I will share how you might apply these findings to your everyday life so you can experience real and tangible improvements in your happiness. As a wife and mom of three, I understand the challenges of juggling a busy family life while striving for personal well-being.

That’s why I’ll also be sharing my own stories and experiences along the way. Because let’s face it, life can get messy. Through it all, we can find and create intentional moments of joy. So, whether you’re looking for ways to boost your mood, improve your relationships, or simply add more enjoyment to your daily routines, Practically Happy is your guide to a practical, happy life.

Pass the Mic Summer Series

Hello there. Welcome back to Practically Happy and welcome to the Pass the Mic Summer Series. I’m thrilled to be able to share the mic this next couple month with friends new and old and have them share a little bit about their core messages, their core values, their businesses, their podcasts, and things that I think will inspire you, encourage you and help you feel a little bit more practically happy in your life.

I’m kicking off the past the mic series today with a good friend, Monica Packer. Monica is a recovering perfectionist, podcast host and a progress coach for women. She saves women from themselves by helping them ditch perfectionism, step into their gifts, and move toward real progress. Monica is a wife and mother of four who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Her podcast, About Progress, is a community of motivated changemakers that empowers women to take on radical growth through small and simple, sustainable changes. Monica is also a certified habit expert and the creator of the Sticky Habits Method, which she’ll share a little bit more about in this show today.

I’ve been connected to Monica for years. We’ve met in real life several times. And I’m super impressed by her authenticity. I know that word gets overused a little bit right now, but Monica is truly one of the most genuine and open-hearted women that I’ve ever met, especially on the internet.

I’ve mentioned on my own show my love for a type of content that she creates on her Instagram account called The Real, where she just shows you a room in her house. A real room on a real day, which I think is so healthy and refreshing, as I talk a lot about how sometimes we set our expectations by what we consume and being able to have someone sharing openly about what their real life with kids looks like is wonderful.

Monica is also an avid gardener, has a huge, beautiful garden that I love following along Monica is also a Jane of all trades, experimenting with all sorts of different hobbies and pursuing passions for progress, not perfection. She shares her pursuit of so many different ideas and passions and hobbies on her Instagram account and through her podcast.

I also really love this idea that she has shared and come up with that’s called the Do Something List, where every once in a while, maybe once a season, you write down some of the things that you’d like to do I’m excited to have Monica share with us a little bit more about what it’s like to create habits when you’re a woman and why women have to do habits a little bit differently.

I hope that you’ll sit back, settle in, and enjoy this episode.

Passing the Mic to Monica Packer

Miranda: Welcome to the Pass the Mic series for Practically Happy. How are you doing today?

Monica: Oh, I am so excited to be here. I am really thrilled to be a guest on your show.

Miranda: Good. I’m so happy that you’re here.

You’re a habits expert. You have a habits course. You’ve talked a lot about habits, and you have a great, your Instagram, I think, I love going to your Instagram and just learning little tidbits and how real it is. I, a couple of weeks ago on my show mentioned your real reels and it’s just so refreshing to have you be authentic about what’s happening in life, running a business and, learning how to do your habits well.

One thing that you’ve really narrowed in on is this idea that women can’t do habits the way that Where you know, maybe research tells us or all the big books about habits will tell you here’s how you do it and that doesn’t work for a lot of women tell us more about why? traditional habit making braking Systems don’t work for women

Monica: I’ll just start by saying that figuring out that answer was never the part of the plan.

That was not something I planned to even get interested in. I did not consider myself to be a habit person. Like I knew I could do my responsibilities and show up for those well, with my household or my work, but I just thought habit people were a certain thing. Type of person and a person that I had long let go of being, and in ways that were negative overall, because of perfectionism, like I just realized, Oh I thought there was only one way to grow and to develop.

And I thought it was all or nothing. And so, I thought those were, that’s what habit people are. They’re the people who are extremely type a very rigid and have a superhuman consistency and superhuman power. So, me even getting into the habit world, I think really ties into why women must do habits differently.

And that’s honestly a big factor right there is a lot of women discount themselves from this part of life because they’re simply so overwhelmed or they think only the whole people can have good habits for themselves. Or they get really frustrated with the traditional habit formation methods that they’re following, and they blame themselves instead of the methods.

And so, to teach about that, I’ll just share briefly. The reason I figured out that I had to do habits differently than I was being taught was because I had done a lot of internal work on trying to figure out who I was outside of my old perfectionistic tendencies. And these were tendencies that, were a spectrum for me.

