Adaptability Is Your Homeschool Superpower

Pam: Are you ready for homeschooling to feel joyful again?

Do you long for support as you learn alongside your kids?

Welcome to Homeschool Better Together,

a podcast about building a homeschool experience that works for your family.

I’m Pam Barnhill and it’s time to step out of the overwhelm and in to the wonder.

Let’s do this.

Hey there and welcome to the podcast.

So I am a big Atomic Habits fan. I really appreciate author James Clear and his book all about building habits. It was. It’s a read I’ve gone through a couple of different times and actually now that I’m saying this out loud and thinking about it, it’s probably about time for me to go through it again.

It’s been out a few years now, I think I’ve read it twice and it’s time for me to circle back around. But I recently came across a quote from James Clear that kind of made me stop in my tracks and I wanted to read it to you.

He said, in theory,

consistency is about being disciplined, determined and unwavering.

In practice,

consistency is about being adaptable.

Don’t have much time,

scale it down.

Don’t have much energy,

do the easy version.

Find different ways to show up depending on the circumstances.

Let your habits change shape to meet the demands of the day.

Adaptability is the way of consistency.

And when I saw that I thought, this is exactly what we’re aiming for in homeschool life,

not Pinterest, perfect, no interruptions kind of consistency.

The kind that bends when it needs to bend so it doesn’t break. That’s what we’re looking for.

And today we’re going to talk about like, what does this really look like? How can you plan for it in your homeschool?

And why? Adaptability is not the enemy of consistency,

but instead it’s the thing that makes it possible.

In theory, consistency is doing the same thing the same way every single day.

And that’s lovely if you’re a robot.

Have you seen those AI robots that Elon Musk and I don’t know if they’re under the Tesla brand or whatever, but he’s presented these kind of creepy looking robots out there and he’s like, oh, everybody’s going to have one.

They’re going to be a butler. And I’m like, not 100% sure about that. That robot,

he could get up and do the same thing the same way every day. But we are are not robots and neither are our children.

In homeschool reality,

kids get sick appointments Pop up, the toddler dumps his cereal bowl on the cat.

So if we’re defining consistency as never missing, never changing,

we’re setting ourselves up to feel like a failure before lunch even happens.

Really, in practice, consistency is about showing up,

even if the way you show up looks different depending on the day.

That’s where adaptability comes in.

Because without adaptability,

you’ve only got two speeds. You’ve either got perfect or that’s it. We might as well throw in the towel, we’re done.

And that kind of all or nothing thinking is what kills your momentum.

Adaptability says,

okay, today it’s not ideal,

but what’s the version of this that I can still do?

Adaptability is giving yourself permission to adjust without feeling like, oh, I’ve blown it.

And adaptability is the difference between keeping your homeschool going in February versus letting it stall out for weeks at a time until spring.

Here’s the mistake a lot of us make.

We know bad days happen,

but what we don’t do is decide ahead of time what our plan B looks like.

And then when we’re exhausted or we’re running late,

we try to get creative in the moment or. Or we just give up, right? But this is when our brain short circuits and suddenly we’re maybe scrolling Instagram instead of actually teaching our kids.

So the key if we’re going to be adaptable is decide on our adaptability versions, our scaled down versions,

ahead of time. Do it now so that when your day goes sideways,

you can just, like, kick it into gear and switch to the adaptive version and you don’t even have to think about it. You’ve already got that plan B in place.

So let me give you some examples of what this might look like.

Maybe you don’t have as much time as you thought you were going to. Your school day is getting cut short.

So what you can do to plan ahead for those days when our school days get cut short is we can kind of pick an express lane version of each of our core subjects.

So, first of all, we’re not going to try to do everything right.

We’re going to just do a few core things,

and then if we have to move even faster,

we can do the express lane version of those core things.

So maybe in morning time, we do one song and one poem and that’s it. Morning time’s over for the day.

Maybe for Math, we do 10 minutes of review or a handful of flashcards.

Maybe for writing, we just do one sentence of copy work instead of writing a whole Paragraph.

