely destroyed and you'll never be able to rebuild back to the goal that you want to achieve.

Yes, keep the fun. (laughs) - Yes, and you can keep it without feeling guilty, which y'all, let's face it, if you're gonna do the serendipity thing but feel guilty the whole time, it just ruins it. - Yes. - You don't enjoy it, and frankly, you can be a wet blanket for your kids.

Let's just don't, and say we did, okay? So let's talk about it. All right, I wanna be a little bit particular. I wanna say, what are some of these habits that you have uncovered over the years that propel your family to success? What are some of the habits that have led to routines that have become so automatic that they are bearing you on the tide of success?

- This is such a great question, and I'm ashamed that it took me so long to figure some of these out. (laughs) But I will cheer them in hopes that they will help someone else who's not quite so far along on the journey. - There you go, excellent. - For me as a homeschooler, I don't think I was clued into the fact that my environment was so crucial in shaping my ability as a homeschooler to focus in on my children and what we were doing together.

My environment needs to be in a place where I'm not in the back of my mind thinking, oh, what are we having for supper? Oh, there are all these things everywhere. And so for me, just because our home is our classroom, just like the rest of the world is our classroom, but a lot of our deep thinking occurs in that environment.

Now, does it bother my children that there's a stack of dishes in the sink? Absolutely not, because they're from my children. But for me as a mom, when I'm sitting there and we're trying to solve algebra problems at the kitchen table, and I look over and I see all the to-do's that need to be to-done, I discovered that I needed to establish routines for our family that would contribute to me having the mental space to completely focus.

And so I have, over the course of these last 20 years, created habits that helped me to have simple things, like an empty sink, or a swept floor where there are not mounds of crumbs that our little dog is lapping up all the time, or laundry under control. I won't say always done, because that would not be true.

- Right, that's crazy, until your children don't live with you, that will not be true. - There will always be laundry, but laundry under, you know, laundry with a plan, things like that. And I think those in-home routines have also helped my children to have structure so that they know on certain days their laundry will be done, and that they can come get it, and they can fold it, because they're of that age now where they are consistently helping out.

You know, knowing that I need to run the dishwasher at night, and then empty it first thing in the morning is a very practical thing, but it gives us a place to put our dirty dishes when we break from homeschooling for lunch, or we're having that afternoon snack. - I love that.

- Those little habits that we've accumulated over time, because in true type A+ fashion, I thought that, oh, I'm just gonna do all the things, and be, quote unquote, be better. Well, that didn't happen, Lisa. That was a big, that was a recipe for crash and burn. - And you know what?

Be better means something different to everybody in your family. - Yes, for sure. - And if homeschooling is a joint endeavor, then we need to define our terms. What does be better mean? - Exactly. - And just because, I mean, you're right. It does not bother, it never bothered my children that there were crumbs under the table that we were doing our reading on, but it bothered me, and so we just, that needed to become a defined thing, that we do, there are certain basic chores we do first, so that, like you said, our environment is hospitable for all of us, not just for some of us.

- Right, well, and I will say, as far as homeschooling itself is concerned, I think some of the habits that we've tried to establish as a family, one of them we lovingly refer to as eating our frogs before breakfast. - How funny. - So we look at, my children look at what they need to accomplish, and they take care of the task that they look at with dread and disdain first, and just like productivity is personal, that choice is personal too, and for each of my children, that is a different frog that they take care of, but just knowing that they've accomplished that, that is the building block, they eat breakfast, and then it's time for the frog, and then after that, it becomes almost like a snowball effect.

The day becomes increasingly easier because the guard is taking care of the difficult thing, so that's been incredibly helpful to them as students to know that, you know what, I'm gonna invest my energy, and I'm gonna get this done, and throughout our years as a homeschooling family, that has looked different based on the ages of my children, because we've been through seasons where I have one or two children napping while another child does school, or we've had different iterations of what our most productive day looked like, and as a parent, you need to take time to look at your family, what are your family's rhythms of the day, and think about, okay, you know what, I want to accomplish these tasks, when is the best time, and choosing that best time can help you in building that routine, because if you're trying to kick against the bricks, and you're trying to get something that takes a lot of mental energy done at the time when, oh my goodness, we used to jokingly refer to it as the witching hour, at our house, whenever it was almost supper time, and everyone was hungry, and slightly disgruntled when they were young.

If I had tried to do deep thinking work at that time, I would have been defeating myself before I even began. So sometimes taking that extra time to consider the rhythm of your day, and your family members, and the rhythms of their day, can help you to be able to know when to build the habits, and not just what habits to build.

- Yeah, I think that's really smart. I think that the power of routine is that you do it automatically, even if you're tired, even if somebody is sick or missing, even if you don't want to, or even if you haven't done it in a long time. And so when we start back to school in January, or in second semester, if there are things that we know, we just have a routine, we have a rhythm.

