Society has timelines for everything: finish college by 22, establish your career, then maybe think about family. But what happens when your internal compass points in a different direction entirely?
Alyssa Wolff found herself at exactly this kind of crossroads multiple times throughout her life. At 16, she was already planning her college trajectory with the precision of a military strategist. By 17, she was in college. By her sophomore year, she realized her carefully laid plans weren’t going to work. Instead of forcing herself to stay the course, she made what many would consider a radical pivot.
“I had to shift out, ditch all of my carefully chosen degree plans, figure out something else to study,” Alyssa explains about her college experience. But rather than seeing this as a failure, she treated it as valuable information about what she actually wanted from life.
This pattern of making intentional, often unconventional choices would define Alyssa’s entire approach to life—from accelerating her graduation to get married sooner, to building a family of five children in ten years, to eventually starting an online business with a baby at home. Her story reveals something crucial about the difference between making choices that look good on paper and making choices that actually work for your life.
The Art of Strategic Pivoting
When we think about successful people, we often imagine they had everything figured out from the beginning. But Alyssa’s experience tells a different story. Her initial plan was to pursue a specific major at an engineering college, but when she got there, reality didn’t match expectations.
“I realized, oh, I can’t see myself doing this for the long haul. I don’t even know if I could finish this major and still keep my sanity,” she recalls.
The conventional advice might have been to push through, to stick with the plan regardless of how miserable it made her. Instead, Alyssa made what she calls a “strategic pivot.” She switched to an interdisciplinary degree that allowed her to combine multiple areas of interest.
This decision-making pattern reveals something important about navigating life’s uncertainties. Rather than viewing plan changes as failures, Alyssa treated them as course corrections based on new information. When Amy Stone asks about this flexibility, it becomes clear that Alyssa approaches life with both intentionality and adaptability—a combination that served her well throughout multiple major life transitions.
The key insight here isn’t that we should constantly change our minds, but that we should remain open to adjusting our approach when we discover our current path isn’t serving us. Alyssa’s willingness to “ditch all of my carefully chosen degree plans” ultimately led her to a more sustainable and authentic direction.
Redefining Life Timelines
Perhaps nowhere is Alyssa’s unconventional approach more evident than in how she structured her family life. While many of her peers were focused on establishing careers first, she chose to begin building her family immediately after marriage.
“Three months after we got married, I had that positive pregnancy test,” she shares matter-of-factly. This wasn’t an accident or a case of poor planning—it was an intentional choice based on her values and circumstances.
What’s particularly striking is how systematically Alyssa approached even this deeply personal decision. She recognized that her interdisciplinary degree, while fulfilling to study, didn’t lead to clear career opportunities. Rather than forcing herself into a professional path that didn’t feel right, she chose to pursue something she knew she wanted: motherhood.
“Since I always saw myself with kids, I might as well go ahead and get started,” she explains. This pragmatic approach to major life decisions runs counter to conventional wisdom about “establishing yourself first,” but it worked for her specific situation.
Her approach challenges us to think more critically about whose timeline we’re following. Are we making choices based on what actually makes sense for our values and circumstances, or are we simply following a script written by societal expectations?
Creating Your Own Definition of Challenge
One of the most fascinating aspects of Alyssa’s story is how she consistently sought out new challenges, even when her life already seemed incredibly full. With five children ranging from ages 5 to 16, most people would assume she had her hands completely full. But Alyssa saw it differently.
“I’m like, all right, I’m done having kids. There’s no more leveling up of how many more people I can juggle,” she explains. “What am I going to do with my free time again?”
When Amy asks about this perceived “free time” with five children at home, it highlights something crucial about perspective and systems. Alyssa had created such efficient routines and systems that she genuinely had bandwidth for something new. This wasn’t about having an easy life—it was about creating an organized one.
Her decision to start an online business when her youngest was only six months old exemplifies this approach. “I can say this is not convenient for me. I’m going to wait 17 years till this 6-month-old graduates from high school. Or I can say this is going to require a lot of up leveling, but I’m going to go ahead and do it now.”
This mindset shift from “I can’t because…” to “How can I make this work?” represents a fundamental difference in how we approach opportunities. Instead of waiting for the “perfect” time, Alyssa consistently chose to create the conditions that would make her goals possible.
The Freedom of Strategic Saying No
Perhaps the most valuable insight from Alyssa’s journey is her philosophy around elimination and boundaries. As she developed her coaching practice, she realized that success often comes not from doing more, but from being strategic about what you stop doing.
