Creating Space, Not More Systems
Christina: [00:00:00] Years ago, I remember talking to a mentor about everything that I was doing, everything that I wanted to do, and all of the things I was trying to figure out. And I wanted help to better manage my mindset and my time so I could get it all in.
That was the problem as far as I was concerned. Tell me how to do it better. Give me the system. Show me the thing I am missing that will allow me to achieve all of this at once.
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Speaker 2: Welcome to Clear and on Purpose. I'm Christina, coach, strategist, and someone deeply fascinated by the patterns that keep capable people stuck in cycles of burnout, overthinking, pressure, and self-sabotage. Around here, we go deeper than surface level motivation or productivity hacks. We talk about the hidden dynamics shaping the way you work, lead, relate, and move through [00:01:00] life so you can create success that actually feels sustainable.
Each week, I share personal stories, mindset shifts, and practical insights to help you reconnect with yourself, reclaim your energy, and move forward with more clarity, intention, and self-trust. I'm glad you're here
Christina: / You've noticed all the things that need to change. Your routines are off, your house is a mess, your schedule has gotten way too loose, and you have all these obligations coming up, and there's absolutely no way that the way that you're currently doing things is gonna be able to handle what's coming.
It's time to lock in. So you start the five AM workouts, and you create the new morning routine. You streamline the house.you time block the calendar, and you turn on all the reminders. You meal plan, you prep, you finally deal with all those piles sitting around. [00:02:00] And suddenly, you are doing all of it.
This is what you needed, a reset, a little structure, a good kick in the butt to get everything moving smoothly again. For a minute, you become her, the I don't know how she does it woman. You are nailing it, and it feels so great. This is what you've been dreaming about until the adrenaline starts to wear off and the newness loses its appeal.
You're getting up at five, but you're exhausted by three. Everyone else in your house has somehow been unwillingly enrolled in your new operating procedures, and they are not on board. There are fifteen reminders going off. You're trying to maintain the workouts and homemade meals and perfectly organized schedule while keeping up with work and kids and activities and whatever else real life throws at you.[00:03:00]
And so you start to get behind. And then something blows up. Someone gets sick. Work gets busier. You miss two workouts. Nobody prepped the food. Your beautifully time-blocked week bears almost absolutely no resemblance to the weeks that you are actually living. And eventually, you find yourself right back where you started thinking, "Why can't I ever stick with anything?"
Except I think that sometimes we're asking the wrong question. We all know that I love a reset. I love a fresh notebook and a new plan, and the idea that this will apparently be the system that finally makes my entire life run perfectly. Obviously, the problem comes when keeping that whole thing going starts requiring an enormous amount of energy.[00:04:00]
Because the desire to reset wasn't necessarily the problem. The routines weren't themselves bad. Maybe your schedule really did need more structure, and maybe your house genuinely feels better when it's cleaner. Maybe meal planning saves your sanity. The part that I want you to look at is what happened between.
Between the this-isn't-working thought and the jumping right into the new plan. Because we can move through that gap really, really quickly. We notice the discomfort and immediately move to fixing. How can I organize this better? What system do I need? What routine am I missing? How can I fit all of this in?
And we never stop long enough to ask whether all of it should fit. And that's a different question. And I actually was [00:05:00] thinking about this this morning, because instead of working on this podcast, I cleaned my house. And when I say I cleaned it, I don't mean I wiped the counter and threw a load of laundry in.
I cleaned. I mopped, I organized, I vacuumed crumbs out of the furniture. We've had way too many sleepovers and kids running in and out, and not enough actual full house resets lately, and I reached the point where I could not stand it anymore. My whole body felt itchy. My brain felt cluttered because everything around me felt cluttered.
And apparently, before I could sit down and write an episode about pausing before you immediately start changing everything, I needed to immediately change all of my outside circumstances. Because I don't only coach what I've learned, I coach what I'm still learning. And here's the really annoying part.
It [00:06:00] worked. Once the house was clean, I felt better. I could think better, and honestly, it helped me notice where we get drawn into these same situations over and over again. Because there are plenty of times when changing your environment genuinely supports you. And I'm not gonna sit here with my shiny floors and tell you that cleaning your house is avoidance.
Because sometimes the house just needs to be cleaned. But I also know this pattern in myself. Give me a big project I don't quite know how to tackle, a few deadlines piling up, some uncertainty about what I need to do next, and suddenly rearranging my office seems incredibly urgent. Or perhaps this is when what we really need is an entirely new system for homeschool.