Everybody gets up, like you said, we all get up, and it may be different, listeners, at your house. The order may be different, but you need to establish some routines that your children can follow without a lot of redirection, without a lot of negotiation. There are things that just aren't.

We all get up. For my kids, it's we get up, and we immediately make our bed. Don't come down until you make your bed, because I know how it works. If you go back upstairs to find something, you might crawl back in that bed, so let's not. So we get up, we make our bed, we eat our breakfast, we do the frog, and then maybe your children know it's time to read together, or every morning they know that they're gonna do math first, they're gonna have devotion, then they're gonna do math, and then we're gonna have a read time.

And so everybody does the hard thing, if math is your hard thing, they do that hard thing first so that they get to the easy thing, or the snuggly thing, or the together thing. Develop routines. I think it's really important. One of your routines might be that everybody's school supplies are in a certain box or a certain bin, and everybody goes to get their own bin every day.

My kids, our house was really small when the girls were young, and we homeschooled at the breakfast room, well, it was the breakfast room and the dining room table, it was the only table we had, and it was that we had a bookshelf, and they each had a little tote that had their pencils and their rulers and their glue stick and their markers and their bookmarks and whatever they needed in there, and they had a board that they put down so that when they bore down really hard with their pencil, they did not etch their math problems into my dining room table, which did not always happen, but now, as a mom with grown children, I like the fact that I can still read the five times five is 25 at my table.

But anyway, they knew to get their boxes, and they knew when we're done with school, you put it back. So routines like that mean that you're not spending 30 minutes, everybody looking for their pencil, or 15 minutes looking for the Bob book that you threw under the couch in December, and now you don't know where it is.

So all of those kinds of things. If you decide on, I had one friend who had 10 children. She homeschooled all 10 of her children. They're a wonderful family. But she went through a season when she had lots of littles, and getting them dressed in the morning was a nightmare, and deciding who was gonna wear what, and oh, you have my shirt, no, that's my shirt, and this doesn't match and that doesn't match.

And she instituted, she bought pullover jumpers for the girls and jeans for the boys, and they had like three shirts a piece, and they got up and there was no question. You put on this shirt, you put on this jumper, and that's what you're wearing. And they all wore the same thing because she needed to get through that part of the day to get to the routine that was gonna bring them success.

- Absolutely, absolutely. Well, and you know, Lisa, the funny thing is, now that we're, oh goodness, my eldest is 20. So if I say that our first homeschooling days began when he was born, you know, there are some routines and habits that we established at certain points in our life that turned our day almost into a dance, where you just danced from one thing to the next, and now I reflect on those routines, and there's so much joy, I almost don't want to stop the routine.

I have, we had a similar situation with our children's school supplies when they were young. We were all around one little table in an apartment, and so to corral all the school supplies, I saved tin cans and wrapped them in masking tape, in duct tape, and then put them in a shower caddy.

And so I still have this shower caddy with our little tin cans that have our dry erase markers and our colored pencils, and do my two students who are now in high school still need that? No, but it was such an endearing part of our family's homeschooling routine to have that sitting on the table.

They knew homeschool was beginning for the day when I put that caddy on the table. I simply cannot bring myself to let it go quite yet, because those routines were endearing, and they were a sign that homeschool was in session, and we were beginning our studies. And there is a joy and a peacefulness that will pervade your household when you find that sweet spot for those habits and routines.

- That is the most encouraging thing, potentially, that you have said. And that is the perfect place for us to end. Here's the truth, establishing some routines will lead you to productivity that you don't have to belabor every day, and will eventually bring you success. But what those kinds of routines will bring your homeschool and your family is peace.

And isn't that what we all want a little bit more of in this thing here? - Absolutely. Absolutely. - Absolutely, absolutely. Well, parents, this has been a great time of encouragement, I hope, along with some fresh practical ideas for you. I have one more thing I wanna tell you about that might also be a new idea for you, but could possibly prove to be the best thing you ever did for yourself.

If you are looking to level up your skills in guiding and assessing your students' learning at home, I wanna talk to you about the classical learning cohort. The spring semester is just getting started. Six times throughout this semester, you can meet online with a small group of other homeschool parents who are on this same mission to grow their understanding about classical education and develop lifelong skills for guiding their students through the truth of learning.

Your cohort would be led by an experienced mentor who will walk you all through some hands-on practical assignments, helping you learn how to give good classical assessments, helping you to grab your students' attention, giving them an exhortium into what you're getting ready to study together, and then developing a review that'll help you engage your student with every lesson.

If you wanna keep growing in your knowledge and as your skills too, as a classical educator, the learning cohort might really be for you. So spaces are limited and I don't want you guys to miss out, so don't wait, go to classicalconversations.com/cohort. You can find out more information and you can sign up.

That's classicalconversations.com/cohort. Okay, you guys, go and establish a routine that will make you truly productive and find peace in your home. And I'll see you next time, bye.