“There’s some very radical mindset shifts we need to make of dropping off everything that’s non-essential,” she explains. “And it might even be culturally weird for you to say, I don’t think this is essential for me and my family.”
This approach extends to seemingly “good” activities like volunteering, attending every social event, or participating in children’s activities. Alyssa gives permission for what many people feel but don’t dare to say: “No, I’m not taking them to the park. They can run around the backyard.”
The key insight here is that saying no to good things allows you to say yes to great things. When Amy asks about the practical aspects of managing such a full life, Alyssa’s answer reveals the power of clear priorities: “Whatever you pick, it gets to be okay as long as it was driven by your values and your priorities.”
This isn’t about being selfish or antisocial—it’s about being intentional. Alyssa’s approach demonstrates that when you’re clear about what matters most to you, it becomes much easier to make decisions that support those priorities, even when those decisions go against conventional expectations.
Making Unconventional Work for You
Alyssa Wolff’s story isn’t a blueprint that everyone should follow—it’s an example of what becomes possible when you’re willing to make choices based on your actual values rather than external expectations. Her journey from college student to mother of five to successful entrepreneur wasn’t linear or conventional, but it was deeply intentional.
The real lesson isn’t about having five children or starting a business or any specific choice she made. It’s about the meta-skill of making decisions based on what actually works for your life, rather than what looks good on paper or what everyone else expects.
When we first encounter someone making choices that seem radically different from the norm, our instinct is often to dismiss them as outliers or assume they have some special circumstances that don’t apply to us. But Alyssa’s story suggests something different: that many of us are capable of much more than we think, if we’re willing to question conventional timelines and create our own systems.
The next time you find yourself at a crossroads, facing pressure to follow a conventional path that doesn’t feel quite right, remember Alyssa’s approach: gather information, assess what actually works for your values and circumstances, and don’t be afraid to make the choice that serves your life, even if it’s not the choice everyone else would make.
After all, as Alyssa’s journey demonstrates, sometimes the most unconventional choices turn out to be the most authentic ones.
This article was inspired by an interview with Alyssa Wolff and Amy Stone on The Art of Imperfect Adulting podcast. To hear more compelling conversations like this one and receive special offers from our guests directly to your inbox, join our email community today.
Interview Transcript Alyssa Wolff with Amy Stone | The Art of Imperfect Adulting | April 30, 2025
Amy Stone [00:00:06]:
Alyssa Wolf, welcome to the art of imperfect adulting. I’m glad you’re here. Are you ready for a fun chat?
Alyssa Wolff [00:00:12]:
Yes, I am, Amy.
Amy Stone [00:00:14]:
Yay. I start almost every interview by asking my guests, what part of the world do you call home?
Alyssa Wolff [00:00:20]:
Currently living in Oklahoma.
Amy Stone [00:00:22]:
Oh, Oklahoma. Very nice. You. Now, let’s see. So Oklahoma is part of tornado alley. Is it tornado season now? I feel like I did spend a chunk of my life in the Midwest, but I don’t remember when tornado season is.
Alyssa Wolff [00:00:35]:
Usually it’s done. But yes, we were up last night with the sirens.
Amy Stone [00:00:39]:
Oh, all right. Well, they. So that’s, so that, that’s, that’s dramatic. All right, so the topic of the day, not tornadoes. We are going to talk about kids. Quite a few kids. And your journey into online business. I’m very excited about this. Let’s start with this. I, I know the answer to this because you put it on your intake form, but I want you to share with the audience a tiny bit about your family specifically. Tell us a little bit about how many kids you guys have and the age range that they fall in.
Alyssa Wolff [00:01:10]:
Yeah, so I’m a mom of five kids in 10 years. So the youngest is five and almost six, and the oldest is 16.
Amy Stone [00:01:18]:
Okay. All right. So five kids in 10 years and that actually, so for some people, that’s going to be a very big family. For other people, it’s not a big family. My family is often considered a big family, so I ask questions about it for information, but not from any judgment on my side. Let’s back up a tiny, itty bitty bit. Because your kids, you’ve got these five kids in 10 years. When you were younger, a much younger version of yourself. When you thought forward about your life as an adult, were you a person who knew that you always wanted kids and did you have a vision of yourself with, you know, with several children?