Perhaps I should research that for the next two hours. There is something incredibly satisfying about a problem I can [00:07:00] see, control, and solve.
The furniture goes here. The floor goes from dirty to clean. I make the spreadsheet. I create the schedule. Done. Meanwhile, whatever bigger question I was wrestling with is still sitting there waiting for me, and my shiny floors are only gonna stay that way until the kids come running through the doors again.
On a good day, I've lost a couple of hours and gained a little mental clarity. On a bad day, the whole day is gone. I'm half way, halfway through some giant organizing project I now want to abandon. I'm more stressed than I was before, and now I'm exhausted too. And I think we can do this with entire seasons of our lives.
Planning for the next season feels good because we're building the clean version of the future, the one where everyone is healthy and cooperative, nothing takes longer than expected, nobody has a meltdown, there are no [00:08:00] surprise deadlines, and I am lit up and energized every day. Future Christina is incredible.
She has her shit together. The problem is that future Christina eventually turns into current Christina, who is still a real person living in a real house with other very real people. And if I created a life that only works when everybody follows the plan and I operate at maximum capacity, that's going to dissolve real quick.
So before we start resetting everything, I think there's another question worth asking: What needs to be here at all? Think about your house. If you have a closet completely packed with stuff, you can organize it. You can buy matching containers. You can put labels on everything. You can get another shelving unit, and you can become incredibly efficient at [00:09:00] fitting a ridiculous amount of stuff into that closet.
But if it's full of half-used products, expired medication, and things you don't even remember buying, and you can't get to the stuff you actually use without following a very specific method to keep the entire system from collapsing, you haven't solved the real problem. You've just developed a better temporary system for maintaining too much.
And we do this with our lives constantly. We have too many commitments, so we buy a better planner. We have too many activities, so we optimize the calendar. We're stretched thin at work, so we create a better morning routine. We can't keep up with everything at home, so we develop a more elaborate household management system.
And don't get me wrong, those things absolutely do help. [00:10:00] But sometimes we are organizing something that actually needs to be decluttered. And there's research suggesting that humans tend to do exactly this when we're solving problems. We are surprisingly likely to think about what we can add before we think about what we could take away, which I find incredibly validating and also infuriating because of course we do.
We're exhausted, running on empty, and trying to keep up with our already busy lives. So obviously, what's the solution? Add the routine. Add the app. Add the system or that newest productivity hack. Maybe we just need another supplement. And do not suggest that perhaps I simply stop trying to do all the things, because subtraction requires a decision, [00:11:00] and sometimes it requires admitting that you can't or don't want to keep everything.
Maybe your kids don't need three extracurricular activities this fall. Maybe you don't want to do the giant launch you planned. Maybe you want one night a week where nobody goes anywhere. Maybe you want dinner with your spouse where you aren't simultaneously checking emails. And maybe your version of taking care of yourself includes working out regularly but doesn't require waking up at five AM.
Maybe there's something that you really do want to pursue, and the choice is allowing another area of your life to simply be average for a while And that one is hard, especially if you've built an identity around being capable. Because the question stops being, "How can I get better at holding everything?"[00:12:00]
Now you're asking, "What am I choosing to hold? And what am I willing to let go?" And that one brings up a lot. Years ago, I remember talking to a mentor about everything that I was doing, everything that I wanted to do, and all of the things I was trying to figure out. And I wanted help to better manage my mindset and my time so I could get it all in.
That was the problem as far as I was concerned. Tell me how to do it better. Give me the system. Show me the thing I am missing that will allow me to achieve all of this at once. And she listened to all of it and basically told me, "You're doing so much. What you really need is to create space." And at the time, I remember thinking that was complete nonsense.
That was not an [00:13:00] answer. Creating space? I was asking how to get more done. I wanted the magical tool that would make me capable of managing everything I decided should fit into my life, and she was suggesting that I do less. It felt like giving up. and if I'm being really truthful, it felt like maybe my fears that I wasn't capable enough were true because she didn't think I could do it all either.
Because being highly capable was what I was always striving for. I should be able to do this. Other people do this. I have the capacity. I can figure it out. Until eventually I started realizing that my capacity wasn't really the question. I could do a lot of it. I had already proven I could do a lot.
The better question was [00:14:00] whether I wanted my life to require that much of me all the time Creating space eventually gave me enough room to actually see what truly mattered to me and where there was a real structural limits on my capacity during that season of life. Those 5:00 AM workouts after sleepless nights with a toddler and baby were actually draining me more than they were giving me the energy I so desperately wanted.
