How to stay calm (or try) with kids moving stuff between houses with Amy Stone

Kathi: Hi everyone. As promised, I'm here with Amy Stone, and we are talking about how to adult. She's the creator of The Art of Imperfect Adulting. And boy, we all need to know that, right? No matter how adult we think we are, there's always some improvement. So welcome to the show, Amy.

Amy: Thank you so much for having me, Kathi. I'm happy to be here.

Kathi: Yeah, absolutely. So you have a great background. Talk to me about how you learned how to adult. What's the beginning of that whole process?

Amy: So I love this question. I like to say that I have experience, as everybody has, and my experience is only my own. But my line is that I learned how to adult. My skills were forged in the fire of life, as everyone's are. There is this idea that I at least had when I was younger that I was supposed to already know how to do a lot of these things, or know what was coming next. Shockingly, news flash, I have been surprised over and over again, all the way through. And somewhere along the line, I realized, you know what? Maybe I'm not supposed to know all these things. Maybe the skills that I really have that are helping me get through this are the tenacity to believe in myself, my faith that I'm going to figure it out, my ability to not take myself too seriously, and to surround myself with other people who have different experiences and different skills who can help me get through the things that I don't know how to do.

Kathi: Yeah, I love that. We think we're supposed to know everything. And what's ironic about that is our 17- and 18-year-old selves thought we did, I would say all the way up to 25.

Amy: I had all the confidence that you can only have when you are that age. Sure, what could go wrong? No problem.

Kathi: Exactly. We don't future pace on that. I think imperfect adulting is not future pacing, actually. Stop future pacing. We don't need to go there to the doom and gloom. Or sometimes we do, with worry, right?

Amy: I think sometimes it's unavoidable. I even think that sometimes running a worst-case scenario can be helpful in lowering an anxiety level if you really are catastrophizing. How likely is it that XYZ is going to happen? Sometimes it can be scary, but other times it's like, hey, if I fall off my bike, what am I going to do? If I get a flat tire on this road trip, what am I going to do? So sometimes it can be helpful. But if I get caught in that loop where I can't get through it, never ever do I find that to be a helpful thing.

Kathi: Absolutely. I agree. When you run the scenario of what's the worst thing that could happen, that's generally not actually the worst thing that could happen. It's always something you can get through.

Amy: Yes.

Kathi: Now, I love this Stepparent Success School. Let's talk about that a little bit.

Amy: You bet.

Kathi: What happened with that? Obviously, you must be a stepparent.

Amy: I am a stepparent. My stepkids are grown. I was a stepparent before I was a parent. So I dated, fell in love, and married someone who already had kids. They were four and eight when I met them. They are now both in their 30s, so I've been a stepparent for a very long time. We talked about the confidence that you have when you're young. When I started my role as a stepparent, which is a famously hard job, famously hard job, I had blind faith and confidence that I was going to be able to pull this off. My gut feeling was, I'm nice, they're nice. What could go wrong? So many things, Kathi. So, so many things. What I came to learn is that even though it's estimated that four out of 10 adults will be in a position where they will consider themselves a stepparent or a bonus parent at some point in their life, it is amazingly unsupported. It is hard to find people who will help you. This is true of a lot of things in adulting, and specifically within families: you can find yourself asking people for support who have a lot of judgment. They make assumptions about what you are. It's a tough thing to figure out. And because of that, when I got into the position 20 years later and somebody said, "Hey, what's something that you can help people with?" I was like, "Oh, well, this is a thing that people ask me about a lot." How did I make it through? How did I manage to be in that role that is so famously challenging? And the answer is because I'm perfect. No, I'm just kidding. I'm more than happy to share the challenges I had and the mistakes I made and then how we worked through it. My stepkids both still speak to me. We have a decent relationship. I added two more kids to the family very quickly, which will surprise no one, and that made nothing easier.

Kathi: No, made everything much more complicated. So you had a four-year-old and an eight-year-old, and then you came along with two more.

Amy: Two more. So a total of four in this house. My husband's ex also had two more kids, so my stepkids are two of six. The two youngest in my house are two of four. We needed a lot of extra tickets for many, many graduations for a lot of years.

Kathi: Obviously a lot of extra cash, I am sure of that. That's a lot of mouths to feed, and a lot of varsity and all that extra stuff that kiddos like to do.