They were all, they were the nothing, they were everything in between, but mostly it left me either in burnout or standing on the sidelines of my life. And I had worked hard on trying to figure out who was Monica outside of outcomes. As I discovered that it was helpful and I changed a lot, but I hit a big plateau with my personal development.

And that’s because while I knew who I was, my day-to-day life was not supporting that self. And that’s when I realized I had to start to work on better sleep. I needed more sleep. Clarity of mind through journaling. I needed movement to look and feel differently for me. And as I began to work on those things, I was following those traditional habit formation methods.

I’ve read all the bestsellers; you can name them all. I’ve read them all and I devoured them. And then as I worked to install what they were teaching me, some things would click, but most things wouldn’t. And I just kept failing at these habits. And. Thankfully, since I was already in this experiment of working on progress outside of perfectionism, I decided to experiment with habit formation.

Can it be something that’s also outside of perfectionism outside of this rigid consistency and all these ideas of basically forming perfect habits from day one and the ideal from day one and doing it for 28 days and boom, you have a habit. And I worked on a new way of forming habits. And I also did this with many women.

I was coaching and eventually hundreds of women who I’ve coached on habit formation, and we found a new way. And it’s a way that works for women who are across this, whole spectrum of who we are and what we do. It’s not just for moms. It’s not just for single people. It’s not just for working women.

It’s not for just for stay-at-home moms. It’s, Everything, because there’s one unifying reason why women must do habits differently. And it’s true for all the women I described and it’s true for all women. So now are you ready for me to answer your question? Yeah. What that reason is. I absolutely am.

It’s invisible labor. And a lot of women don’t even know what invisible labor is. So, I’ll just quickly define this and then I’ll let you talk to well, invisible labor. It’s not a new thing. This has been something that has been researched for decades. And I really dove into this research.

I’ve read so many books on it. My two favorites are invisible women by Caroline Cristo Perez and fair play by Eve Roski. But based on their books and the lots of research, I. Have my own definition of invisible labor that I know applies to all women. And invisible labor is the unseen, undervalued, and often underpaid labor that women perform to keep households, communities, and workplaces afloat.

And It’s unseen in so many ways. It’s just even as simple as who’s always trying to remember that the toilet paper needs to be restocked. it’s even who plans your work parties. It’s, who is taking care of an elderly neighbor. Who needs someone on standby for just a question they have or a need they need.

its almost always women carry most of the invisible labor. And again, that’s true for women, whether they have children in the home or work outside of the home,

Miranda: That’s so interesting. I’m thinking about this has felt really, of course, familiar to me as a woman, the stay at home.

Working mom, but a stay-at-home working mom with a flexible schedule. and a few months ago, at book club, one of my good friends who is a full time, career woman, she has two children and a full-time nanny because she works full time outside of the home and her husband as well works full time outside of the home.

And so, we were talking about, I think we were discussing the idea of, human giver syndrome that’s talked about in the Nagowski sisters’ book, burnout. And my friend said, what’s so interesting. She hadn’t realized how much of that invisible labor transferred to her workplace. She’s a senior level executive.

And she went into a meeting, and they were discussing an upcoming event. And the partner turned to her and asked her to head up the committee to plan the event. And she said, after she left, she went to lunch with a coworker who said, did that kind of bother you? And she was like, what did, what bothered me?

That you were the only woman in the room, and you were the one asked to chair the event committee. And she said, my jaw dropped because I did not even realize like, why didn’t they ask Ben or Jake to do the event committee?

And I think it was eye opening for all of us that like, wow, I think I’ve personally gotten a little bit of a handle on what it looks and feels like in my own life at home, like my household stuff, but the fact that it’s so pervasive throughout, all different roles, responsibilities, and seasons of life is really eye opening.

Monica: I found that eye opening too. And the reason why I discovered that was also by accident. And it was just because I was coaching women from all these different backgrounds and I was there to help them with their identity really, and perfectionism and working on that. But they hit the same plateau I did, and we had to work on habits.

Like they had to have their lives reflect and support that sense of self and no matter their background. They hit the same roadblocks that I did, and I’ll share some of those roadblocks because I think this is what’s going to help the women who are listening realize, wait, okay, this is a factor for me.

Invisible labor is a reason why traditional habit formations don’t work for me, and it’s because women have more interruptions. Both mentally and literally. And when I say mentally, I’m talking about that mental load piece. Like maybe you have a supportive partner in your life or household members who are really invested in sharing the load, but traditionally still women carry a higher mental load than their male counterparts in their own home.

So even mentally, we have more interruptions, but also literally. That’s one of the biggest factors, honestly, for the women I work with is just constant interruptions and fires that must be put out. Another factor is that women have less time. And this is honestly due to just maintaining the homes that we’re in, as well as those workplaces and communities.

