123: Create Your Summer Success Plan + Special Announcement

Jun 10

(Unedited)
Summer Success Plan Session
/
Hello friends and welcome back to the podcast. We are in June and it is the last week of school for my kiddos and I am looking forward to a change in routines and getting outside and being in the sun a whole lot more. I wanted to talk to you today about something, if you're on my email list you've probably heard of it already, I've been offering sessions called Making Your Summer Success Plan and it's a 90 minute session where we address any issues that you are nervous about or worried about for the summer to come and talk about making a plan so that it can be an awesome summer no matter where you are going through your divorce, no matter where you are with co parenting.
I want to help you set some intention around your summer so that You get to labor day and you're like, I rocked it. That was the best possible summer that I could have had.
And I have so many good memories from it. I thought today I would walk you through the parts of the summer success plan session that I do with clients. And you can take these concepts with you and try them yourself at home or be inspired to sign up and schedule a session with me so that I can walk you through them.
There are four parts to a summer success plan session. That's a mouthful. Summer success plan session. I always start with identifying any fears, uncertainty, or unmade decisions. I abbreviate it as FUD, F U U D, Fears, Uncertainty, and Unmade Decisions. And we do a FUD dump. I want to hear from you, what are these fears, uncertainty, and unmade decisions?
And I have a series of questions to help you identify them. Once we've identified them, then we make a plan. of how you want to handle each and every single one of them. Sometimes the plan is direct action, what you're going to do right now about it. And sometimes the plan is, okay, this is not a urgent need right now.
I have a plan for if it becomes an urgent need and I'm just going to take that plan and I'm going to shelve it. I'm going to file it on my mental shelf for now and clear that brain space so that I can focus on more urgent or pressing or really just things that I want to be focusing on.
We don't want to leave these FUDs running freely through our minds. We want to name them and we want to deal with them. This is probably the least fun part of the summer success plan session, but it's the most impactful. I want to give you some examples of things that I've worked through with clients.
I had one client who was worrying about the decision about whether or not to stay in her apartment. She's going through her divorce. She hasn't decided yet if she's going to stay where she is or she's going to move. And through our conversation, she realized she didn't have enough information yet to make that decision.
And so
we came up with a timeline where She would give herself a month to gather the information that she needed, and then she would revisit the decision about whether or not to move. But for the time being, she would just shelve it. And that helped her not have to constantly be thinking about that decision, but to focus on more pressing items.
Another client was afraid that their soon to be ex would want to discuss the divorce and specifically financial division of assets while they had a lot of family visiting this summer. And so we made a plan so that If the soon to be ex did bring up these issues that my client knew exactly what she would say and what she would deal with so that she made sure that she was only talking about those issues when it felt like she had the mental space to be able to do that and for her that wasn't when a lot of family was visiting.
Another example is I had a client who has his child for two days during the work week every week during summer and he hadn't developed a plan yet for what that child was going to do while he was having to be at work and he works from home so it's
it's really easy for him to say okay well the the kid can go do some video games or watch some tv but he didn't want the kid to be on the screen all day every day. And so we brainstormed a whole list of options that would get that kid being more active and more engaged, getting to see friends, getting to get out of the house, and my client could go to that list every week and make some decisions.
I find with my clients that once we talk about what these fears, uncertainty, and unmade decisions are, and we clean them up, some of them we address, some of them we just decide when we will address them, they suddenly have so much mental bandwidth to deal with the day to day and to actually start thinking about how to make this summer really fun.
So that's why we do the FUD dump as the first part of our summer success plan session. The second part is I asked them to develop a tagline, a summer tagline, and specifically I want it to be about What do you want to say about your relationship with your kids at the end of the summer?
Think about yourself come the beginning of September and you're looking back on the summer. What do you want to say about your relationship with them? Things that come up is we laughed a lot, we had a lot of fun, we created some good memories. In my case, I will have played a lot of badminton with my kids because they are obsessed with it.