Amy: Yeah, it was a very complicated season for a very, very long time.

Kathi: Yeah, absolutely. So I love the Success School. Is that something that people can join, or how does that work if people are stepparents or newly stepparents, or they still can't figure it out? What happens with what you're doing with this?

Amy: So Stepparent Success School is completely self-enclosed. I'm happy to work with stepparents as a one-on-one coach. There's never going to be a situation where I would talk to a stepparent and turn them away for assistance. But the truth is that when stepparents come to me, it's not a topic that people initially want to talk to a stranger about. And so that was something I grappled with all the way through. I always had in my mind the reality of me as a young stepparent, when I was questioning my life choices. That was often on a Saturday afternoon, or a Tuesday night at 11 p.m., sitting on the floor in my closet, or sitting in the car in my driveway, questioning my life choices. So as I built a collection of tools and skills that were translatable and that I was able to teach people, I was repeating them a lot. I put them together into an online course. Stepparent Success School is something that people can come into. They can purchase videos and worksheets and emails, and a way to reach me for follow-up, and they can stream it and get all of these things on their own. I took a training on how to do premarital coaching, and that's the framework I built it on. And then I updated it with the realities of a complex family, the potential of other extra people that are there, and all the things that come with stepparenting.

Kathi: Wow, that's amazing. It's similar to what I did with my online course. It's all the things that people ask you, right? That's what we do as entrepreneurs. So if you're listening as an entrepreneur, even if you don't have stepchildren or you think you're adulting, think about what people ask you all the time and what your skill set is, and you can create courses around that. I did that with Home Organizing Made Simple, with home office organization. You did that with Stepparent Success School. What people are asking us is what you can bring forth in the world as your gift. So I think that's awesome, Amy. And they can go through the course, and then they're like, "But what about this, or what about this?" And then it's time for one-on-one, once they understand what they don't know.

Amy: What they don't know. Yeah.

Kathi: That's what I tell people with the home organizing course. Go through it, and then you'll understand what you don't quite understand. Then it's really appropriate to do one-on-ones, because you have really succinct questions about your specific challenges.

Amy: Absolutely. And the big challenge with one-on-one work is really getting the two calendars together. Having something that people can just download and get is not the same. Not at all. I do my very best to make it as comprehensive as possible. It's not the same in that respect, but you don't need to fit into my timetable. You can be in Australia and I'm in Miami, and you can get those things, and then if you have a follow-up question, you send an email and we can do things like that. So that's the reason it was important to me to get it to a place where it was that. There's also, I'll use the word privacy, but privacy is not exactly the right word. It's reassuring and nice to have somebody. Most of the time when stepparents reach out to me, I'm the first person that they're telling they're struggling. They've been keeping it inside for a very long time. It's actually a big reach. People don't like to raise their hand and say, "Hi, I'm really struggling to get along with these kids, and it probably is me," or, "I made this major life commitment, and I think I made the wrong decision." So creating a way where they can hear me supportively talk about the situation, and share stories from myself and other clients so they feel less alone, I think that has a place also. You can do that within the privacy of your earbuds, wherever you are. And then once you have gone through that deconstruction, you say, "Oh, okay. Now I'm ready to talk to somebody specifically about this. I'm not embarrassed. I'm not ashamed. I know that there's lots of people out there going through the same thing. And here's where I'm struggling." Because the struggles that stepparents go through are simultaneously unique and the exact same as other situations, right? The struggles that I went through as a stepparent in a big, busy family, keeping myself organized and things like that, had some unique things because I was a stepparent. But I learned a lot of things from people who were not stepparents. How to organize family meals for a big family that sometimes shifted at the last minute. It might be eight people, it might be 10 people, it might be four people. You've got kids in high school, and they show up and they're like, "Hey, I've got three extra people. Is there extra food?" Or at the last minute they're like, "So sorry, I know that dinner's usually at 7:00, but I'm going to the mall." Learning how to navigate that kind of stuff is not always specific to a stepparent.

Kathi: Yeah, I get it. And every time I do these podcasts, I learn that as entrepreneurs we have so many commonalities in what we do and why we do it. It's the same thing with people that want to get organized. Half the time people don't want to say, "I can't really get organized." Just like, "I don't feel like I'm being a good stepparent." But then once you dig into it and see that other people are having the same issues, it helps a lot. And that's why we do online courses, quite honestly. So tell me, Amy, have you been an entrepreneur for many years, or how did this come about? When did you start?