Go back to the poem that you did in morning time.

Take one sentence from that and write it on the board and have your kids copy that.

You’re keeping the habit of the school day alive without trying to cram a full lesson into your rushed day. And when you get to the end of the day and you’ve checked off every one of those little express lane boxes,

trust me,

you’re going to feel really good about yourself. You’re going to go, man, I conquered that list.

Doesn’t matter that it was the express lane list, you still conquered it. You’re going to feel great.

Now as another example, what happens when you don’t have much energy? Because sometimes, you know, our school days go off the rails because of the time issue. We have to get to the doctors or something like that.

But sometimes it happens because we didn’t sleep well the night before.

So are there any couch school options that you could identify if you have been up for half the night with a sick baby?

What are the things that you mom can do from the couch? Little shorter, little easier. Could you read aloud? Or even better,

put on an audiobook?

Is there some independent work that they could do that you could check later?

Is there an educational video that’s tied to your current topic? I would keep a list of little things like that. I would even keep some little workbooks on hand that just come from the dollar store.

And on those days that you are just completely out of it,

hand over the little workbook and let them do a page or two. Give them stuff that is easy,

stuff that is a review.

Review is a very important part of learning and giving your kids something to review.

There is no shame in that.

You’re still present and engaged, but you’ve removed the physical and mental load of full teaching mode on the days that you don’t have as much energy.

Now for a third example, what happens if your day just completely goes off the rails? Maybe somebody has a major meltdown. Maybe you’re the one who has the major meltdown.

It has happened to me before.

I’m the one who’s gotten mad about something and then I kind of explode and then I feel so ashamed that I can’t even bring myself to do a full school day.

I know I’m not the only one, right?

Choose some kind of last resort activity that you can pivot to guilt free on the days that these things happen.

Could you go on a nature walk or do some park time?

Maybe you can listen to an audiobook in the car and run errands or bake some cookies and listen to an audiobook while you eat some and print out some coloring pages.

Or maybe there’s some other simple art or handicraft project that you could do.

And so you end the day with connection and learning instead of frustration and shut down.

But go ahead and plan a few of those activities in advance.

Plan the I don’t have time activities, plan the I don’t have energy activities, and plan the my day has completely gone off the rails activities.

Just put it on a piece of paper, slide it into your teacher’s binder, and have your plan Be ready.

Adaptability is not about making things up in the moment. It’s about having these options ready before life throws you the curveball.

Listen, perfection says if I can’t do it all, I shouldn’t do it at all.

But adaptability says do what you can with what you have today.

When you make that mindset shift right there, you won’t lose momentum as easily because you’ve stopped tying your success to perfect conditions.

And you know as well as I do that in homeschool, perfect conditions are a rare unicorn.

This idea of planned adaptability is exactly what we work on inside the Homeschool Consistency Bootcamp.

In there, we’re creating rhythms, routines, and backup plans so you know exactly what to do when your day isn’t perfect.

I’ve seen moms come into the boot camp thinking that they just needed more willpower.

But what they really needed instead was a plan that could bend without breaking. And when they had that,

they stopped stopping.

They kept going, even on the messy days.

If you’ve been listening to this and thinking, oh yeah, this is what I need.

Now is the time to join us.

The doors are open for the boot camp right now, but only for a few days.

Head on over to pambarnhill.com consistency to grab your spot and start start building the kind of consistency that actually works in real life.

We’re keeping the doors open for you until October 17th, and then we’ve got to close it all down so we can get started with that boot camp and really change some homeschool lives this fall.

Listen, adaptability is not a compromise. Instead, it is the secret ingredient that makes your consistency sustainable.

So go ahead and make your Plan B list. And remember, every time you choose the flexible version over doing nothing, you are building the habit of showing up. And that’s the habit that changes everything.

All right, friends, I hope to see you inside the boot camp. If not, I’ll see you here in a couple of weeks for another conversation about building a homeschool you actually enjoy living.

That’s our show for today.

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visit hsbtpodcast.com until next week. Keep stepping out of the overwhelm and into the wonder.