Ep 54: Making Room for More with Minimalism

Christine Koh, author of Minimalist Parenting, reveals how to get
more out of your family life by doing LESS. She says “minimalism”
isn’t about getting rid of apps and toilet paper, it’s about
making room for the stuff that helps your family thrive while
cutting back on everything else.


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Full show notes


Does your life reflect your strongest values?


You can value travel, and still spend 50 weeks of the year in
your own county. You can value the outdoors, and still get no
closer to fresh air than your car window five days of the week.
You might value time with your kids, and still encourage them to
take on a ton of extracurriculars. This is all fine, right?


We make sacrifices for our family all the time, even if we’re
sacrificing what we value most. We can still be comfortable and
not do what’s most important to us. Why make changes that aren’t
necessary?


As we go through life, it’s easy to get stuck in our ways, even
if our ways don’t reflect our strongest values. This might not
sound like the biggest problem in the world, but think about it…


If our way of living doesn’t reflect our strongest values, what
does that teach our kids?


Values are one of the most effective ways you can influence a
teenager. Once your child gets into the teenage years, it becomes
extremely difficult to influence their daily activities. But if
you impart strong values that your teen can live by, you can keep
the door open to conversations about values later into their
adult lives.


Reshaping our lives to reflect our most important values is a lot
easier said than done. However, the woman I speak with in this
episode insists that with a minimalist family life, making room
for what’s important is totally possible!


Before I introduce her, though, let me just say:


A minimalist family life is NOT what it sounds like.


Christine Koh runs FIVE businesses! (And yes, she’s here to talk
about minimalism.) She is the founder and editor of the
award-winning blog Boston Mamas, the graphic designer behind Posh
Peacock, and a digital strategist at The Mission List. She is a
speaker, a writer, and co-author of the practical and humorous
book, Minimalist Parenting: Enjoy Modern Family Life More By
Doing Less. She might sound like the farthest thing from a
minimalist, but she insists that a minimalist family life is what
frees her up to do what she values most.


Foundational Values


Christine decided to co-author the book, Minimalist
Parenting, because she found it especially hard as a
parent to define her own family’s values and stand up for them.
She points out that there is so much noise about what your
family’s values should be.


For example, parents feel compelled by the popular culture to
have their teens do a million activities at once, or they’ll
never get into college. For some families, that’s totally fine!
They might like being busy. But Christine knows that in her
family, her kids need a lot of down time. Her kids can’t focus on
their homework and chores if they’re too saturated with
activities they don’t care about. It was hard for her family to
say, “No! We’re only going to do one activity per season!” They
had to do it, though, in order to honor their own key values.


She says it’s really important to identify your family’s key
values because everything else in your life will be founded on
those. Quiet times, space, sleep, and a minimalist family life
are all part of Christine’s key values. If her family isn’t
getting those three things, life begins to get a bit
dysfunctional.


Balancing Values


What if your personal values differ from your spouse’s, though?
Christine can speak personally to this.


Remember those five companies Christine runs? Well, her husband
isn’t so on board with how diverted her energy can become. Having
different projects is something that Christine loves and values
in her life, while her husband values more quality time away from
work. They needed to


The two of them have worked very hard to balance their values and
create a minimalist family life. They have to be very clear about
how Christine can stop working at the end of each day and be
present with her family. At the same time, her husband knows that
he must sacrifice some one-on-one time to support her career
goals. And their balance is working great!


When key values are identified and balanced, everyone in the
household benefits.


What does it look like practically, though, to identify key
values and balance them?


A “More” and “Less” List


One of Christine’s favorite tools for creating a minimalist
family life by identifying key values is a More and Less List.


A More and Less List is just what it sounds like. It’s a list
with two columns. One side is the “More” column, and the other is
the “Less” column. The trick, Christine says, is to be honest
with your thoughts. Turn off your inner critic. No one has to see
this list except you. Now, write what you genuinely want more and
less of in your life!


Maybe it’s less running around, more time with friends outdoors,
or having a more minimalist family life in general.


Once you have your thoughts on paper, you can make a plan to edit
your life. Get rid of stuff that is unnecessary, and make room
for what is really important to you. Work on creating a
minimalist family life that isn’t complicated by things that
aren’t adding value to your life.


If you wrote down that you want to learn more, maybe you can rent
some audiobooks from your local library, and listen to them
during your commutes. If you wrote down that you want to be
driving your kids less, maybe set up a carpool rotation with
another family.


Christine’s other favorite part about making a list, is that the
exercise can help you realize that the stuff you want more of is
within reach!


Coffee Punch Cards and You


Research shows that when you feel like you’re part of the way
towards achieving a goal, you’re more likely to take action to
achieve it. Just think about coffee punch cards! If you have an
unpunched card, well, that’s not motivating. But if you have a
card with one or two punches already in it, then you feel like
you’re already on your way to winning that free coffee!


A More and Less List is like a coffee punch card. It helps you
see that you’re already on your way to achieving your goals. The
list helps you realize that you can make changes
to your life, and that in some ways you’ve already started to
make such changes. It’s this ability to make changes that is at
the heart of a minimalist family life.


Even if one of your minimalist family life goals is just “clean
the playroom,” you might need to break the job down into baby
steps to make it more approachable. It’s not that you don’t know
how to clean the playroom, but that the scope of the task can
seem overwhelming if you’re tired and stressed.


Taking a couple extra minutes to break the task into baby steps
make...