Source: diaryofamadmommy-londi.blogspot.com via MagnoliaMom on Pinterest
I came across a great blog today called The Orange Rhino challenge. I think I may have seen it before. However, today something made me look a little further when Google brought it to me while I was looking for something else. Anyway, I found it appealing to the eyes, because I adore orange and pink. It peaked my interest and I wondered what the challenge was. This mom of 4 boys under the age of 5 made a challenge last year to stop yelling. WOW! “God is looking out for me,” I thought to myself as I read about her challenge. I was never a yeller, until I became a grown up. Something inside me changed, with 2 boys, a husband, a career, and all the stresses that are thrown upon us when we become adults. I hate that I yell and seconds after I do it, I feel terrible, not only for the yelling, but also for what is said when I’m in the heat of anger, frustration, or sadness.
I love that she says that with less yelling, there will be more loving. And for me, I feel like my kids have just become so defensive and as a family unit I feel there’s just too much negativity. Growing up, I was such an optimist. I wore a smile everyday through it all and my positive outlook on life was contagious. (or so I was told…) What happened to that sweet person? I’m sure if you asked my kids they would not describe their mom that way and that, my friends, makes me so sad.
Things I can do to change my yelling habit:
1. Have personal daily time with God
A few weeks ago, I started doing a personal bible study. Although, I’m not in a regular routine with it yet, I’m getting there step-by-step. Eventually, I want to have this “chunk” of the day that is set aside to complete my time with God everyday.
2. Have a regularly scheduled family bible study
Our kids have grown up in a great church, with amazing kids’ and youth activities. In fact, Teenager is in a Wednesday night disciple group that after nearly 3 years of attending has only missed twice, I believe, and those were for his brother’s birthday dinners. Monkey can list off the books of the Bible and knows many bible stories by heart. All of this is well and good, but I feel we, like so many Christians, have a disconnect between how we act on Sundays or while we’re at church vs. when we’re living our daily lives. For me, as a family if we’re “in the Word” more, we will all have a better outlook, a better attitude, and henceforth, I won’t “need” to yell as much. You know?
3. Setting family routines
Rob and I have been talking about our family and not so clean and organized house lately. I shutter to think that Teenager will be a 10th grader in just a few months and before we know it, he’ll be graduating, moving on up to the next stage of life. And as Rob and I talk, we realize that we have a short period of time to instill some better habits. Don’t get me wrong, there are many great qualities about Teenager, but we feel like with some extra guidance, we could negate some habits that could eventually drive his future wife bonkers! 🙂 With Monkey, we have more time, but I just think it is so important to teach these boys some simple daily routines and habits (some of which I’ve had to teach Rob).
We used to have a family chore chart, which helped us keep up with our daily duties. Sharing the workload as a family is really the only way to help keep everyone accountable. In turn, keep me from going bonkers on everyone, when I look around and see piles of ‘stuff’ and hours of work, when at first all I want to do is ‘tidy’ up around the house.
4. Get back into my regular workout routine
This last year I’ve done a better job of working out, but a true workout routine is something I haven’t been able to set in stone. I blame my crazy work schedule, but truly there are no excuses. There are so many benefits to exercising on a regular basis. While reading Huffington’s post on the benefits of exercise, you see that the first one listed is reduce stress. The second one is boost happy chemicals. Yelling is my outward action because of the internal volcano that is just boiling inside of me. Regular exercise will help control my stress and increase my happy chemicals, which will be a huge boost to combating the urge to yell.
5. Have more ME time
So not only do I need a set time to spend with God, I need to set time for just ME. As a busy mom, juggling 40 hour job, home duties, laundry duties, wife duties, cubmaster wife duties, photography duties, blog duties, friend duties, etc. most of the time, time for me is way down on the list and it gets neglected. This is just another way to help reduce the stress in my life, which I believe is the root of my yelling.
So….there’s the 1st five things I can do to help me stop yelling. As I start this experiment I’m going to try and keep track of my successes, as well as my failures. I’ll share those with you. If you are a yeller or have become a yeller like me because of stress, I’d love to hear about if you’ve tried to stop and what roadblocks you may have ran into.