Get my Decision-Making Matrix—a guide to making choices from the heart. Dinnertime used to be my least favorite part of the day, for a gazillion reasons — I wanted our meals to be as healthy and delicious as possible and so I knocked myself out to make meals that dazzled.
Because my kids were small and needed to be in bed by about 7 or else they were total basket cases, I wanted the preparation and the consumption to happen in a timely manner. And then, there were the dishes. Oh, the dishes!
Perfectly reasonable, right? The thing is, my husband is a soaker. This bugged me to no end. Then I got pissed off. I still did the dishes many nights, but now I did it noisily, hating my husband in my head. Even when I occasionally hate him.
So I thought about it and realized, having the dishes done is important to me. So I started accepting that sometimes I did the dishes. Over time, I started to shed another layer of dish drama. That was a big shift. Then something cool started to happen. I started to see the time I spent doing the dishes as a time to decompress. The dishes got done, AND I got a little mental downtime. Not because we talked about it, but because the energy around the whole conversation shifted.
And as a result, my angst over whether the dishes are done or not done has totally receded. Over this process, it has removed a point of contention between me and my husband, which means we can just enjoy each other more. That feels really, really, really good. It took maybe a year to get to this point. Can you imagine it? My new daily podcast, How to Be a Better Person , is here to help by sharing one simple thing you can do in the next 24 hours to rise.
