I was recently asked to write a guest post on Kathie Morrisey’s Character Corner blog about encouragement. (You can read that article here on the blog!) When I sat out to write encouraging words, I came back to what I always come back to–prioritizing leads to encouragement. I can encourage myself by setting my priorities and following through on them. It’s true….it has happened to me countless times during my thirty-two years of homeschooling and continues to happen to me now as an entrepreneur and online teacher. So I wrote my article for Character Corner–and decided to make a video to follow it up. I hope that this prioritizing help encourages you as much as it has me throughout my parenting years.
Before I give you the outline, I’d like to leave you with some other tools to help you in your encouragement and prioritizing journey:
1) Podcast: Overcoming Obstacles in Parenting
2) Wondering Wedensday–Foundations for Becoming an Efficiency Expert in Your Home
3) My Organization Beginnings: Do the Dailies!
4) 5 Influences to Determine Your Priorities
Here’s a short outline for this video, Finding Encouragement Through Prioritizing:
A. Introduction–Priorities are what I did that day
1. I did my priorities
2. I did my dailies
3. Priorities are not always exciting and grandeur
4. Priorities start with the things we do every day to make our home a success
5. Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
B. Prioritize Your Day
1. Most important things first each day
2. Put things that need done every single day in the first part of the day and don’t do anything before them
3. Delighting in Dailies Part I (here) and Part II (here)
C. Make list of Priorities and Attach Actions
1. Priority is a priority if we do it; if not, it is a wish
2. Priorities are the final outcomes; list of habits/actions are the way we will reach priorities
3. If we do not do something consistently, it is not a priority–only the things on our calendars and checkbooks are priorities
D. Put the Actions That Help Us Meet Priorities in Daily Schedule
1. Daily, weekly, monthly priorities need actions to make them happen
2. Put these actions down in daily schedule, calendar, planner, etc.
3. These actions should come ahead of everything else
