Welcome to Part 4 of planning your Best Homeschooling Year Yet.

In the last post we created a homeschool manifesto. Today we are going to look at feelings.

How does your homeschool feel to you right now? How would you like it to feel?

I recently read The Desire Map by Danielle Laporte, and had a big ‘ah-ha’ moment. She says that

“You are not chasing the goal itself, you’re chasing the feelings that you hope attaining those goals will give you.”

We often set goals for ‘things’ instead of thinking how the ‘getting the thing’ will make us feel. Yet what we are really wanting is the feeling. When you set a feeling for a goal, it allows you to open yourself up to getting what you want in unexpected ways. Sometimes we don’t even need the ‘thing’ to get the feeling we want.

Danielle says :

“When you get clear on how you want to feel, you may go after different things, and you may go after them differently.”

I know this is true for me. For a number of years now I have been setting a theme word for my year. And the word makes a big difference to how we live that year.

I realized that my theme words are about how I want to FEEL during that year. What emotions do I want to evoke?

It seems like such a simple thing to do, but it can really set the tone. Imagine how different your homeschool year would look as a year of  ‘adventure’ vs a year of  feeling ‘peaceful’. And when we strive for the feelings we want, instead of for arbitrary academic achievements, then we can really live our homeschool life more deeply and fully.

So how about you? What feelings do you want to associate with your homeschool this year? Set a word or two as the theme – and let me know what it is in the comments!

Next up – 20 ways to plan your best homeschooling year yet