Amy: I have been an entrepreneur for about 20 years. The first business that I started was right when I came home to have kids. I owned a portrait studio here in Miami for about 10 years, and then I closed that because the portrait industry changed. That's one of those fun things where it was legitimately a very organic, spontaneous business. My degree is in photography. That's what I studied in school, and I worked as a freelance photographer. I thought I was going to work for a newspaper, but in my opinion that business was not viable when I graduated. But when I was having kids, I bought myself a new camera. I was taking pictures of my own kids, and other people were like, "Hey, will you take a picture of my kids?" And I was like, "Sure." And within six months, I had a brick-and-mortar store and other people working for me. That was a beautiful, wonderful entrepreneurial experience. I loved it. It was an industry I knew and understood from the ground up. Closing it was hard. It was absolutely the best thing to do, because the industry shifted, and it would have collapsed under the weight of itself if I had not closed it on my own terms. And then I retooled and went into coaching. It wasn't an immediate thing. It took a little while. But now I call this the rule of 35, and the 35 is how old you are. It's not really a rule. It's a little bit of a joke. But whatever your hobbies or your skill set are when you're 35 years old, people are going to offer to put you in a leadership or training position for that. If you're in an office, you might be stepping into a mid-level management thing. If you work in a bank, you might be training. If you work in HR, you might step into training. But that's also when we become yoga instructors and Pilates instructors and running instructors and all of these things. Whatever your strengths are, like you were saying, whatever the thing is you know how to do, that's right around the time that you're like, sure, I'll show other people how to do it. And that's also when my life shifted and I stepped into coaching.

Kathi: Ah, that's interesting, the rule of 35. It's true. By then we're like, oh, this is what I like. This is what I love. And the ultimate job or career to create for yourself is one that you love anyhow. I always say whatever you can do standing on your head or asleep, that's your God-given gift, right? So if you can figure out how to do that and make money at it, then you're on the right track. You're doing what I would call your dharma, what you're naturally born to do. I love that conversation. This is good. So what's a lesson that your business has taught you as a coach? What's the number one takeaway that you've learned after coaching clients for years?

Amy: Oh, the number one takeaway. The number one takeaway that I've learned as a coach is that almost always, the first thing that people bring up is not actually what they're going to need help with. And I think that's true outside of coaching, too. It takes some time to have the experience as a coach to allow the conversation and to ask the right questions to figure out what is the issue behind the issue. And that's very nuanced. It goes both ways, right? Sometimes it becomes a deeper issue. Somebody will say, "My problem is this," and then you talk about it for a while, and you find out it's something deeper. And other times people think they have a very complicated issue, and it is a logistics situation. One of my favorite stories about working with a family is this. I was working with a very, very big, complicated blended family. There were eight people in one house, and they were very well supported. They had therapists and doctors and all of these things going on, lots and lots of help. We were working together for a while, and they thought they were coming to me for strategies for talking with the kids about the chore schedule. So they thought it was a communication issue. The thing was that they had a laundry schedule, and people were not sticking to the laundry schedule. So they're telling me this, and they're telling me all the things they've tried and all the other people they've talked to. And meanwhile I am looking down and making notes, and I just said, "I don't think there's enough time in the day for all of you guys to do laundry with one machine. There's too many people. And who wants to be assigned laundry time at 1 in the morning?" So I was like, "Can we send some of this out? Can we do these things?" I was throwing out all kinds of things, because this was a resource issue as far as I could see. And then I said, "Is there any way you guys could install another washer and dryer?" And their eyes just lit up, and they're like, "Sure, we could put another washer and dryer in another place." And this became a hilarious thing. They were like, "You should get a commission from Home Depot." They thought it was hilarious, because they had talked to other people about this. They had charts and conversation flows on how to talk about this. And I was like, I think you need more machines. Their kids ranged from 6 months to 21 or 25 years old, and they had been fighting about this for a long time amongst each other: the adults and the kids, the kids on kids, all of these things. And families are complex, so conversations and arguments will flow from day to day. They just go on and on. So they called a family meeting, and the kids were ready to pounce. They were ready to rumble. And they were like, "We're going to get another washer and dryer." And it was party time. Everybody was like, "What? That's the greatest." So sometimes it's just as simple as an outsider saying, "Hey, this is impossible."

