PFL 22: The Benefits Of Being A B+...

Hi everyone! This is Connie Sokol, and you're listening to Balance Redefined Radio. I've spent over 20 years teaching people how to redefine what balance really is, meaning a more purposeful and joyful life.

 

They’ve paid off credit cards, lost weight, organize their homes, and created a meaningful life plan. They've managed their time, changed habits, and experience greater success both at work and at home.

 

So now I decided to take the plunge and help about 100,000 new people who want to redefine balance in their lives. People ask me all the time, “How do I go from an overwhelming and chaotic life to more purpose, organization, and joy?”

 

That's the reason why I'm doing this podcast, to give you trusted answers and create a space where you could find balance. My name is Connie Sokol and welcome to Balance Redefined Radio…

 

Welcome back to Balance Redefined. I'm Connie Sokol, and I'm so happy that you're joining for more wonderful things.

 

Today, I am talking about the vital benefits of being a B-plusser. Now if you're not familiar with this concept, this is one of my favorite concepts.

 

I've been teaching for almost 20 years, but it is fabulous because my belief is you have to hit 80 before you hit 100…

 

So before we're completely perfect at something, we have to be a B-plusser. Before an A, we’ve got to be at least a B-plusser...

 

This has saved my life and my relationships with my children especially because instead of being hyper-focused on being a perfectionist on certain things, I now have this joyful feeling of being a B-plusser. All is well.

 

I'm going to explain what that means because, a little caveat, that does not mean we are sludgy, that we are slackers, or that we intentionally don't do our best at something.

 

That is not what being a B-plusser means. I'm so sorry to say, but there are certain things that require an A, they just do-fidelity in marriage, paying bills on time.

 

But other things, you know, they're just things that require a B plus like folding towels...

 

Okay, my kids fold my towels starting at age, say three. I think about three is when I start them, and they look like bowling balls, and volleyballs. In fact, I remember one time, one of my children, was it a boy or girl? I can't remember.

 

I just remember the conversation because I said, “Oh, could you please fold your towels with a little bit of irritation?” And whoever it was, I just remember these eyes looking up at me and saying, “I just did.” Yeah, I did not realize that was the final product.

 

Yeah, that's how they looked. But you know what? It's all good because it's towels. It's all good.

 

All right, so as far as for recently, let me share a few things and apply to this B+ because it has been reaffirmed to me in my experience. This is a great principle. This is an eternal principle.

 

This works. So how does this work?

 

If you've heard my other podcasts, as you know, we were evacuated for a fire-number one fire in the nation in my backyard. It was my city, and so we were evacuated. We had miracle after miracle and all structures were safe and sound.

 

In fact, we came back and I couldn't believe how everything looked. It was incredible. It was as if no fire had happened. There's a few burns scars on the mountain. We are right up against the mountains, but other than that, I mean we still had the fall trees that looked all beautiful on the mountains.

 

It was pretty incredible. You would not have even known this raging, scary, thing was threatening our city, several major times. The fire had been at work.

 

So after the fire we get moved back in for about a week and then comes the rain because now we have threat of mudslide. I was joking with a friend that it was kind of like out of that cartoon movie, the Disney Movie Hercules, “Was that after the earthquake or before the flood?” It was so like that.

 

Here we were after moving back into our house, sandbagging. Now we were sandbagging as a community. It was incredible.

 

Once again, this community is amazing. It’s going to be lifted up into heaven because seriously, we had one hour of church where we were on that Sunday, and then we got dressed to go over and bag sandbags. They had already bagged 6,000 sandbags the night before on Saturday night.

 

Then Sunday morning, a whole group of youth had come down. These young single adults came and they had helped bag 6,000 bags. Then there was no more for us to do. So we got sent home, if you can imagine.

They ultimately did a total, I believe, of 30,000 sandbox...

 

So the point that I make here is that we were now facing a new threat, and it was mudslides, rain, and torrential rain, that kind of thing. So we put the sandbags at the top of the driveway.

 

We walked around the window wells and and my daughter covered one of the ones that we thought would be kind of more of a big concern. We batten down the hatches.

 

We got everything off the floor, the basement, and in the garage just in case. We did all of that again, got gutter stuff to make sure it would not fly away from the house, and those kinds of things.

 

So we felt really good and solid. I have to say that they had predicted four or five days of torrential rain. Just that it's going to downpour, and if we get a quarter of an inch and a half an hour, we're in trouble. That gives you kind of a baseline.