Melinda French Gates, she wrote about this in her book, The Power of Lift. On average, women spend four and a half hours a day doing household chores while men spend less than half as much time. And this is, they’re not talking about stay-at-home moms. This is all women. That’s an average. So many women are spending way more and other women may spend a little less, but on average, that’s a decent amount of time.

We also have more reactive demands. Most women have responsibilities that are connected to people and that means we are in a place where we must be more reactive by nature. And because of that, we can’t just say, stop, wait, or don’t worry about that or, help you later. A lot of times it’s an immediate need that needs to be met by us.

And because of all of that, we also have less predictability. I literally don’t know a single woman with a consistent schedule she can count on. And I’m even thinking about my friends who do work full time, like in a corporate setting, they come home to the second shift or during the day, something comes up at their workplaces or their families where a scheduled day still has less predictability than their male counterparts.

So those are some of the factors there. And it’s more why this doesn’t work for women then is because the habit formation methods we’ve been taught rely on predictability. They rely more on willpower, which is just energy. Women have less energy because of all this. We are more tired mentally and physically.

They rely on a kind of superhuman. I wouldn’t say determination or willpower, because I think those can be often very loaded, but that’s the words we often hear. But essentially, they demand this like consistency and rigidity that is largely more possible for men than it is for women.

And this isn’t because men are the worst. They just have different lives than we do.

Miranda: I’ve done a couple episodes with guests, on this, the hormonal cycles of women and men differ, and men’s cycle is 24 hours. So, it’s of course you can have the same 24 hours because you’ve got this peak and ebb of your hormone levels.

For women, it’s just simply not like that. even if we are looking at consistency, that may be more attainable over 30 days. simply because physically, physiologically, we are different from week to week.

And not honoring that brings so much tension into, like really wanting things to be different, rather than accepting this is the season that I’m in right now. Even just on a week-to-week basis, which was really life changing for me when I recognized like, oh, no wonder I don’t feel like bursting with energy and ideas all the time, because that’s one week of the month that I’m really set up for that.

And then I’ve got to honor the other seasons as well.

Monica: That’s one factor alone that we could spend so much time on is just biology. Like you said, it’s physiology. I think it’s hope giving because what this can do for women is once they understand, I’m not broken, the methods are broken, then they can be willing to try to do things differently.

in different ways and to see how they can work in ways that are already in alignment with their life circumstances rather than against them. So, this should probably be hope giving.

Miranda: Yeah, and I do feel like that. I feel like that idea of oh, it’s not just me. There’s a whole system at play that I’m part of.

And some of it, just the awareness of that can be enough to start setting things down that maybe we take on unnecessarily because we assume them as part of our role. and then part of them are probably things that we’ll still take care of and oversee but with the awareness that means other things in our lives will have to go differently Which habit seems to be one of them.

I’d love to hear knowing this That habits must be different for women. What then? Does that look like how women can maintain or build or create some sort of rhythm or systems to do the things they want to do in their lives if it’s not with this, Rigid consistency doing it the same every single time

Monica: There’s a lot here and I don’t want to firehose your audience.

So, I’m going to give you a deep way to change how you’re doing habits that is a doable thing you can change starting today and more of a practical way you can change your habits starting today.

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I would love to hear how Green Chef goes for you and your crew. Let’s jump back into the show and hear Monica’s tips.

Monica: The first is to change the way you define and look at habits. A lot of how we are taught habits, and I’ll just say, I didn’t say this upfront, but I will say it now is those bestsellers, the thing they have in common is that they’re all written by men.

And again, it’s not because they’re awful, they just have different lives. So, what I’m going to teach you we can take the best of what they’ve given us. Cause there is a lot of good there and we can alter them to match women who have little time and low energy and limited support and lots of interruptions,

Miranda: right?

Monica: first big change I mentioned is shifting the way we look at habits. So, we are shifting from looking at them as prescriptions and metrics that we must meet. So, we’re shifting from metrics and prescriptions to the idea and the belief and the life changing understanding that habits should be there to support you.

And that’s it. That’s habit’s purpose. They’re there to support you. so, you can show up as yourself for yourself and for your responsibilities. And that often means the people in your life too. When we shift that habits are there to be for us, that means we can choose the habits that are right for us, and we can choose them to do them.

can choose to do them in ways that are right for us too. So, it’s less about what we’re supposed to be doing and more about what we know we need and want to do for ourselves. And that can even just shift something as simple as how do you exercise? I think we have, that’s one of the most common things women want to work on with me.