Alyssa Wolff [00:01:56]:
Yes, I would say so. I always knew I wanted to be a mom. And we grew up. We occasionally visited a few Memite families that had like the 10 kids. And then most of our friends were two or three kid families. I came from a two kid family, so I had an idea that there was a range of kids. And I figured, all right, it will have to depend on me as the mom, how many I can handle. But from what I hear, people with lots of siblings love growing up with lots of siblings. So that was what I headed into the teen years with a vision for.
Amy Stone [00:02:25]:
Yeah, that’s not unusual. That’s not like, I mean, none of it’s unusual. Right? If you ask 100 people, you’re going to get 100 different answers for what kind of vision they have for the size of their family. And sometimes people repeat it, and other times people make changes. So you came from a family of two siblings, you and one other sibling? That’s correct. And how about your husband, your partner? Did he come from a small or a large family?
Alyssa Wolff [00:02:53]:
Also small. One out of three.
Amy Stone [00:02:55]:
One out of three. All right, very good. So you are not a group that you are not a pair of people who are repeating what your parents did. Okay, so we’re going to talk about when you started this family, because it’s a part of your story, and it just is the way it goes. And let’s talk a little bit about education. So before I ask this question, I’ll just say the like, I went to college. It worked for me. But I’m not a person who says that everybody else has to go to college. I know so many really happy people who did not go to college. So I ask this with no judgment. Don’t live under a rock. I understand that everybody does different things. Tell us about your college experience and how it relates to when you started your family.
Alyssa Wolff [00:03:35]:
Yes, I was excited to go to college. So at 14, I was spending, like, hours pouring through college catalogs, trying to pick the exact right major. And of course, that changed every time I picked a different college as my top one. But finally at 16, we settled on one, and then I went there at 17, started in my lovely, wonderful major and realized, oh, I can’t see myself doing this for the long haul. I don’t even know if I could finish this major and still keep my sanity. So I had to shift out, ditch all of my carefully chosen degree plans, figure out something else to study. The problem was, it was an engineering college, and I do not have an engineering brain, so I was pretty limited what I could go with. So I ended up doing the catch all interdisciplinary one, so I could just throw in a few interesting areas of study and get out with the degree in hand, because that was what I promised my parents. I will graduate with a degree before I get married.
Amy Stone [00:04:30]:
Okay. All right. So that’s really interesting. So if you were looking at 14, I was not. Other than I knew that there was college, I do not think that I had a plan. I was not one of those people who had lists and spreadsheets and knew the names. And I’ve got the four kids that have gone through our house. So I’ve been through that process four Times, some of them, I think it’s a pretty even split in my house. Two of them had really intentional plans that they did and structured, and the other two were just kind of like, aye, what’s next? But you really were. You did have a plan. And that plan was a form of engineering. Not the first person I talked to that when they got into studying engineering, they were like, well, wait a minute, this is not exactly what I thought it was going to be. I don’t like this anymore.
Alyssa Wolff [00:05:20]:
Well, to correct the record, I was at an engineering school, but I had a few other majors, so, no, I never did engineering.
Amy Stone [00:05:26]:
Oh, so you weren’t studying engineering, but it was an engineering school misunderstanding on my part. But you decided you. So then you shifted and you chose to finish your degree because you had made a deal with your parents that you were going to finish a degree. All right, so part of this story, I think, is meeting your husband. Did you guys meet at school? Did you have a relationship before you went to school? How did you guys meet?
Alyssa Wolff [00:05:50]:
Yeah, I met him freshman semester pretty early on. I had no clue. We didn’t really talk. So it took the sophomore year. When I got in the middle of all these major changes before we became friends, he asked if he could court me. I eventually said, oh, well, all right, yes, we’re spending way too much time together anyways. There’s not to be some kind of relationship.
Amy Stone [00:06:11]:
So.
Alyssa Wolff [00:06:11]:
So that got added into the mix, right, with all the career stuff. And at that point I was like, all right, I’m going to compress my major down to three years instead of four. We kept getting more serious, like this is headed the marriage direction. And he was a graduating senior, so got engaged, said goodbye. He’s going off to get his first job, and I’m still at school with an entire year left and thinking, that’s too long an engagement. What else can I do? So that summer, I was bugging my academic advisor like crazy during my internship. What else can I do? What summer classes can I take? What things can I do to possibly graduate in one semester, not two? So she put together this grand plan. I did an overload semester and I was able to walk that December so we could get married sooner.
Amy Stone [00:07:05]:
Wow. How far away did he go for the job? Did he go far, far away? Like, were you.
