Bringing Home Baby: Easing This Transition for Couples

By Orly Katz, LCPC at Everyday Counseling and Coaching Services

It’s hard to describe what bringing home a baby means to new parents – until you’ve experienced this transition, it seems impossible to really understand the changes your life undergoes, from long-term plans to the daily routines you’ve had. When parents bring home a baby for the first time, it can be a time of overwhelming joy – but with any new change, stress and feelings of disconnection can also be present. Without understanding what a new baby can do to a relationship, this can be an especially vulnerable time for marital discord. We love this article from Women’s Health Mag – it’s such an honest look at the most common relationship troubles during this transition. Take a look – when you come back, we’ll explore some questions to ask before you bring baby home that can help avoid these issues.

The good news is that these issues can mitigated with some honest and thoughtful conversations with your partner. Ideally these would happen before discussing having a baby (or at least before the baby is born), but if these are things you are struggling with in your own relationship, start the conversation as soon as possible.

• What role expectations do you both have regarding child-rearing, especially at the newborn phase? How do you expect your partner to support you? How will you communicate when you need more help or when you are feeling overwhelmed? If you are planning on returning to work, how will these roles shift at that time? What additional supports would you consider to help mitigate the stress of working and raising a child?
• How prepared do you both feel to provide daily care to a newborn? How can you communicate with one another if you are concerned about the care provided by your partner to the baby? What are your expectations for care and are these realistic things to expect from your partner all of the time?
• Your body will need time to recover after child-birth, regardless of yours or his sex drive. How can you embed intimacy during this time? How will you make time for this even after your body is healed? How would you prefer to communicate about feeling dissatisfied with the amount of intimacy during this time if it becomes an issue?
• Do you and your partner spend quality time together now? How will you hold yourselves accountable to scheduling this time after the baby comes? What supports do you have that will allow one-on-one time without bringing baby along?
• What are each of your parenting styles and philosophies? How were each of you raised, and how is that influencing how you intend to parent your child? When baby comes, how will you discuss parenting differences as they arise in a respectful way?

While these are a lot of things to consider before having a baby, they are essential to making this transition successful. Without having a conversation around these issues, problems like resentment, stress, and isolation can arise – things that quickly drive deep wedges in relationships. Above all, remember that effective communication, the willingness to be flexible and insightful, and placing your commitment to your family above all else is what powers couples through the new baby stage.

The Miracle Morning: Lessons For Creating a Better Life

By Orly Katz, LCPC at Everyday Counseling and Coaching Services

I recently stumbled upon this video describing some of the concepts from the book The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. I was immediately drawn in by the story of what happened to Elrod, the choice he made to live a happy life, and how he was successful in this. Elrod writes this book from a place of healing and believes passionately that the key to success and fulfillment is in the choices we make. As you watch the below, pay attention to Elrod’s story and the major keys to what helped him through this time. When you’re done, we’ll review some of these ideas and consider how they can be applied in our own lives.

There’s so much wonderful advice and guidance in this video in such a short period of time, so let’s break down some of they key points:

We have the power to transform our day by starting our morning with a joyous and hopeful awakening; or, when we leave our bed looking forward to what the day will bring. Consider – when is the last time you left bed quickly and happily? What motivated you then to do so? Is this motivation something you have the power to create each day?

There are acts we can engage in (SAVERS) before we try the miracle morning, things we can do the day before:

• Silence: Are you giving yourself the time in your schedule to sit and reflect on the things you are grateful for each day? Time where you are alone and aren’t distracted by a phone, television, traffic? How can you work to embed this time, even a few minutes, into each day?
• Affirmations: What mantras are you repeating in your mind? Are they ones of hope and self-gratitude? If not, can you push out the negative mantras and refocus on creating positive ones?
• Visualizations: What are your hopes for the future? What do you want each day to look like moving forward? Are you creating the time to see this image in your mind?
• Exercise: Are you moving your body every day, at least a little bit? If not, what’s an activity you enjoy? Can you commit to doing this for a few minutes a day to start?
• Reading: How often do you read literature that fulfills you or helps you to meet your goals? Even 10 pages a day is enough.
• Scribing: Do you reflect on and record the days events before you go to bed? Do you create and maintain to-do lists?

