Welcome to this new series on the blog called: My Big Five! I’m excited to share with you a simple process, which I took very seriously, that has changed my life significantly. This post will tell you all about “My Big Five” and the process, give you a preview of each of my five focuses, and share how the benefits from the way it’s transformed my life. I’ll follow up with five additional posts, each going into a detailed deep dive of the five separate foci. 

Let’s dive in!

Instagram can be a place of inspiration if we allow it to be a tool for ideas instead of a comparison trap. Early this year, I saw a post from Alistair Humphreys that served as a launchpad for taking his idea, making it my own (one of my favorite things to discuss), and allowing it to work for me. 

Here’s his original post.

In the post, he encourages us to narrow down the five things most important to us to focus on. I loved this because my word this year is attention and I’ve been praying this simple prayer for months, “God of purpose, direct my attention.” In such a noisy world, filled with brokenness, problems to solve, causes to become involved in, and people in need it can be so hard to put our attention in the places meant for us. Whether it’s the culture, a natural bent toward empathy, or the influx of constant information there can be a false sense of the need to do something about everything.

I’ll never forget, a few years back, after a tragedy (I sincerely don’t remember which one now because we move so quickly from one tragedy to the next) I saw a post on Instagram reminding us all: we aren’t required to have commentary on every, single, event. This echoes the sentiment I’ve been seeing lately directed toward a generation of adults who were taught to care about changing the world that, perhaps, we aren’t meant to handle the mental load of all the world’s issues, concerns, and situations needing attention. Perhaps we are meant to have finite focus on a few things, which we are either naturally disposed to care about, called to care about, or we have a connection to in real life.

This is what intrigued me about Mr. Humphreys post. He suggested we select those five things we feel most compelled, passionate, or connected to, focus on them intentionally, and this is the part I felt I needed to hear most, trust the other things we wish we had bandwidth to do or advocate for will be done by someone else.

How refreshing. The sixth thing I wish could be a part of my time and attention? It’s in someone else’s top five. This reminded me sometimes when we care about everything, we’re not only dividing our focus so our own work is never stellar, but we’re also taking away the space needed for someone else to rise into their calling. 

As a mother, in particular, this was a message I needed. Mother culture today tells us we can and should do everything; and if you are burnt out at the end of doing everything, just complain about your kids, bash your husband, and drink too much wine. Instead, we should be acknowledging we cannot do everything, care about everything, and nurture everyone. Instead, we should narrow our focus and direct what we can do, can care about, can culture well. I would truly rather do five things well than twenty things poorly. And when the constant stream of information is barraging me, and moving me onto the next thing needing attention before I’ve processed the last one, I know my overwhelm can lead to me doing nothing very well except feeling overwhelmed and defeated. 

Mr. Humphreys’ post gave me hope. A different way. A path to not only tune out the noise but give me clear boundaries to be able to direct my attention, and trust the rest will be beautifully handled by others with big hearts and better ideas. 

Here’s the process, as described by Mr. Humphreys:

Step 1: Problem Dump

Write every issue taking your attention. Nothing is too big or too small in step one. But get it all out.

Step 2: Narrow the Focus

Highlight the ones you’re best positioned to do and get rid of the rest. Identify connections among the things you’ve highlighted

Step 3: The Fun Fix

Brainstorm solutions you’re excited about, you’re positioned to do something about, and/or are interconnected with each other.

Step 4: Narrow it to Five Solutions and Get to Work

Stay focused and integrate the five things into all the parts of your life.

This process resonated with me from my experience helping college students (and myself) set learning and life goals. Often in goal setting procedures we encourage individuals to get all the ideas out and then narrow down to goals that are measurable, specific, time bound, realistic, and interconnected. This all made good sense to me as a process. But like with anything, I think it’s good to tweak these kinds of suggestions to make them your own. Here’s what my process looked like in real practice.

Step 1: Problem Dump and Walk Away

I have a tendency to want to name these things (whatever it is, goals, character traits, five foci) and move on. I want to rush this stage. So I told myself I was going to take a long time and be very deliberate. I wasn’t going to rush this process.