Alyssa Wolff [00:07:09]:
He went pretty far away. Yeah.
Amy Stone [00:07:11]:
So you guys had. How so you guys had a long distance relationship for at least a year?
Alyssa Wolff [00:07:17]:
Well, I knocked it down to the. More like the nine months.
Amy Stone [00:07:20]:
Nine months. All right, so that was a Little.
Alyssa Wolff [00:07:22]:
Better if you count the summer and the semester.
Amy Stone [00:07:24]:
You’re obviously a very innovative, get it done kind of person because you went into college with a plan. Planning college before, as a teenager, you were very intentional. Then you made the change to your degree when you became aware that it didn’t match up with your life goal. That’s a pretty. It sounds like you had a pretty good self concept and the ability to bend. And then you had a time frame for graduating and getting married. And we were like, oh, this is not. This is not what I want. You went to the administration and said, hey, what do we do? How do we. How do we make this work the way I want it to? That’s. I think there are other people that probably would just be like, oh, this is it. There’s no option here.
Alyssa Wolff [00:08:06]:
Yeah. And I got teased in college, like, going for the Mrs. Degree, but I was like, no, I put in a ton of work to graduate in two and a half years. Yes, I’m getting married right after graduation, but so are half of you, probably.
Amy Stone [00:08:19]:
There was one person in my friend group got married straight out of, like, we all went right after term ended. She was my one friend, and we teased her too, but they’re still happily married, so she wins. And so. Okay, so to recap, you accelerate your degree, you know, you don’t want to do the thing at your. You shifted your career path in school and you get married. And do you go straight into family building or is there a period where you have a professional career?
Alyssa Wolff [00:08:53]:
Yeah, I went straight to family building because getting that degree as part of the bargain with my parents and still managing to like what I studied meant it was interdisciplinary. You can’t really get much of a job. It did not lead directly to a degree, which was what I had planned for myself, what my dad had expected as well. So getting married, it was kind of the. Well, I just shot the career path. I’m not sure what to do next. Well, since I always saw myself with kids, I might as well go ahead and get started. So three months after we got married, I had that positive pregnancy test.
Amy Stone [00:09:28]:
Okay, so this was. This was a dramatic shift. So when you say interdisciplinary degree, tell me a little bit more about what that means. Just that I make sure that we’re all. We’re all understanding. So it’s not like a trade program or an accounting degree. What did it mean? That it was an interdisciplinary certificate or degree.
Alyssa Wolff [00:09:46]:
That university said you may pick three minors and then you may throw a bunch of general ed courses of whatever Else you studied. So for me, I used that first year in my major and I threw all those courses in there. And then I effectively got to pick three minors I wanted to study. Boom, done, out.
Amy Stone [00:10:02]:
Okay, so. And did you like the stuff that you were studying while you were there? Did you. You enjoyed it? Yeah. Very nice. Okay, so you decide to go directly into building your family. No messing around. Five kids in 10 years. I actually grew up with a very close family friend. They were. The kids were younger than me. I babysat for them when I was a teenager, but they had five kids in probably six years. There was a time where there were five kids under five that I had. The mom would talk about. So they were very, very close together. So you had. You had some. I remember thinking that. That mom could handle anything if she could do that. So that is one. Anyway, this is a story not about my family friends, but about you. One of the things that jumped out at me in your intake form is that you have these five kids in 10 years, and then you say in the intake form that you were looking for your next challenge. And that stood out to me very clearly because I think managing a house with five kids, seven people would be a huge challeng. Like, let’s talk about that. What was going on that you were looking for another challenge?
Alyssa Wolff [00:11:13]:
Well, for me, adding a new kid is always like the next level. So I went from one to two, and that’s when I had that decision point. All right, do I stay with the family size I grew up in or do I go for the at least medium sized family? You know, that’s why I thought, this is easy. I think I will challenge myself more than living it easy for the rest of my parenting life. And then we had kid number three. We had kid number four. That was a pretty awful birth story. I said, I don’t really want to finish. On that note, can we please have kid number five? By that point, I was like, I’m tired of getting up at night nursing newborns. I don’t feel like I need to do this anymore. So I just felt done.
Amy Stone [00:11:51]:
Okay.
Alyssa Wolff [00:11:51]:
My husband was quite happy to hear that, of course, because he’s looking at the van size and the number of seats available. And do you have to go for a seven seater or an eight seater that affects your availability with new vehicle purchases?