And we must start by first. Getting clarity on what are the metrics and the prescriptions they carry around about exercise and when they switch the way they look at habits, they can also switch the way they look at exercise. So, if exercise is there to support me, what kind of exercise would do that?

What frequency? What intensity? And that’s going to be different for every woman. And sometimes it’s going to be different for different seasons of our lives. 2023 was a season of me trying to recover from having my fifth kid and me having my world basically torn apart. Like it just was like a bomb hit my entire life.

So, exercise for me was more about just having a moment to myself. And sometimes it really was literally a moment, and it was about giving myself. That time, but also just some gentle movement. This year is a little different. My husband just got me super heavy weights for Mother’s Day because I’m ready for more intensity.

I’m ready for more of a push. So, when we change the way, we look at habits, that also means we have the flexibility we need to do them in ways that match what we want and need in our seasons. And that’s huge right there.

Miranda: Yeah, and can I add, something that I think was fascinating about exercise in particular and, consistency, which consistency is a loaded word in habits, but, one of a study that I read last year in graduate school that I loved because it felt really aligned for me is that, People are more likely to return to activities that they enjoy in the moment rather than activities that they think are good for them.

So, I heard my whole life you should exercise because it’s going to feel so good later. You’re going to have them, you might hate it while you’re doing it, but you’re going to get this runner’s high after, or you’re going to, like your body’s going to feel so good, or you’re going to be so clear in the head later.

And so, I would try these things that I didn’t really enjoy. I don’t like. A lot of types of exercise. And I was so confused why the later benefit didn’t work for me. And then I was like, read this, fantastic study about how the best way for people to exercise is for them to do things that they like.

And take the confining definition of exercise out of the gym and put it into maybe it’s gardening, maybe it’s walking, maybe it’s shopping, maybe it’s, whatever it is, but there’s some way to move your body that feels fun to you that you look forward to that you want to do.

And it’s not just about enjoying it later. It’s about enjoying it while you’re doing it. Of course, you’re going to want to return to it. That makes so much sense. Oh yeah, it’s not the thing that I dread, it’s the thing that I desire. That feels like an important shift

Monica: It’s working with our brains, which I love because habit formation really is just brain hacking. And it’s finding ways to do that work with our own limitations that we shared earlier. And one of them, like you said, is to make sure the habits themselves feel good. That’s a brain hack right there.

Miranda: Yeah, absolutely. So, I love this idea of redefining what a habit is and that’s the going deep. So, what was the next one?

Monica: The practical one is to design your habits, so they have built in flexibility. Now this is one of those things I could talk about for an hour. So let me give you just a minute.

We’ve talked about consistency a lot and how the way habit formation methods traditionally are taught as they rely on rigid consistency, and that’s the kind of consistency women don’t traditionally have. And that is across the board. That’s science back by the way, this isn’t just anecdotal or my own experience, or even just a couple of women I’ve worked with.

This is across the board. so, we must redefine consistency in many ways. And consistency is. not, contradictory to flexibility for women. it works. It’s complimentary with flexibility. These two things work together. When we allow our habits to have some built in flexibility, then we can be consistent because habits still live and die by consistency, but it’s not the way that we’ve been taught.

Consistency is doing your best most of the time. Over time. So, consistency is more times than not. And it’s also allowed to change. It’s allowed to change day to day or week to week. If you’re in a low part of your cycle, it’s allowed to change seasonally. But the overall idea here is instead of starting with an ideal habit, the ideal, like the end point of where I want to end up with the habit.

You have what I call as a baseline and the baseline is the smallest and simplest version of your habit that you can do when you have the lowest amount of energy, the smallest amount of time, the most limited amount of support and like the most interruptions. And it will feel laughably small. a built in flexibly habit, like a flexibly built-in habit. That will allow you to be consistent is what will help you one has the habit and consistent ways, but also in ways that it can build quite organically and sustainably, which is key right there. because. While you grow towards your ideal, your baselines grow too.

What you can do on your worst of day gets better. I think about this with journaling. I’m not naturally a journaler and this is one of those things that I like the results better than I do the process and I have found ways to make the process feel a little better too with that brain hacking we just talked about.

But my journaling was to just write one line in my journal. And I thought before a paragraph a day was reasonable, but it wasn’t because I wasn’t doing a paragraph a day. So even starting with a paragraph a day would have been too much for me. Having a baseline of one line in my journal, over time, my baseline changed.

Became a paragraph and more of my ideal became like a page, but funnily enough, a lot of times we discovered that the baseline is enough. Like right now I still journaled for my kids, but for myself, that was something that I decided was not in my season last year, 2023 and 2024.