We tried a lot of new things, we went swimming a lot, we got hooked on a new game, Or we came up with a new thing that our whole family likes to do together, or I just felt closer and more connected to them by the end of the summer. You get to decide, but let's set some intention around it. Come the end of the summer.
What do we want to be able to say as we look back? Okay, the third part of the summer success plan session is defining your ecosystem of support. So what support do you need? And this can be support around the kids. It can be support around your house. It can be support at work. It can be support around other issues.
Maybe you're having to support extended family with health issues, or maybe there's travel that needs to happen. And of course, maybe you're going through your divorce and, what parts of that divorce do you need more support on? How can we make sure that you have an ecosystem, you have a community, that's really supporting you in all the ways that feel nourishing, and will help you have the best summer.
Oftentimes I talk to folks that are going through a divorce and we talk about this being a season where they are asking and receiving more support. We are not in the habit of asking for support, asking for help. And folks sometimes will feel like they have to reciprocate in the same timeline or in the same season.
And I like to encourage folks to not think that way and to actually come to a place where they recognize it's okay for me to ask for a lot of support right now from a wide community of folks. And there will come a season when I have more bandwidth, I have more depth to be able to support these people as they need support.
So choosing to just look at it as this is my season where I'm going to request and receive a lot more support. And we can also talk about how to ask for support and how to receive support and how to be okay if the folks that we ask for support can't give us support. So what I see is co parents, the first person they want support from is from their other co parent, and oftentimes that person Does not want to give support in the way that my client wants to receive support from them And we talk about how to handle that and then what are our other options?
Are there other people that we can look to for that kind of support and we can break it down into really small chunks so that it doesn't feel overwhelming or intimidating to ask new people for new kinds of help. And then the final piece of the summer success plan session is to develop your nourish me list.
This is a list of activities or time with certain people or experiences. Or places that fill you up and nourish you. I have you do a whole brainstorm of , what would just be awesome this summer? What, would fill you up? Who do you want to see? What do you want to do?
And it can be so simple as I want to read You know, a romance novel, or I want to go to this park that I really love. I want to have a picnic outside one day. I want to see this friend at least three times this summer, or I want to have this conversation with this person that I haven't talked to in a long time.
And then I make you a bingo card, right? So we put all of these things on a bingo card that you can print out and put up somewhere that you're going to see on a daily basis so that you can keep reminding yourself, okay, these are the things that I know would nourish me. How can I work them into my week?
So that by the end of the summer, you've done all of those things on your bingo card. What we find is that as we nourish ourselves in those ways that really connect, really are special for us, we have more depth to offer to our kids and we create a summer that we really love.
So if all of this sounds interesting to you, if it feels like this is the kind of guidance that would be super helpful right now to have someone hold your hand and walk you through creating a plan like this, then I encourage you to reach out. You can go to my website at meggluckman. com or you can go through my Instagram, the link at the top of my profile and which is just at meggluckman.
and schedule your summer success plan session. I'm doing them through the end of June, and I would love to help you create a summer of your dreams. All right, y'all. And before I go, I want to announce that I'm going to be taking a break from the podcast for the summer. This is the first time I've done it, and I am so excited.
Very excited. I have a bunch of other projects that are underway that I'm super excited to share with you and I'm going to focus my summer on doing those projects and then I'll come back and I'll see you on the podcast in the fall. So wishing you all a wonderful, wonderful summer. Get out there, have fun, and give your kids a good squeeze.
Take care now.

Summer brings sunshine, swimming, BBQs, and also…

Childcare scrambles
Changes to routines (goodbye bedtime)
Increased communication with your co-parent to get little Tommy from swim lessons to the park for a birthday party to…
Travel logistics
Change in parenting schedule bringing on anxiety, heartache, or new responsibilities
More time with kids or more time alone…

Without a plan, summer can feel like a current that you just have to ride.

But summer shouldn't be about JUST STAYING AFLOAT! Because even if you're in the middle of your divorce, even if you struggle with your co-parent, you can have a great summer where you get to have fun with your kids and feel nourished throughout.

Come next Labor Day, look back on this summer and say “Dang, we squeezed every drop of goodness out of that one!”

In this week's episode, I share the 4 parts of creating a Summer Success Plan.