 

They were predicting one and a half to two inches, and at one point they were predicting two to four inches of rain. So that's where we were kind of standing. Okay.

 

Once again, there were miracles for days in a row. There was hardly any rain. In fact, initially a hurricane was supposed to come through Utah. What? Like what? When does that happen?

 

The initial hurricane that got downgraded to a tropical storm was coming through, rerouted around our city. I am not joking. We're talking...community prayer works people. It got rerouted and hit north instead dumped on salt lake.

 

So that was kind of, not funny, but it was an irony…

 

Anyway, the point that I'm making with the b plusser things is that…

 

You know, we thought we were all solid and good.

 

Well then we wake up this morning to my daughter who comes to me at six in the morning and said that her window well is leaking. And I went, “Oh, what went down? And here's the stream of water coming in her window.

 

We probably had a foot and a half, maybe more than that of water. And at this moment I'm thinking, “Oh no, this is actually happening in real time. I'm going to have to make a plan here.” Obviously an amended plan to my original awesome plan.

 

So, I looked at her and I thought, “We've got to cover that one window. Well we thought was going to be just fine and here's where the b plusser thing comes in...

 

I'm standing there at six in the morning just having awakened, and I think, “What can we use?” We want something that's going to move away from the house in a diagonal fashion and kind of let the rain fall off of it. So we can tarp it and let the rain kind of drizzle off, not just flat.

 

In the hallway right by his room is my son's whiteboard and he was supposed to have put that away. He didn't put it away, and it's sitting right there. I look and I go the whiteboard. So we took two white boards, angled them against the house covered in tarp, and sandbag the bottom on both sides. Boom. Done. It worked fabulously.

 

So nice job on not putting everything away in the house…

 

The second thing is when we went to find the tarp just a few days before, we had gone out to, you know, the recess (where we have a little bit of property).

 

We went out to the recesses of the property just to clear everything up, and there were some tarps kinda laying around. I thought, “Well let's just bring those into the entry where we're going to fold them and put them away.”

 

Thank goodness we did not do that. Because you know what happens when you fold and put away something. What happens? You never know where it is. So it was sitting right there in the entry. Grab that on the way out.

 

Then when my daughter was clearing out that window, well we stopped it, and got that window well covered. Then we wanted to clean that out and siphon it out. She had this wonderful idea of taking thing stuff out by scooping it, and dump it into a water buckets, you know, to carry it upstairs. This was down near in the basement.

 

Then we carry it upstairs and take it outside. Then dump it up in the rocks, and the rock area, but you know, it's hard. Those five gallon buckets can slosh all over. They're really heavy and hard to move...Shazamm! We have these drinking water buckets for emergency preparedness.

 

Months ago we had a family night where we were filling these blue water buckets. I call them “lego buckets” because they sort of stack together like blue legos that are about, I don't know, two feet to a foot and half tall. We had gotten to a good place, almost done and hadn't quite finished it and said, “We'll get back to it.”

 

Yeah, we never got back to it…

 

So we had some of these that were empty, so we grabbed those. She literally just siphon it out and put them right into these water buckets. Then we'd easily carry them out to dump them.

 

Done. So, so easy. So three things in a row: the whiteboard, the tarp and these lego water buckets. It was perfect.

 

Within a matter of minutes, we had not only taken care of the problem and made sure there wasn't more water coming in, but we weren't stressed. We weren't exhausted. It worked so smooth.

 

I hopped in the shower, got the kids to school, and boom. I went off and did a spiritual activity over at the temple. I mean, it was amazing. Amazing. So B plusser. Yeah. I'm an absolute advocate. So what does that look like in daily life and not just for emergency preparedness, right?

 

What that says to me is do the best you can. Just do the best you can because when you're a B plusser you say, “I'm going to do all that I can do today. I'm going to do what I can with what energy that I have. I'm not going to put myself in a coma and crawl to bed every night. I'm going to do what is reasonable and I'm going to do those things that come to mind that I should do.”

 

And the second part of that is, and you know I'm a god fearing woman, but you put in whatever that is for you, higher power, the universe, divine influence, whatever that is for you...

 

I know that that second principle is God fills the gaps. He fills the gaps. You know, like when you build a wood cabin, this always comes back to me when you build a wood cabin, there's the gaps in between the logs and you have to fill it with a substance called chinking.

 

That's kind of like this flexible sealant that seals between the gaps of the logs. Does that make sense? It's that white stuff. Often it looks white and it goes between the logs. That’s chinking.

