Lifehacks For Working Moms With Megan Strand

If you’re reading these words, you’re probably a parent. If you’re a parent of children that can speak, you’ve probably experienced the topic of today’s episode – and that’s back talk. Rude, snarky comments in response to your authority as a parent. It’s maddening! Luckily for us, we have a parenting expert to help us address this dynamic in our homes. Dr. Becca is a child psychologist and host of the blog, Parenting the Modern Family. Tune in to hear Dr. Becca’s wisdom!

Waking up to realize that you are a parent…in charge of another human being’s life…is typically a pretty life-altering experience. And while our Facebook feeds show much of the joyful, silly, happy and proud sides of being a parent, what we seldom admit to ourselves, let alone to our social circles is that parenting is hard and not always a lot of fun. My guest today is Jennifer Senior, author of the much acclaimed book All Joy and No Fun, named one of Slate’s Top 10 Books of the Year which I can almost guarantee will make you feel about 6 degrees closer to sanity because it is such an honest, fascinating look at modern parenting.

It’s a brave new parenting world out there, fraught with all sorts of parenting conundrums that our parents never had to deal with. So many of us feel like we can’t keep up with our kids and their love of technology. The thought of them venturing into an unknown cyberworld fills us with both excitement as well as great fear. In this episode, I’m joined by an expert on keeping kids safe online. Larry Magid is a technology journalist and an internet safety advocate and serves as on-air technology analyst for CBS News is also co-director of ConnectSafely.org and founder of SafeKids.com. If you’ve got a technology-aged kid, these 22 minutes are well worth your time to provide some perspective on this issue of internet safety, as well as some general reassurance that you already have everything you need to parent a child in this digital world.

How’d you sleep last night? Sometimes if we don’t sleep well, it’s a function of our environment: you’re up with a kiddo, the cat’s crying to be fed or that cough kept you up all night. But so often sleep is elusive because of our poor sleep habits, the biggest being our own attitude toward sleep. In this episode you’ll hear from a sleep expert named Terry Cralle – she’s a registered nurse and certified clinical sleep educator and spokesperson for the Better Sleep Council. And she’s got some great back-to-basics about why you need to be sleeping fully each night and how to improve your own sleep habits including the ideal temperatures for falling asleep, how much sleep your kids need each night and much more!

If you’re reading these words, my guess is that you’re a loving person. You probably spend an awful lot of time loving the other people in your life, whether that’s a partner, your kiddos or even your pets. But are you taking the time to spread that love to yourself? If you’re like most busy women, you may fall a little short in that department. In this episode I’m joined by the lovely Julie Jeske, an individual and couples counselor who is going to give us a 20-minute look into why we should think just a little bit more about loving ourselves and how to do that in a way that’s practical and simple to fit into your busy schedule. YOU are the #1 thing that’s missing from your own to-do list. I love Julie’s down-to-earth approach to all of this. She’s not pushing some agenda that’s hard to achieve, just small mindset shifts and the recommendation that we add ourselves to our to-do lists each day. Tune in to this fantastic, nourishing episode now by clicking the player bar above or by listening in iTunes or

What if I told you that there was a simple way you could have more energy each day without increasing your caffeine levels? Not the hyper kind of energy fueled by caffeine and sugar where you know a crash is just around the corner, but the kind of energy that just makes you feel more like you. The good news is that getting more energy is simple. The bad news is that it’s not easy. In this episode, I’m joined by Marcelle Pick, Founder of Women to Women. She knows a thing about increasing your energy levels naturally and simply because she works with busy women with full lives just like you every day. This episode is chock full of useful advice…things to move away from and things to consider to live your life with the highest energy level possible. Take even some of Marcelle’s advice in this episode and this may just be the most important 25 minutes of 2015 so far. Tune in now!

We’re all well aware that we should be getting a good night’s sleep every night but sometimes that seems impossible. Or worse…even if we’ve allocated the time for a solid night of dreamland, we find ourselves unable to fall asleep or stay asleep. I don’t know about any of you, but this stresses me out! Well, it turns out that, with sleep, like pretty much everything having to do with being healthy, we probably need to take more of a holistic approach. In this episode, Lifestyle and Wellness expert Lissa Coffey dives into how the food we eat impacts our sleep. We even get a mini-lesson in ayurveda to frame the whole conversation. Lissa is a spokesperson for the Better Sleep Council, so she knows a bit about this subject and is generous in sharing her knowledge.

Want to make 2015 the year of being more intentional and more productive? Then you must tune into today’s episode. Ever thought about cloning yourself to squeak out just a few more things each day? I know I have. In today’s episode I discuss the next best thing: hiring a virtual assistant with Josh Boltuch, CEO of Fancy Hands, the fastest growing virtual assistant service out there. With monthly subscription plans starting at only $30, it’s affordable to boot! Beware: hiring a virtual assistant like Fancy Hands may also make you focus on (gasp!) more important things in your life, instead of those time sucks you’re accustomed to. Not to worry, you’ll soon get used to the new, intentional you who no longer wastes needless time.