Amy Stone [00:12:05]:
It does.
Alyssa Wolff [00:12:05]:
And so I’m like, all right, I’m done having kids. There’s no more leveling up of how many more people I can juggle. Well, as soon as I get used to Being past the first couple months, I’m like, okay, life is settling back into our routine. Great. What am I going to do with my free time again? I should note here that my husband started working from home, so I was not allowed to sleep in with my free time. So I’m looking at five hours a day of quote, unquote, leadership. That’s way too much.
Amy Stone [00:12:34]:
Okay, so I think that there are going to be many people who are listening to this that are going to say, that does not sound like a situation where I would actually have very much free time. I definitely, like, I helped to raise four kids that seemed like it was very, very busy season of life. The youngest of yours is still just under six years old. I think there are definitely going to be people who are thinking, what free time exactly did you have with a house of five. Five kids? So the. So you were going through this very methodically, which I’ve only talked to you for a couple of minutes, but that matches the other ways that you were making decisions. Which of the jumps from. As you went up in kids, which is the. Which of the jumps felt like big jumps? 0 to 1 is a big jump. It’s a very famous jump to go from not having any kids to kids. Zero to one is a big jump. What were the other jumps that maybe felt like, wow, this is a big increase in how our life feels at home?
Alyssa Wolff [00:13:34]:
Just the fourth one. But that was because of some unusual things with his birth.
Amy Stone [00:13:38]:
Yeah.
Alyssa Wolff [00:13:39]:
So you know that it wasn’t really too hard to level up each time.
Amy Stone [00:13:43]:
Wow. Okay. And so that is that I am impressed because I will say, every single time I added a new kid, I always like was like, wow, that’s a lot. It always surprised me. Like, it did. It always surprised me, I will admit. So I was a stepmom before I was a mom. So my first kid was actually third kid in the house. So I never actually. I only sort of did. And I didn’t have the 0 to 1 phase. And then I had a very abrupt adjustment, which is like sort of 0 to 3. And so that was. That felt like a lot. But when we added the fourth, that was also. Oh, my God. It was like. It was like where there’s no time. Where. Where are all they Just of all the schedules, so on and so forth. All right, very good. So today, like, I knew this was going to be good when I read it because I have learned so many things from people who manage busy households. You call yourself a take back your time coach these days. I’d love for you to share a little bit about that. This is a direct correlation to the fact that you had five hours of free time with your kids. I once did a survey for a business coach many, many years ago, and I audited my time and I had 45 minutes in a day that wasn’t like pre scheduled. Five. You had five hours. All right, very good. So you call your that, you call yourself a take back your time coach. Tell us more about that.
Alyssa Wolff [00:15:15]:
Well, for the next ironic twist, after blowing up all my degree plans, I said, I will never be an entrepreneur. I don’t have the right mindse mindset. I’m not a risk taker. Like, this is not for me.
Amy Stone [00:15:27]:
Okay?
Alyssa Wolff [00:15:27]:
So I’m proceeding on this five kids and homeschooling and this and that and the other kind of life and cooking from scratch. Like all the things. But I still had that desire, me, the teenager, to do something more. I had an idea, maybe you’d be mentoring women. But that was as vague as it was. So I’m sitting here having another kid and another kid and another kid going, okay, God, why can’t I have a purpose too? Like, having a family is great. This is essential to my identity, but what else do I have out there? Because obviously I have gifts, talents, and abilities. If I can cram through degrees and manage the family like this and not feel like it’s too difficult, so what am I supposed to give back to other people? So six months after the birth of baby number five, I’m listening to a podcast host and she starts talking about online business. I don’t know what rock I was living under. I had never heard about online business before.
Amy Stone [00:16:19]:
I knew what rock you were living under. You were living under babies and toddlers and school and food. Okay, go on. So you’re listening to a podcast and you discover the concept of online business. I interrupted you. I apologize, Alyssa.
Alyssa Wolff [00:16:34]:
Oh, no problem. And of course, it was a call to action for her business boot camp. You know, a free multi day challenge to learn how you could set up your own online business. I’m like, okay, I’m going to go attend that just to see what this is about, because I like research. So I did that. And then I’m like, I could see how this could work for me. I can still stay home with all these kids. I can do virtual mentoring of something. When I pick what my business will be about. It looks to me like I got a choice here. I can say this is not convenient for me. I’m going to wait 17 years till this 6 month old graduates from high school. Or I can say this is going to require a lot of up leveling, but I’m going to go ahead and do it now, even with kids at home. So I decided I gave myself like another month to think about it and research, but I picked the go ahead and start now and up level.