Breastfeeding, baby wearing, running an organization, and making home-cooked meals meant my house was often a disaster. And instead of looking at the areas where I thought I wasn't keeping up or what other people could seemingly do with ease, I needed to really start to pay attention to what actually mattered to me, what I wanted to spend the majority of my energy on, what I wanted my days to feel like in practical terms, where I could accept more support, [00:15:00] where I could loosen my expectations, what I was doing because it genuinely mattered to me, and what I had somehow decided I should be doing because that's what I thought I should be able to do.
And I didn't abandon everything else, and this is really important. Creating space doesn't mean blowing up your life, quitting your job, canceling every activity, and spending the next month contemplating your existence in the woods. Although, depending on the week, that may sound really appealing. It means allowing enough room to make an intentional decision before you start optimizing.
Because action is useful, routines are useful. Systems are truly useful. I love all of those things, but they work much [00:16:00] better after you've decided what they're supposed to support. Otherwise, you can get really, really good at maintaining a life you don't actually enjoy. So as we head into this next season, when there is going to be a lot of back on track, lock in, new routine, fall reset energy everywhere, I want you to give yourself a beat before you join in.
Look at what is already here. Ask yourself, "What's working? What is consistently creating friction? What feels full simply because too much has been packed into it?" Where do you genuinely need more structure? Where would more structure just help you to maintain something you don't actually want anymore?
What do you want there to be room for in this season? [00:17:00] Maybe you want calmer mornings. Maybe you wanna focus heavily on your business for thenext three months. Maybe you want more time with your kids. Maybe you desperately need regular time with adults who are not asking you where their shoes are.
Maybe you want more rest or more creativity, more dates with your spouse, or more empty space on the calendar to allow for spontaneity and presence. And then ask, what would actually support that? Which routines help? Which systems help? Which commitments belong? And what could you take away? And stay with that one for a minute because it's easy to avoid.
What can I let go of? It doesn't have to be forever, [00:18:00] but for right now, where can I create more space by eliminating an expectation, an obligation, or simply pause before automatically adding more things to the calendar? And then there's one more question to consider if you want this to be more than simply a thought exercise that lives in a journal somewhere, the one that actually helps impact your life What has kept me from doing this before?
Because sometimes you already know. You know you don't wanna sign up for all those activities, but you wait so long to decide what you do want that the schedule fills itself. You know you need support, but you keep planning around doing everything yourself. You know you need one night without commitments, but every individual invitation sounds reasonable, and somehow you've [00:19:00] created another week with nowhere to breathe.
You know the launch is too ambitious, but scaling back feels like disappointment. You know the system is too complicated, but simplifying it feels like admitting that that beautiful system you designed doesn't work for your life. And sometimes that's the thing you've been avoiding. Because once you know what you actually want, you may have to admit why you don't already have it.
Maybe the plan looked great in theory and asks too much of your actual life. Or maybe you do know what would help, but you haven't been willing to protect it in the moment. You say you want an open evening, and then every individual invitation seems reasonable. You say yes automatically. You want more support, but when the opportunity comes to ask for it, doing it [00:20:00] yourself feels easier.
You know you don't have the capacity for another commitment, but saying yes feels more comfortable than disappointing someone. Sometimes the pause is uncomfortable because the pause creates room for decisions we've been avoiding. Doing gives us somewhere to put the energy. Pausing makes us sit there long enough to decide.
And I think that's why creating space eventually became so important for me. Because once there was actually some room, I could hear myself again. I could tell the difference between I want this and I think I should be able to do this. I could see where I was spending energy because something mattered and where I was spending it maintaining
Speaker 3: Thank you for tuning in to Clear and on Purpose. My hope is that these conversations help you see yourself more clearly, understand your patterns more [00:21:00] compassionately, and move through life with more intention, capacity, and alignment. If this episode resonated, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who'd benefit from hearing it too.
And if you're looking for deeper support, coaching details and offerings can be found at christinaslayback.com
Speaker: expectations I hadn't consciously chosen.
And then I could make the intentional plan. I could create the realistic routine, and I could lock in to what truly mattered, if that's what I wanted. So maybe before you overhaul everything for the next season, don't immediately ask yourself how to do all of it better. Give yourself enough space to decide what better actually means right now.
What belongs? What [00:22:00] doesn't? What you want there to be room for, and then build the systems around that. Because you do not need a beautifully organized closet full of things you don't even want, and you probably don't need a beautifully organized life full of them either
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