I'll admit it. I have a love/hate relationship with the looming end-of-year, goal setting process. I honestly do really love the reflective process of intentionally setting the tone for the coming year. But I've done it so many times only to have it forgotten by February that I've become a teeny bit cynical about the whole deal. But that doesn't mean I've given up entirely! In this episode, I'm doubling down by calling in the reinforcements and explore a framework for all this end-of-year nonsense with Marriage and Family Therapist Sabrina Walters. Sabrina has some new ways of looking at the goal setting process and part of it centers around a tool I've never heard of called the Core Values Index. Designed to optimize employee effectiveness in the workplace, this index very quickly gives you a snapshot at what's most important for you. It's pretty powerful and I hope you found it as useful as I did. This is the last episode of 2014 so dig in, put on your 'intentional planning' hat and enjoy!

Did you know that you make 25-30 food-related decisions by the end of breakfast each day? What?! It’s not just about the type of cereal you choose for breakfast, it’s how much you serve yourself, whether to add milk, how much milk, whether to finish the first bowl, if you go back for seconds, what you do with the extra milk and on…and on…and on…And that’s just in your kitchen! You do this all. day. long. Which, it turns out, is why we end up mindlessly overeating. We don’t realize we’re making hundreds of little micro decisions each day. I’m here to tell you the good news about all of this mindless eating. The same things that make you overeat can help you engineer your environment and your food choices so that you mindlessly eat less. Without going on some crazy diet. Without depriving yourself of the stuff you love. You can eat up to 20% less each day without even realizing it. You just need to implement a few simple, scientifically-proven tools (sounds like an infomercial, right?). Sound good? I tho

No matter how old your kiddos are, fostering independence is one of those skills I think we all probably try really hard to impart to our little cherubs. Sometimes we’re successful as we patiently share a process or explain a rationale for the umpteenth time. And sometimes we scrap that nonsense all together and just do it ourselves - done! If this sounds familiar to you, you’re going to love this latest episode. I've had the good fortune of joining a group of Speech-Language Pathologists from The Hello Foundation on two international service trips and was really struck by the power of the tools they used with kiddos who struggled to communicate. It was clear to me that these tools could be used with any kids, no matter their level of communication proficiency. At the end of the day, an SLPs job is to foster independence, work themselves out of a job, if you will. And isn’t that our job as parents, to a certain degree? In this episode, I invite a dear friend and one of the SLPs that was on those internati

Where do you store the stuff that matters in your life? Do you have a special notebook? Do post-it notes litter your desk and computer? Perhaps you use collaboration software for work and then a calendar for home? Google docs? Excel spreadsheets? Or maybe you’re like me and you use every. single. one. of these things. It gets a bit cluttered and it’s definitely clunky and none of these items talk to one another. What if you could store all of these important things in one single place? One online repository you could use for work, and home and everything in between? Good news. You can. In today’s episode I chat with Rash Pixel’s Pete Wright about the coolest, most useful technology tool known to woman. It’s Evernote. Get ready to drool and then have some fun playing with Evernote. It’s a free app that you’re going to love (if you don’t already). Tune in now!

If you’re anything like me, you love food. Good food. Real food. Nothing puffs up my mama pride more than putting a healthy, yummy dinner on the table for my family after a long day (it sort of feels like a reward for me too!). Can you relate? But holy heck, there are a slew of logistics that come along with getting to that nicely made dinner from the planning to the shopping to the prepping and the actual cooking (not to mention cleaning the whole shebang up afterwards!). It’s a giant black hole of a time sucks. But it’s one that’s pretty much unavoidable when you’ve got hungry mouths to feed. In this episode of Lifehacks for Working Moms, I’m joined by Brandie Kajino, food blogger at SpoonandSaucer.com and busy working mom. We dish about our favorite crazy-easy, real food, go-to items in our household. What I love about Brandie is how realistic she is about all of this. Real food doesn’t have to be a giant hassle. Hungry bellies will be glad you listened to this episode!

This whole month we’re talking about creating a happy home. Today that means talking about a clean and organized home. As a mother, (whether you work outside the home or not) we all know that having a chaotic tornado of a home makes life a lot more stressful (and I know this from intimate personal experience). There’s something almost therapeutic when your house is neat and organized and clean. The challenge…at least for me…lies in keeping it that way. Which is why you’re going to love my guest today…Her name is Nikki Kinzer. She started her business as a professional organizer and now she;s an ADHD Coach and founder of Take Control ADHD and a personal friend of mine.