So I brain dumped into a small notebook it’s easy to keep with me wherever I am, and then put it away and vowed not to move on for at least a week. Over several days I found myself adding to the list, “oh yeah, I was fired up about this issue last week but I forgot because it’s so noisy and distracting!” I kept letting myself do this to truly get it all out. I let myself forget I was in this process for days at a time and then have something remind me and add it to the list. My list had all kinds of minutia on it but that was the point: to get all the little things and shake them out of the crevices of my brain where they’re taking up space and energy.

And every time I looked at it, before I stepped away again, I prayed over it; asking for discernment and guidance.

Step 2: Draw Connections

I sat outside one afternoon in the grass and drew connections between all the tiny things to be able to see what things fit under the same or a similar umbrella. I asked, “do these things go together? Or could they?” I tried to see some problems differently. I wanted to understand if after pulling them all apart they either fit back together, or didn’t.

Here I prayed again for the Holy Spirit to guide me, to show me connections, to make things obvious.

Step 3: Eliminate

Anything that wasn’t connected to something else and fitting neatly under an umbrella category was immediately eliminated. If it isn’t something interconnected then it’s not for me to be putting energy and attention into, at least not in this season of my life. With only so much bandwidth I needed to find things that were going to feed each other, not pull me in a different direction. I asked for more guidance to see what needed to be eliminated and also for peace in letting things go, and prayer for whomever is supposed to tackle the thing I was releasing.

Step 4: Let the Big Ideas Simmer

Next I wrote on a fresh page of the notebook (you can imagine the page was pretty messy at this point) the big umbrella ideas that had emerged. Then I walked away for a week again. I carried the notebook with me and would look at throughout the week and consider what was there. More prayer each time: for revelation. “Show me what you want me to pay attention to and what is for me.” I’d edit as the edits came and refined. In some cases, I eliminated again – I had more than five and I knew where this was going after all. If it wasn’t sitting with me as something I really felt excited about or positioned to do well or called to focus on, I might as well let it go sooner rather than later. 

Step 5: Select the Big Five and Make them Actionable (and pretty)

I chose my big five areas to give my attention. And prayed once more, for the opportunities to move into what I was feeling called to pay attention to.  I wouldn’t call these big five solutions the way Mr. Humphreys did; instead they’re where I’ll give my energy. Under each of the five categories I wrote out examples for myself of what I’m doing or would like to do that qualifies as a solution, action, or task for each specific focus. Then, I wrote my big five on post-it notes, created a beautiful background to color, left space for those examples to rest under the post-its, and brought it to life. Just like this!

My Big Five Focuses are:

Cultivating the Atmosphere of Our Home

Adventuring with My Family

Encouraging Homeschool Families

Increasing Local Access to Nature, especially for kids and families

Fostering a Love of Beautiful Stories and Words

I’ll get into the examples of how I am or plan to live out these focuses in the rest of the series. But I want to share how this is shaping my life.

The Transformation:

These five areas of attention are serving as guides. I’ve used goals and values before to help me to decide where to put my energy, but as a recovering people pleaser, those often got trampled (because I let them) to give energy to things I didn’t intend to or desire. In my past this has often resulted in a lack of boundaries. But here, these aren’t my values or goals, which I can modify to accommodate or make someone else comfortable. No. These are where I put my energy. I can determine if something is for me or not based on whether it fits in one of those categories. While I’ve loved using family values as a filter for what’s right for my family, and am pretty good at holding those, I’ve never found anything quite so strong as these big five intentions.

Want me to teach a nature class to kids? Easy yes. Want me to teach you how to make fresh-milled bread? Can’t. It’s not in my big five. It used to be something I tried to do and failed at horribly. And you know what? I know someone who can! I know someone who is focused on that and doing it well and if I would get out of the way, you could know them too. Book the camping trip? Easy yes. Book a speaking engagement about the academic research I used to do? Nope. Not what I’m working on right now, and maybe not ever again.

And that’s the beauty of this, it’s fluid! I could re-do it every year (though I don’t think I will – but you could!). My big five today aren’t the same five biggest things I was passionate about five or ten years ago, and I anticipate these will change as well. Maybe some will just modify as the years go on, but some will probably get ripped off and replaced. Which is why I wrote them on post-it notes: to remind myself these aren’t permanent, but they are purposeful. 

Want to try to determine your big five? I’d love to hear about it!

And make sure you’re subscribed to see how each of my five focuses looks in my day-to-day as we continue on this big five series. 

Thanks for being here!