Amy Stone [00:17:29]:
The youngest was six months. So that’s an interesting milestone because a couple things happen right around six months. The baby sits up, they start to giggle. They also there’s a period where a lot of parents get real tired because when they do that they like are like, I don’t need to sleep. No one needs to sleep. I just discovered how to sit up and smile. Like, let’s just stay up all night long and sit up. But after that, that is where things really actually begin to stretch out and you get to do those big chunks of sleep. And so you do feel like you can climb a new mountain and take something on it. It’s where you kind of that is that benchmark. So that that part of it does definitely make sense. Okay, so part of. I have gone through many, many business workshops myself. Part of that is often. And I think that your story is going to dovetail with that. They look at you and they’re like, what are your strengths? What is the thing that you can do? And talk to us a little bit about how you got to managing time. I mentioned that I have learned many things from people who came from big families. Notably I learned from my sister in law who’s one of seven. She taught me like a system for grocery shopping because she, you know, because yeah, it’s a process when you’re feeding a big family like that. Like, and she taught me and I was like, oh my gosh. But how did you come to think about time as the thing that you had a strength in and you would like to mentor people.
Alyssa Wolff [00:19:00]:
I was just brainstorming like they tell you to do in the exercises, like what do you enjoy and you’re good at? So I’m like budgeting and paying off debt. Picking a personal style uniform according to whatever seasonal colors flatter you. Decluttering minimalism and then productivity, time management. So that was in there right from the beginning.
Amy Stone [00:19:20]:
Okay.
Alyssa Wolff [00:19:20]:
I just took a while until I realized everyone is right. You do have to niche down. You can’t talk about every single thing at once.
Amy Stone [00:19:26]:
Okay, all right. Very, very good. It definitely is a thing. So it’s like what are you good at? Once upon a time, many, many years ago, I was Doing a worksheet like that. I tell this story all the time. And one of the things was ask people what they think you’re good at. And I went to my husband, I was like, all right, so here’s the thing, you know, this is this worksheet. What do you think that I’m good at? And he looked right at me and he was like this, this conversation may not go well for me. I do not want to have this conversation with you. Please go find somebody else to ask and have this conversation with. And I was like, ah, fair enough. But yeah, so how did, did you do that version of it? Where did you talk to other people and get feedback about what kind of things they thought you excelled at? Or was it all just self Dr. Driven and knowing yourself?
Alyssa Wolff [00:20:14]:
I probably asked my mom just as a backup. But yeah, I’m pretty self driven and I, I love the practical aspect of psychology. So I had done quite a lot of introspection.
Amy Stone [00:20:23]:
It’s. Yeah, no, many, many people think, say, will say that forming your own business is, is almost like it’s a self development course in itself. It challenges you in very similar ways. All right, so very good. So you started this process when the youngest was six months. So how long have you been working on this roughly?
Alyssa Wolff [00:20:44]:
So this has been over five years now because that was January of 2020.
Amy Stone [00:20:48]:
Wow. Oh wow. So used that was the boom of everybody starting their online business. Just as a point of discussion. All right, very good. Okay, so I am going to ask you a semi personal question. When I wrote this out, I wasn’t sure if it would be appropriate. But you’ve mentioned a couple of things that I think it’ll fit. You can tell me to buzz off if it’s not. But many, many things with families and children and so on and so forth are deeply rooted in faith organizations. Is your community and is the stuff that you do is your philosophy Personally, is there a faith based element to it or not?
Alyssa Wolff [00:21:27]:
Well, for me personally there is. I don’t necessarily work with clients.
Amy Stone [00:21:32]:
Okay.
Alyssa Wolff [00:21:32]:
As part of my method with that.
Amy Stone [00:21:35]:
Okay.
Alyssa Wolff [00:21:35]:
So if a client is a Christian, then yes, we’ll be time blocking in like the time for church or the small group or something. But it’s not one of my program pillars.
Amy Stone [00:21:42]:
Okay.
Alyssa Wolff [00:21:43]:
Building in faith like self care is a program pillar, not necessarily devotional time, if that makes sense.
