5-4 How to Build Upon Your Anchors - TMM Module 5 Mon, 3/21 9:19PM 9:09 SUMMARY KEYWORDS anchor, layering, laundry, building, lunch, advantage, piece, clean, schoolwork, tasks, kitchen, chain, stopped, dishwasher, talked, transition, washer, visual cues, dividing, sense SPEAKERS Patricia Sung Patricia Sung 00:00 Hey there successful mama. Welcome back to Module Five. And we are looking at how are we actually building upon these anchors? Like, what does this look like? Patricia Sung 00:10 Okay, as we are building, okay, what's with my career? There we go, okay, as we are building, and when I'll just manage your expectations for a second, because each item that we're doing in the day, each task is a piece of the puzzle. And right now, we've dumped out the whole puzzle and we get 1000 pieces spread all over the table. And what we want is this right here, we want to be putting in the last piece exactly where it goes, and we want to be done. And that's now where we are right now. Or we're still over here in the big mess. Patricia Sung 00:44 Okay, so know that, yes, this is where we are. And we're overwhelmed. It's okay, we're staying together, we're gonna make it through. I want you to look at each individual task. And know like, there's not one specific place where it has to go. That's the beauty of this puzzle is that it can be modified to make sense for your life. Yes, we're still right here. But we're going to get there. Okay. What we're doing by implementing one piece at a time is we're taking these two pieces, and we're putting them together and being like, do these fit? Does this make sense? Like, no, that's not working? Let me put it with a new piece. Does that work? Patricia Sung 01:26 Okay, this feels good. Let me put on a third piece. Does that feel good. And I don't like that. Let me move it, put it over here. So we're doing this trial and error, okay, we're implementing one thing at a time, making sure it makes sense. And then adjusting, we want to do all the things 

thing at a time, making sure it makes sense. And then adjusting, we want to do all the things and you're gonna want to add all the things in at one time. When that becomes overwhelming, going back, do want to dive. And we'll we'll get there, it will all come together, we will get through the 1000 piece puzzle. But we put each piece in one at a time. So what does this look like in real life? Patricia Sung 02:07 Okay, now, reminders, we've got our anchors, this is their specific point of reset. It's like a requirement of like, this is where we have to stop. And we're like purposefully making ourselves pause. And not like letting the day run away from us. We're anchoring in on that time and be like, Hey, I'm resetting. And we're building the habits around them. Because it's already a time of transition, we're going to use it to our advantage. We know how much chain we have, excuse me, you know, this is our protection, how far can we get off course in our day before our chaining says back in, it's like, well, that's not safe. Stay here with me. So the chain is there to protect us. Patricia Sung 02:47 Different anchors are going to have different chain lengths. Because when you know if it's the kids getting picked up by the bus, that's a short chain link, that bus comes at a certain time it's got to happen. Whereas you know, if it's a Saturday, you might have room to move in flow. And it's totally fine. Those are the times where you have the window to move around. Patricia Sung 03:09 Okay, so we're using these two things that we've already set up our anger, and our chain window, how much space we have in order to build our routine. Now I talked about layering your anchor, so I'm not a very fashioning person, but I felt like this was a good a good analogy is that, because we're doing one thing at a time, it's like you start out with your shirt, and your bottom, you're talking about them. And then when you know those match together, then you can grab some socks, then you can add on some shoes, a purse, maybe a bag, maybe a hat, right, but we're not going to get too crazy, right? But we're going to layer them all so that we make sure that they all make sense together. Patricia Sung 03:48 If we just grabbed a handful of stuff out of our closet, threw it on, we look like our two year old getting dressed, which isn't actually a bad thing. But if we want this to be comfortable for us, we know if we're grabbing some winter stuff and some summer stuff, we are not going to be comfortable, that's not going to feel good. So we're layering one thing at a time. Now, there's a pretty good chance that this is us, where we start layering and then we're like, and then this one and then this one and then this one and some more, some more, some more and all of a sudden, you know you're carrying 40 shopping trip 40 Shopping values because you only want 

