Today, we have the privilege of hearing from my friend and mama mentor, Renee Swope, who is a wife and a mama of three and an author and speaker. She's so wise and I love that she is ahead of me in the motherhood journey, she has so much to offer.

Today, I am continuing my conversation with my dear friend, Shay Cochrane. She's a wife, a momma of two girls. We tackle all kinds of topics and I just couldn't leave anything out so I decided to split it up into two episodes. I hope you enjoy the rest of our conversation.

Welcome to May is for Mamas, where every episode in the month of May is dedicated to all the mamas out there with topics and conversations specifically for you. Today, I'm chatting with my friend Shay Cochrane, who is a wife and an entrepreneur, and a mama of two daughters. She owns Social Squares, which supplies elevated stock images and digital marketing education for female owned online brands.

Her vision as a creator is to enable more women to find greater success, sharing their ideas and businesses with the world, and she does all that and just 16 hours a week. I love how she models her life and her parenting and I have loved this conversation with her today.

We jumped into some hard stuff like, what it looks like to raise daughters in 2022—body image, style, confidence, work ethic, technology, teaching your kids about money. You are going to leave this conversation with some really practical parenting conversations and decisions, as well as some solid encouragement to keep up the good hard work we are doing as mamas.

Today's episode for May is for Mamas is all about using a timer in motherhood. This is going to be fun.

This is the first episode of May is for Mamas, which is one of my favorite things I do on the podcast every May. This first episode is all about speaking scripture over your children and how powerful that can be for your kids and for you.

Today, I'm veering off the normal podcast course and I'm breaking a few rules and I just want to share some of where I am in my own work and play and how that affects this podcast moving forward. I'm really excited about where I'm headed and I want to be very honest with you and take you along in this journey with me. I value you, I'm grateful for you listening—especially those of you who listen every week I'm so, so grateful and I'm excited just to share my heart with you today.

Today, I'm going to share my two favorite work habits: how I start my workday and how I finish my workday. I'm just going to go ahead and put this out there—they're pretty nerdy, but they've worked for me and I really like them!

I'm going to talk about tension and anxiety and how to get past it, how to get through to the other side. I'm going to share some practical things that I've walked through in my life very recently and I'm going to share the things that helped me get through it.

There's something about meeting regularly as a family that brings you together. You can talk about the calendar and your schedules and your plans, but emotionally you can connect and you can share things you're looking forward to or problems that you're having. Today, I'm going to share with you the simple outline that we follow for our family meeting and I hope it's helpful to you.

This month, I read the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. A book that came really highly recommended to me by a few trusted friends and it did not disappoint. So yes, today we are talking all about money and our relationship with it.

As I manage a household with four little kids and a lot of stuff, as well as my online business I've realized there are two parts to productivity. Those are also the two places I tend to get hung up, but when I get them right, they are key. So hopefully today's episode will unlock some insight for you, too!

Having four small children six and under simply means that over the last six years there has been a lot of sickness in our house. And while there's really no right or wrong way to be sick, because you're just sick. I have learned a few ways to cope with sickness, ways to cling to Jesus, ways to pray over your children during sickness, ways to perhaps make sickness a little less miserable and that's what I'm going to share with you today.

We are living in a tense time. Cultural pressures are really high. Our nation feels like it's falling apart some days and is super divided in it. It's hard and more than anything, the dark world around us is begging for light and truth. T his episode is simply an encouragement for you to be bold and strong and to live out your faith in every aspect of your life and to cling to Jesus every day.

Now, today I'm going to be talking about The Self-Driven Child, which is a book that's going to stay with me throughout the rest of my parenting journey.

For the last six months, I've taken a break from social media and it has been so good. Today, I’m going to give you an update on how I liked it, what I missed, the best lessons I learned and how I'm going to do things differently when I come back.

Today I'm going to be talking about my first book, The 12 Week Year and why this book was just what I needed to read at the start of this year, between having baby number four and this pandemic. I don't know about you, but it felt so hard to plan and to dream and set goals—but 12 weeks? 12 weeks? I can do that. I can plan the next 12 weeks.

Money is a part of our life. Whether we like it or not, we need it to live and we can choose to either manage it well and let it be a blessing to us and those around us, or if we neglect it, we'll likely end up with not very much of it and it will be a continual point of stress for us.

This episode will be full of practical advice, but all of that practical how-to is going to stem from these money mindsets, and I hope that they're a blessing to you.

The key to success is contentment.

I mean, think about it—if you can find a way to truly be content, to be happy in every circumstance, wouldn't it be awesome? Every day it would be incredible. I mean, we'd wake up so grateful and so happy because we're content! This episode is about fighting for contentment with simple habits in our lives. Habits that can help us pause and realize just how good we have it. Habits that help us to live at ease and to live content.