In order for the SAVERS to work, they must become habits, things that we do on auto-pilot. Elrod recommends keeping the following in mind as you start on a path of embedding new habits:

• Find someone to be your accountability partner who can ideally go through the steps with you.
• Recognize and move past “rear view mirror syndrome”: Has something happened to you in the past that is holding you back from your goals? If so, what was it? Can you commit to trying again, understanding that just because something happened before does not mean it will happen again?
• Recognize and avoid “isolating incidents”: Don’t treat any action or inaction you do as something that is “one-time” or “just today.” Every choice we make, big or small, starts us down a path of habit-forming. This means we need to constantly hold ourselves accountable and treat every choice as an opportunity to move further down our path of self-actualization.

Making the Habit: How We Can Effectively Embed New Habits Into Our Lives

By Orly Katz, LCPC at Everyday Counseling and Coaching Services

We’re nearly midway though 2017, so let’s do a quick check in on something that a few of us may have long forgotten about – our New Year’s Resolutions. A little awkward, right? For some of us, these goals may no longer be goals because we’ve achieved them – we’ve started and maintained a regular gym schedule, we’ve quit an unhealthy habit, or we’ve dived into a new hobby we enjoy. But for many of us, well, these resolutions may have fallen away from our daily lives months ago. Why is that? Why is goal setting and habit formation such a hard thing for so many people? Here are some ideas around this:

• We’re not designed to change easily: As human beings, we are naturally prone to stay within our comfort zone. It’s what our body is used to, it is what our mind can accept. When we introduce a new habit, when we try to make change, our body and mind naturally rebel against this. It takes a lot of willpower and planning to make a habit stick.
• We try to do too much at once: The entire idea of setting New Year goals is already not helpful, simply because most of us don’t pick just one. I can think of years where I made a goal list an entire sheet of paper long, each goal more lofty and idealistic than the last. If we are naturally inclined to reject change, what does an attempt to change everything at once do? It puts our systems into shock. And when that happens, even the smaller and more attainable goals become more difficult; giving up on everything just seems easier.
• There’s an elephant in the room named “Shame” that no one wants to talk about: Even though every person, no matter how successful they are, shares the reality that they have experienced failure, no one wants to talk about it. No one wants to admit when they’ve given up, no one shares a status update about forgoing a goal that meant so much to them. But in this secrecy lies shame, and shame is the kindling that fuels our inability to bring positive habits into our lives. When we can accept ourselves as fallible, it means looking shame in the face and moving past it. It means accepting that it is okay to fail, thereby losing the fear of trying so many of us hold onto.

So how can we invite habit formation back into our lives? I love this video (although, a warning – the humor is a bit quirky and there is some adult language used). Once you’ve finished, we can take a look at some other lessons from this.

Now that we’ve been informed of some great, evidence-based tips for how to make habits stick, let’s spend a few moments exploring some additional things to consider before you proceed with introducing a habit.

• What’s your plan for holding yourself accountable? While the video above has some great ideas, make sure you’ve picked one that works for you before you get started. This accountability is especially important to make sure you get through those first 66 days, and to ensure you don’t go more than one day without engaging in your new habit.
• What habit are you going prioritize? Just pick one to start, and don’t feel obligated to introduce new habits every 30 days – choose a time frame that works for you, where you don’t feel overwhelmed.
• What’s your motivation for change? Why are you making the change? Why is this habit a priority for you? This is the kind of question that shouldn’t be answered quickly. When you think about the why behind your habit, take the time to meditate on this, journal about it, or talk with someone about. Dig down deep and go underneath the surface responses – there you’ll not just learn the why, but also the how behind keeping the habit you choose.