Flourish: Balance for Homeschool Moms Review

I am so glad I got the opportunity to review  Flourish: Balance for Homeschool Moms. This is a fantastic book written by Mary Jo Tate and put out by Apologia Educational Ministries . You can pick up a copy for $15.00  at  Apologia Educational Ministries.

The name Flourish: Balance for Homeschool Moms says it all. This book is to help homeschool mothers find that balance between  homeschooling, kids, cooking, cleaning, your home business, and just life in general! If you feel like a juggler of all of those things in your life then you need this book. It helps you stop being a juggler and start being a tightrope walker! What is the difference you ask? Mary Jo Tate explains it like this- Juggling means you have all these “balls” that you are juggling, and its so hard to keep everything in the air. I (Mary Jo) finally realized that the juggling act  inevitably leads to a dropped ball.Tightrope walking on the other hand means making small  frequent adjustments to maintain balance.

She teaches you real life practical ways to learn how to be a tightrope walker! She helps you learn how to set goals ( yearly,monthly,and weekly) that will help you reach where you want to be in all areas of your life from personal to business to homeschooling. Really working through the steps she lays out has completely changed my homeschooling, my business, and my personal life.

That might sound a little dramatic but let me lay it all out on the line- I needed something dramatic to take my business and my life to another level.  What I was doing in all areas was not really working. I had a great business that really helped a lot of women but I need to take it to the next level. I needed my business to start making more of a profit to make it really worth the time and energy it took.I felt like the homeschooling methods I had always used were not really working anymore for this season of life and that added to a ton of mommy guilt I had. I was stressed becasue I was unorganized, and I was unorganized becasue I had no real clear goal for any area of my life. I kind of knew where I wanted to go in the areas of homeschooling, my business, and in my personal life. But I had no clear goal. Without clear goals then you can never really make a good solid plan.

I needed a plan desperately. I was watching all my hard work  I had done in my business, my homeschooling and my life all really start to slip. Which you can guess made me just extremely frustrated. I just felt like I was wasting so much time and I had a hard time ever really being productive in any area. My productive days and my unproductive days were really unbalanced!

I wanted and needed to Flourish not just live in crisis mode all the time.What is funny is I didn’t even know what that meant until I read this book and suddenly it was like the lightbulb went off in my head! I never understood what flourish could mean for me. I understood it from a gardener’s perspective, and from a moms perspective. But never from how can Amber (my name in case you didn’t know) flourish. I put the definition of flourish on my organizing binder (more on that later) and I want to share it with you so you can also understand what it means to flourish.

Flourish means to  grow or develop in a healthy or viguour way, especailly as the result of a particularly  favorable environment. 

I wanted to flourish and I really realized how much everything I was doing or not doing was in no way helping me reach that goal. That is where this book stepped in and really became practical for me and not just fluff! Let me explain what I mean. How many times have you read a book that showed you why you should do something but never really gave you any practical solutions that  you couple implement? You know you need to change but you don’t know what step to take first, or the steps they give you just really don’t work for you in this season of life. I call these books “Fluff”.  I have read lots of them. I am sure they are great books for someone but for me as a homeschooling mom with 3 kids, a husband who works from home, and my own home business they were “Fluff” ,no real substance that I could use.

This book was the farthest from fluff that I have ever come across. Flourish: Balance for Homeschool Moms helps show you where to start and what to do next. What is so fantastic about this book is it is so easy to adapt to whatever style of homeschooling you do, whatever kind of business you do , and whatever type of life you have.

I’ll show you how it helped me in each area of my life, and I hope it encourages you to go and buy this book and see how it can help you start to flourish too!

Personal-

One of my personal goals I set was to really get a system in place to get my life organized. I had so many different places that all aspects of my personal life, my business, and my homeschooling were kept. I really needed a practical way to put it all together and be able to know what I needed to do without searching around or guessing. I also needed to be more productive when I was working so I could not work all the time. Following Mary Jo Tates suggestions I started with defining some simple and some big goals in each area of my life.  After I knew what my goals were I could start making plans on how to reach those goals. One of the things she does is help you take your monthly goals down to practical weekly goals. One of my first goals was to set up a master organizing binder. You will see this binder mentioned in the next sections on my business and homeschooling section. This binder really falls under all of these areas that this book helped me improve in but I am talking about it here becasue getting more organized helped me be more productive in all areas so I had more time to not be working , and it cut down on my stress levels a million times over.

This is the front of my binder. I wanted it to be something I enjoyed looking at and I wanted it to  inspire me to open it up and tackle my goals everyday. The flourish definition helps remember I want to flourish!

Personally I needed to cut the stress level of my life down. When I am stressed I don’t eat good, I don’t sleep good, and I don’t have time to do the things I really need to do (like exercising) or the things I want to do like read a good book or take the afternoon and visit with a friend, or take the evening and watch a movie with my family. Before I set goals and made my plans I always felt like I just didn’t have enough hours in the day to do all of these things, so if I wanted to be successful then I just needed to put my nose to the grindstone and work hard. I finally started realizing its not about working harder, its about working smarter. Having weekly goals and daily goals let me get done what I needed to get done and not waste time, hence I got more hours back in my day for all those things I loved and really wanted to do. I am no longer stressed out which makes me a much better mom, wife, friends, and businesswoman.  I was able to look at my biggest challenges and instead of laying my head down and crying I could  make practical plans on how to tackle and conquer those challenges.

I will have to say though the best thing I got from this book personally is the secret of how  to do it all!

Do you know what that secret is? This is by far my favorite passage from this entire book, and I think shows why this book is so amazing.