 

I kind of look at God as you know, he does the chinking. He fills the gaps because we cannot do it all ourselves. We can't. And especially when I talk with and work with women, they have this feeling that society makes them believe that they're supposed to fill all the gaps. We're not.

 

We're to do all we can and women are wired to do more multitasking than men are. And I get that we have different wiring, different gifts, so we can do a lot more of those kinds of things, and have that be all taken care of, but that is not our job is to make sure every jot and tittle is taken care of.

 

That is not our job... We're just to do the best we can and then live for God's divine help. That is my feeling. If I'm doing my best to do God's will, obey his commandments, do whatever it is that you personally feel, and I personally feel is what God is wanting me to do, if I'm doing my best, but that I can ask for that help.

 

I can rely that God's going to fill those gaps. So that's something to consider because there's no way we can be 100 percent. There's just no way.

 

The third point is...I love this from Stanley Greenspan. He writes parenting books, playground politics, and things like that. And he wrote The Challenging Child. I think he wrote Playground Politics. I could be wrong on that, but he wrote The Challenging Child. I know that for sure because I read that cover to cover, underlined and came back, probably read it several times.

 

With Seven kids, you know, there's a little bit of experience with challenging children and one of the quotes I love, and I'm paraphrasing, but he says, “We have to learn as parents when we become parents, we have to learn that we have to choose to do less than our best in different situations.” That it's the first time often that parents are facing that challenge.

 

When we're single, we have a lot of choice about when we want to do our absolute best and when we're not, but when we're parents, we're now put in a situation where we feel less than our best and choosing to do less than our best is actually our best.

 

Have you been there? Have you experienced that where you're like, “I am working it here. I am spinning the plates as fast as I can. There's nothing more that I can do. This is as good as it gets, and yet it's still not perfect, or it's still not all taken care of, and that's okay because that's parenting.”

 

I personally feel that's intentional because I feel that God is my divine parent. I feel that he is my Heavenly Father. I know that he wants to help me. So if I'm able to take care of everything, where do I put him in my life? Do I need him?

 

So I love that things are needing me to be a B-plusser and that I can't do everything on my own…

 

I actually like, well, not in the moment-I don't like it in the moment and that's the truth-but I really eventually when sanity returns and rationale returns, I really do like that because I know he has better solutions more often than I do. He knows how this is going to work best.

 

So I think it's a beautiful thing. I know studies show even in religious activities...They had studies shown in different congregations of people who if they read scripture, prayed, attended church, you know, held family night, that these different things were supposedly, you know, ideal.

 

What they found is that the most successful families over time were those who were B plussers those who did it, about 80 to 85 percent of the time. Love, love, love, love it.

 

I know for my son that has aspbergers, no one knew much about aspbergers years and years and years ago. And I just knew in my soul there were certain things that I needed to do, provide structure, give him a heads up when we were transitioning.

 

I just knew these things in my soul and I was praying for answers so I knew them, but I was not being this perfect mom and knowing everything that I should do for an asperger son.

 

And yet my B+ efforts when I didn't know any better, actually proved to be extremely fruitful and turned out to be the things that I should have been doing most of the time. Which who would have known. So this is such an important concept in our lives.

 

I hope that you will look around today, look at your life and say, “What am I stressing myself out about to be a perfectionist about? What am I really putting my best energy to and can I be a B-plusser or instead, can I pull back a little bit in this area to carve out more energy to put over into this area? Maybe I'm going to be a b plusser in this project that I'm doing for work, so that I can have more energy to spend with my child when he comes home from school...”

 

“Maybe I'm going to be a B plusser in this meal that I'm taking for this church function or to the neighbor. Maybe I'll have more energy to put towards my spouse when my spouse is needing time with me.” So do you see what I'm saying?

 

Or maybe I can be a B plusser in the way that I'm cleaning that bathroom or the front entry because we all know we'd rather have a clean front entry and front room because anybody comes over. We want it to be clean, right? Rather than the bathroom.

 

But maybe I should put less energy to that so that I have time to sit down for 20 minutes and read a good book or just be still…

 

So today I invite you to look at your life. See where you can be a b plusser.

 

Let God fill the gaps and just be good enough. Just be good enough. Just for today. So I invite you to take that challenge and join me for more podcasts with Balance Redefined.

 

You got it! Thanks for listening. Remember to rate and subscribe. If you are feeling the need for real balance in your life, get your free five step life plan, and get started today! Just go to conniesokol.com/download.