I have picked up again. I started with my baseline of one line and I’m telling you, Miranda, it’s been about three months with my baseline. I’m happy with my baseline. That’s all I need right now. It’s giving me the feelings I need from it. It’s serving its purpose and gradually over time, if I want to build it towards a bigger ideal, I can,

It doesn’t have too either. It can just be the baseline. So again, the practical way that we can change a habit right now is to create some built in flexibility with a baseline version of your habit.

Miranda: Yeah. I love this idea.

I have incorporated this idea into my life, and I’ve shared it with a few of my one-on-one coaching clients as well. When we’re trying to build something what do you want? How do we begin? you don’t jump from I never, get out the door with my exercise clothes on to I’m going to run three miles every day.

That’s just, that gap is wide. It’s the same thing as someone saying I want to write a book, but I won’t sit down and write a word. you’ve got to break it down to the point where it feels so easy. It’s of course I can do that right now.

That’s where you begin with these things and what that does it, I, at least I noticed for myself that. Starting even with something teeny tiny overcomes the activation energy of the task. Yeah. And this is a hack that I use not only for habits, but also for projects that I want to do,

I told my husband I know these, I’m doing all the things, like I wrote it down. I told someone I have accountability. I have it on my schedule. I’m doing all these. And I did not feel like it. I was sitting there listening to my audio book, just I just, I don’t want to do it. I don’t, I didn’t feel like it.

And so, I told myself, I’m going to get the caulk gun out and I’m going to do one inch. Yes. And that was like, I’m going to do one inch, but guess what? Of course, I did one inch and suddenly, I’m in there and I’ve got in my hand. And so, then I called the whole bathroom, and it only took me 25 minutes and it was done.

But if I had thought I’m going to do the whole thing, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I just needed it to be so tiny that it was like duh, that’s silly. Of course, I can do that one tiny inch. And if I had just done one inch, I would have been satisfied. But I did end up, overcome, like it wasn’t the project.

It was the getting up and doing it. That was the hard part. So, once I overcame that, I was able to continue. I think so many of the things that we want to do regularly in our lives are like that, where it’s like, oh, it feels like there’s like a big giant boulder between us and that goal, even the bottom, so if you just turn it into a pebble.

Then you’re much more likely to get started.

Monica: Yeah. baselines are another example of brain hacking for habit formation. It’s the ultimate brain hack because it creates momentum and we know from physics, that momentum, ball motion stays in motion. So oftentimes. we can do a little more than the baseline, sometimes a lot more, but no matter what, it’s that feeling of doing something is hugely validating.

one of the ways that we can rewire the way we see ourselves as part of habit formation. It always goes deeper. I started this work because of identity. even habit formation has brought things back to identity and the way we see ourselves. we can rewire that alongside our habits because we are doing the thing we’re following through.

We’re supporting ourselves,

Miranda: right? Yeah. I love that. I really appreciate the Sort of outline and framework that you’ve given us here of first recognizing that habits must be different for us because of all the invisible labor and the interruptions and the loads that we’re carrying. And then going into redefining what a habit is and that it’s meant to support us.

And it’s meant to like, be there for our benefit, not so that we, become some idealized version of ourselves. And then this breaking it down to what is the minimum possibility to have you still feel like you’re doing the thing you want to do and allowing that baseline to flex and change as necessary.

Where do people go if they’re like, okay, I get it. I’m going to work on it, and I want more. Where can they go? Work with you.

Monica: Yeah, I’ve got a live course that I teach just a few times a year It’s called the sticky habit intensive because that’s what I try to help with women as we create sticky habits that stick But I’m going to not host that until the fall So if they want to be in the know, I would have them listen to my podcast.

It’s free I talk about habit formation there, but we talk About anything, personal development outside of perfectionism. It’s a pretty, vast category. And we learn so much from guests and you also get to hear me coach women once a month on the podcast as well. So, my podcast is called about progress, and they can find it just wherever they’re listening right now.

Go and find me and listen. And you’ll hear when the sticky habit intensive opens in the fall.

Miranda: Sounds amazing. Monica, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your insight today with my guests. I was so happy to pass the mic to you and happy to have you accept.

Monica: Thank you. I really appreciate

Miranda: this opportunity. What a wonderful way to kick off the Pass the Mic series this summer on Practically Happy Podcast. Thank you so much, Monica, for joining me. I hope that you’ll all find her podcast about progress wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts and tune in to Practically Happy again next week and all summer long for the continuation of this Pass the Mic series.

I’ll chat with you again soon. Have a wonderful week, friends.