to take one trip and that's okay. So we don't want to add too many things onto an anchor, you will think it has to be within reason. And we just we limit ourselves in constrain. We're going to go too crazy here. Patricia Sung 04:40 Now, the reason that we're building on these anchors is that by adding responsibilities to your anchor, you're using all of these things to your advantage. One, you're already in a transition. Those times are hard for us. We're not very good at transitions as a general rule. So using that transition to your advantage, like having that power and like, Okay, now I'm going to make this a purposeful transition, it helps our brain move through that transition better, because now we know what's going to happen, we have a plan, we've got momentum there of like, okay, I stopped working on my schoolwork, I'm pausing to take a break, I'm going to eat, I'm going to nourish myself, I'm going to take my meds, I'm going to do a little walk around the block, and using that momentum to get a few things done. And then you might go back to your schoolwork right after and that second, like after that anchor may be the same activity that was happening before. Patricia Sung 05:35 Like, it might be that you're like, rage cleaning your house, because you have company coming. And, you know, obviously, we want to get to the point where we're not doing that. But if that's what you're doing, like, that's okay, but you still need to take a break, like, we tend to just go hard. And then we never stopped to eat, we never stopped to take a drink of water, we never stopped to like check in with ourselves, so that we want to use that momentum to our advantage. Also, we're using proximity and visual cues. That's why has you sorted things by location is that we're going to do kitchen tasks when we're in the kitchen, because we're going to see them there. Because we're in the kitchen, we're going to flip the laundry, hopefully sometime where you're already passing by the laundry room, Aleksey and Oh, got to put that laundry in the dryer. Okay, we're using that proximity and those visual cues to our advantage. Patricia Sung 06:26 We can also divide jobs, big jobs into smaller jobs. You know, we talked a lot about dividing larger tasks into smaller ones. And that sounds good in theory, but a lot of us never learned how to do that. This is a way that we can do that. For example, with laundry, I start at the beginning of the day, I put the laundry in, and then at lunch, I go back and check the laundry. That's like dividing that job into pieces throughout the day of like I put it in the morning at breakfast, hopefully I flipped it if I didn't put lunch, you know, at lunch, I check it and pull it out and either hang it up or fold or whatever. It's like you're taking those pieces throughout the day. And circling back to them. Patricia Sung 07:09 Because like the one of the reasons laundry is so hard for us is because it's not something we can do all at once you have to wait for like that hour to pass for the washer to go for the dryer to go. That's why laundry is such a struggle for us because we have to space it out. And we're 

to go. That's why laundry is such a struggle for us because we have to space it out. And we're like, Oh, I already forgot about that thing, right? So we're going to use that to our advantage by placing it throughout the day, where we have planned for the fact that the washer has now finished its job and we can come back to it. Another good part about laying on the anchor is that at the end of that anchor time, you can look back and be like, Okay, what were all the things that were supposed to happen at this anchor? Did I did I do all three of those things. They can kind of like check it off to completion and be like, I'm in the kitchen? Did I load the dishwasher? Did I turn it on? Did I unload the dishwasher dishwasher? Like whatever tasks were there? Patricia Sung 07:55 You can stop and be like, Okay, I'm in the kitchen. Did I do all the kitchen things? Oh, no, I didn't do that. I forgot to pack lunches or whatever. And your see them because you're right there. So is that moment of like this part of my day has a little checklist. And I can go through and see did I do all the things that were supposed to happen in that little section. And then we also can prep for the next usage. So when we talk about like, like one that's really hard for me is clearing the clean dishes and putting them away. Well, that means that I cannot then put the dirty dishes in that spot to dry because or I can't put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher because it's full of clean stuff. Patricia Sung 08:36 Having those rhythms set up is like it prompts us for the next usage. So if at lunch, we've cleaned up the mess, that means we walk in for dinner. It's like oh, I have a clean kitchen to start with. And I'm not trying to make dinner in between all the dirty dishes from breakfast and lunch. So it's preparing us for that next step because our brain doesn't think about the preparation step on its own. So we're going to build that in earlier in the day. Okay, let's pause there and in our next module or our next video, we're going to look at an example of what this looks like in real life.