Amy Stone [00:21:48]:
That is exactly what I was curious about because just because it is helpful to people know because it’s either way, like if you have a specific faith, that’s very important. To you, it’s nice to be able to find people who are aligned and also the other way to know whether or not communities are driven. And it was in my mind because sometimes large groups of children are, they are faith based communities. Like sometimes it’s a pillar of faith communities, not in mine. So like I will tell you, it doesn’t have to be that way. Sometimes people just have big families. So. But I did think I would raise it and bring it up to say, to give you a chance to talk about it if it was a key element of what you were doing or not. So that’s where that question was. Appreciate you humoring me on it. All right, so we’ve talked a little bit about you, we’ve talked a little bit about your beautiful family and how you designed the timeline for your family in a unique way that served you and your family very well and bucked a little bit of convention and made your own path. In a minute we’re going to do the final questions, but I want to give you a chance to tell people specifically about your business and give us a way that you would like for people to follow up with you, like on social media or email after the, after the show.
Alyssa Wolff [00:23:09]:
Sure. So fundamentally what I’m doing is saying there is a better way. You don’t have to keep juggling, oh, my kids need me over here and my husband needs me over here. And all the self development podcasts say, go, work out, take time for yourself, do this and this and this and this and this. Plus I have my career over here or my business and my goals for it and it all can’t fit in. No, it can. But there’s some very radical mindset shifts we need to make of dropping off everything that’s non essential. And it might even be culturally weird for you to say, I don’t think this is essential for me and my family. So once you get in your head that you are allowed to have a both and suddenly you can smash that box of what motherhood and business and working from home can look like. And then you can start saying, what if I make my kids start learning how to cook and clean? Because they’re going to need to in 10 years when they’re at college anyways, why not start them now when they have less resistance? Or what if we severely limit everyone’s extracurricular activities and in fact, I don’t really go anywhere with the whole family because we need time at home to get all this stuff done. Okay, fine. If you’re an introvert, that’s going to work. Speaking as an introvert, of course. Maybe you’re saying, I’m just not going to sign it for all the volunteer stuff, like at church with your faith community. Oh, well, you should. Yes. And I don’t have time. I am juggling this many things. If you stay at home and you have one child and you need to fill your time, you can go do that. I am going to be over here with three kids and maybe one of them has adhd and maybe I’m doing a side hustle and then maybe I’ve got a full time job. No, I do not want to spend my precious half hours volunteering and then pushing up against that. Well, are you selfish? What about the people pleasing? What about what other people think of you? And you say, no, I’m not going to your kid’s birthday party. No, I’m not taking them to the park. They can run around the backyard. Like, whatever you pick, it gets to be okay as long as it was driven by your values and your priorities. So what I’m doing is I’m coming along and putting the scaffolding behind it. That and saying, all right, these are your priorities. Great. How do we make all the puzzle pieces fit and not fit? Like cramming them in, but fitting with margin and white space so that you never have to feel that level of frazzle. And I have to rush to meet the next thing. I have to rush to finish my to do list. You have the space to breathe, just live and enjoy your family. And yes, hit the goals as hard as you want to, but you’re not having to cram it all in.
Amy Stone [00:25:45]:
So that’s. It is a hard one to wrap your head around. Sometimes when you’ve taken. You’ve internalized somebody else’s idea of what you’re supposed to be doing. And you mentioned one of the ones which is volunteering. And I heard this. Somebody was talking about it on a podcast that I was listening to and they had flipped the words around. And maybe other people who were listening had heard this before, but instead of using the word volunteer, the person was like, I had been voluntold that I was supposed to do things. And she talks about her process of releasing those because it was never actually her intention to do those things. And so, but. And also the, the pressure of, you know, making it okay. Just like you were saying, like saying, I understand that you think I should be doing this, but it doesn’t fit in my life right now. Volunteering on those levels. Yeah, no, that those are really, really good. So. And is this based on. It’s hard for me to imagine in the 30 minutes that we’ve known each other. It’s hard for me to imagine a time where you were frazzled with your schedule. But is some of this based on a personal journey that you went through?
Alyssa Wolff [00:26:47]:
Not really in the sense of no. I never was frazzled because I put in like two or three hours of quiet time from the get go with baby number one. But I still had to adapt my schedule every single time I added a new baby or I graduated a kid to kindergarten and homeschool. Now all of a sudden they needed educational time from me. And now I’ve got people prepping for college. Like there has been that shift in what our routines have to look like every semester. Pretty much. So yes. It’s not a frazzle to peace story. It’s a piece to expansion and you holding even more peacefully story.