 I used this book and the steps and suggestions she gives you to redefine “it all”. I changed my mindset on so many different aspects of my life like she encourages you to do. This helped me take off my supermom, superwoman,super teacher,super Amber cape. I was able to come out of crisis mode and focus on the things that I needed to change, and the things that I needed to say no to. I set my priorities and I set realistic goals and plans so those things would be taken care of.

Mary Jo Tate says it beautifully-  Find peace in the space between the ideal and reality.

Finding peace is worth a million bucks, especially if you have been dealing with tons of mommy guilt. I let go of some really unrealistic goals and ideals I had been fighting so hard to keep becasue I thought that was what I was supposed to do. What is interesting is I was the one setting these unrealistic ideals, no one else. That is where the mindset comes in. If you are struggling with how to do it all, get this book. It will help you redefine it all!

I know when budgets are tight and you are starting a business you count every penny and I can tell you this book is worth every penny you will spend on it and more!

Business –

I went through the steps of this book and I set business goals. I figured out  a rough estimate of how many clients I needed to have in order to make my business profitable. Then I backtracked from that I came up with a plan on how to get those new clients.  I was able to look at how I ran my business and my product and tweak those to make my business much more successful.

I have multiple profit streams but they all go hand in hand. They all fall under the Adventures in Mindful Living business. Going through the steps of making goals  let me  work on making all the different things I do work together better. I was able to get organized and streamline and tweak my 6 week transformation program making it even better, get my Juice Plus business goals set out, and make sure the ads on my blog were making money.

 I also was able to prioritize what part of my business needed immediate work and energy and what parts I could put on the back burner. Being able to take a clear look at my business let me do this. I took the personal side out of it and just focused on the business side. This is also something she teaches you and that I really needed to do. I found that some of the things I had been doing were not really profitable and some of the things I wanted to take on just really would not work right now in my business plan (the saying no part). This also freed up more time for me becasue I was only focusing on the things that were going to make my business successful.

Mary Jo also has a great chapter in her book about how to market yourself that really  helped me take a look at what was working and what was not. Just a few small pointers she made helped me see how to show my prospective clients why my program is great, and what problems it solves for them. That has really increased my business. The other way it really helped my business was she gives you some great suggestions on how to build a testimonial page. This is something I am working on right now and I think it will really help my business becasue I have so many really happy clients but I was not sharing their messages they would send me about their satisfaction with my program or their pictures that show how much weight they had lost.

These were some of the practical things that she offers you to do in your business that will  really help you. The book is loaded with them!

Homeschool-

This was an area that I really  had to adjust my mindset on. I was still homeschooling like I did before I started my business. I had a lot more time then to really pull together some great unit studies, and basically piece together each child’s curriculum. That was a different season of life then I am in now.  this season is different and I had to come to peace with that and adjust. Remember the quote that I shared above-  “Find peace in the space between ideal and reality.” My ideal was to create these fantastic curriculums that  saved us money. My reality is that I don’t have the time to do that anymore, so instead I purchased some really great curriculum this year to cut down on my planning.  I am also focusing on  helping my son become a more independent learner. She has some great ideas and encouragement in this book to help you guide your child in that direction.

One of the things I did was do what I did with my business and look at what has worked with us and what has not. I then compared it to this season of life and made some tweaks to come up with a better plan for our homeschooling.  We do “light” schooling in the summer which means we do some subjects and not others. We never have a full load of studies. This has worked really good for us in particular at this time becasue I wanted to try out some new methods with how to make our homeschooling work better. I tried out some new methods for record keeping, some new curriculum, new storage solutions, and some new assignment charts. It was easy to try the new methods out and see what was going to work and what needed to be canned really quickly!  If I would have been in the middle of full blown school it would have been a little more stressful for us.

These are some of the new things (some still the old way we did it, just tweaked) that we are doing this school year.

For record keeping I just put my school goals in my first section of my organization binder. I keep all my long term and monthly goals in that section for my personal, business, and home school. I also put a tab in the back for my lesson plans.

I also went back to our version of workboxes. If you have never heard of workboxes you will have to look them up and be prepared to be amazed. I am going to write up a post later this month on how we do workboxes  but this is the basics of it.

I bought a tower of drawers at Big Lots.  Each drawer holds one assignment for my son.

I keep a clipboard that sits on the top of the drawers that has his assignments written on it.

I also tried out different assignment sheets  and finally just made up this real simple one. I went to Staples and had a bunch printed off to save me on ink.

I also scheduled in time to reorganize my dining room, which is also our school room.  I tried to get everything in one spot and make it easier for my son to work independently. As I said earlier I looked back on what worked for us and what did not. This let me see problems so I could come up with better solutions. One of the issues we had was keeping my youngest (3) occupied so my son could focus. I had made up busy bags before and those worked great. I found some more great things and loaded up the busy bags again. But this time I separated them into two baskets. The first basket was things she could play with by herself at the table. These were things like crayons, counters,foam puzzles,etc. The second basket had things that she could play with if I was with her or close by ( like in the kitchen where I could see her or helping my son at the table with her sitting there.  These were things like paints, her bingo dotters, her stamps, etc. This way I was just pulling things out trying to keep her busy only to have to stay right with her when I had other things I needed to do.

I know this was a long post but I hope you can tell that this book really helped me and I highly recommend that if you are a homeschooling mom that you go and buy this book. If you are a homeschooling mom who is starting your own business, has your own business now, or if you want to start homeschooling and you work from home then I would say this would be one f the most important books you could read.Flourish: Balance for Homeschool Moms is an awesome book and it has really blessed me , my homeschooling, my family, and my business!

As always you don’t just have to just take my word for it, I want to encourage you to go and check out what the rest of my friends on the Review Crew thought of the book and how they used it with their families and businesses! Click the banner below and go check them out!