Amy Stone [00:27:23]:
Okay. All right. I love that. All right, so you have a special offer for the listeners which I’m going to share. You call it your ready to go work at home daily schedule. So this is. You specialize in helping people who are home based with maybe they have families and maybe they also have side hustles or maybe they just have other commitments. And you described this is no need to hash out the perfect parenting and business schedule on your own. Download your new daily routine and save all that brain space. Normally this is a product that is sold for $37, but for the audience, there’s a code for free access. So if this is something, this is a very generous offer. I want to say thank you very much, Alyssa, for making this available to the audience. There’s a link in the show notes and in the newsletter that I send out with links and codes. I always tell people who are listening and watching the easiest way to access those is definitely to be a part of the imperfect adulting email community because then I send it straight into your email box. You get it when it’s fresh. Just click on it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. All right, so thank you very much again for that generous offer. I encourage everybody to take advantage of that. Are you ready for the final three questions, Alyssa?
Alyssa Wolff [00:28:33]:
Yes.
Amy Stone [00:28:34]:
Yay. All right, so I wrote this before we had this conversation. Usually I try and make the questions not actually about the topic of the interview, but I have mentioned a couple times that I’m really grateful for some of the things that I learned how to do from people who had families before me. Right. What is a tip And I think this is gonna be a good one for you. Cause I think you mentioned time. What is a tip that you can offer for finding or creating quiet time for your house for yourself in a house of seven people?
Alyssa Wolff [00:29:04]:
If your kids have nap time, use that. If they don’t have nap time, they’re still at home, they’re not at school, tell them this is afternoon quiet time. It’s essentially the same thing. And you as the mom get to go run off for hour two, three hours and have that all to yourself without having to stay up late or get up early.
Amy Stone [00:29:21]:
Yeah. Revenge. They call that revenge night owl. Like the. When you try and reclaim it after they go back to sleep, it seems like it’s going to work. And yet it doesn’t. Yet it doesn’t. We all try it. If you’re out there and you’re trying to reclaim after everybody goes to bed, we. We all. We sympathize. We’ve all been there. Like, it’s. It’s not a bad thing. Okay, so do you personally read or listen to books? And if so, do you want to share with us one of the last books that you read and enjoyed?
Alyssa Wolff [00:29:46]:
Yes, I love reading. I will listen, like, podcast binging. But I’m not really an audiobook person.
Amy Stone [00:29:53]:
Okay.
Alyssa Wolff [00:29:55]:
I bet I could find out for you. I could log into my library thing, because I go to the library every single.
Amy Stone [00:30:02]:
Okay.
Alyssa Wolff [00:30:03]:
And see what my checkouts were, because I’ve read them all already. Oh, I was reading some Clive Cussler books because it’s been a couple years since I read his Oregon Ship, Oregon Files series.
Amy Stone [00:30:16]:
Okay.
Alyssa Wolff [00:30:17]:
So every few years I go reread things because otherwise I will run out of stuff to read, which is maybe. Sounds kind of silly, but it’s true.
Amy Stone [00:30:25]:
So you were reading, rereading Clive Cussler books. Those can be very good. Those can be very, very good. All right. Very good. That’s a great suggestion. Okay, this is a question I’m trying out. Okay? So I want you to think back over your life about all the advice that other people have given you. And if there’s a piece of good advice, maybe even great advice that you remember that somebody has given you in your life, what was it? And if you remember who gave it to you?
Alyssa Wolff [00:30:50]:
I think it came from Ali Casaza, who’s current podcaster right now. And it was something along the lines of, if something feels heavy and stressful to you, you don’t need to be working on yourself to try to cope with it. That’s a permission slip. To make it lighter even if it means you said oh it’s leftovers night or it’s frozen meal night because you know supper was feeling difficult. Like relieve the pressure first and then think about a fix. Don’t just say oh it must mean there’s something wrong about me and forcing yourself to have that pressure.
Amy Stone [00:31:22]:
So yes. So she was saying, she was saying when something feels heavy or hard, make it lighter. Watch out that you’re not internalizing it and always making it about you. That’s a, that’s a very good bit of advice because that can be very hard. Like we, it can be very easy to slip into. If something’s not feel easy it must mean I’m not good enough. All right, that’s, I like that a lot. All right, that’s it. Alyssa Wolf, thank you so much for being an amazing guest today on the show.
Alyssa Wolff [00:31:46]:
Thank you, Amy. It was my pleasure.