Almost always, the first thing that people bring up is not actually what they're going to need help with.

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Kathi: Right. Yeah, I run into that all the time. The moms who are stay-at-home moms, the laundry is a big deal.

Amy: Yes.

Kathi: There's so much laundry to do. It's either washed or dried and on the dining room table and not folded, or it's folded but not put away. The whole process of going from the dirty laundry to the washing machine, then the dryer, then the fold, then the drawers, is a big, huge deal. I often will tell my clients to job it out. Take it to the fluff and fold. You don't have to be the perfect mom that does every single piece of laundry. Outsource that puppy, or pay your house cleaner a little bit extra to do the laundry while she's there. There are all sorts of things. But with eight people in the family, I can see how they couldn't see it.

Amy: Oh, yeah. I can't even imagine. Can you imagine? You've got eight people, and you go in and somebody's stuff is still in the washer, and all these things. And after that, I've talked to other people who have big families that are not even blended families, and they're like, "Yeah, right at about six kids, that's where you run out of space, and you've got to look to add in additional machines."

Kathi: Oh, that's a good rule. I didn't know that.

Amy: Yeah. Exactly.

Kathi: You need a new machine or an extra one. I have an extra-large one, and I just love it, and I only have two people in my household. It's great. I only have to do two loads a week, because it's gigantic.

Amy: So it's brilliant. There you go.

Kathi: That's a good rule of thumb. Anytime you have six kids or more, buy an extra machine. I love that. Yeah, that's so cool. Okay, so that was a good story. What's a good story that you remember that will always stick in your mind, about your clients or maybe yourself going through entrepreneurship? What do you have to say?

Amy: A memorable story for me from entrepreneurship. Goodness. I don't even know where to start. Give me a hint of something that you'd like to hear. So I guess here's one with stepparenting that I'll share. One of the things with entrepreneurship, especially service-based entrepreneurship, when you first start is: how are you going to find the people who you're going to work with, when you start talking about yourself being in business and put yourself in a spot where people can hire you? When I launched the coaching, we had already started working remotely and doing a lot of things on Zoom, so I was very focused on connecting in online ways. But then, not even kidding, I was at a parent event at one of my kids' schools. I don't remember which one. I was introducing myself to someone, and I screwed up my courage and I was like, "Yes, I am going to mentor and coach stepparents." And somebody that wasn't even in the conversation tapped me on my shoulder and was like, "Hey, did I hear that you just said you work with stepparents?" And I was like, "Yes, this is like the third time I've said it out loud, but yes." And they were like, "Oh, I'd love to talk to you about that more." And that was a person that I worked with. I remember that because it was really reassuring. You just have to tell people. You have to be willing to tell people. That's one of those things about entrepreneurship that I don't know a way around. I think there are lots of different ways to build a business. But when I hear people who are really struggling to tell people that they have a business and what they do, I'm personally like, you want to pick something you're happy to talk to people about all the time, because that's when it works. And if you feel weird about it, you can work on it. But the people who are most successful, I think, are happy to tell people all the time. You don't have to tell everybody, but you want to be able to.

You just have to tell people. You have to be willing to tell people.

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Kathi: Yeah, you want to tell everybody pretty much what you do. Hang your sign, for sure, verbally. What are good ways that you've found to market your coaching business?

Amy: To market my coaching business. This is changing very rapidly, but I'm a big believer in creating optimized content. So I write articles to answer the questions that people are looking for. For adulting, that can be about burnout, overwhelm, feeling like you're not enough, loneliness, finding friends, transitions, life change. For stepparents, it was a lot of stuff like: I'm not sure if I like my stepkids. I'm not sure if my stepkids like me. What if I made a mistake? So I would write detailed articles with tools that would answer the question that people would pop into Google. Google's not working the way it used to because of chat and all of the AI things, so that is shifting, but it is still what I do. And then the other thing is making friends and putting myself in places where other people have audiences. So speaking, podcasts, conferences, groups, any place where I can find other people who have an audience to introduce myself to.

Kathi: Absolutely. We run parallel marketing strategies, for sure. When I first started my company, I started writing a column in the Coast newspaper here, which is a news group here. It was a Dear Kathi column. It made me write 500 words a week, and it answered people's questions. So then I knew, this is what they need to know, right?

Amy: That's great. Yeah.

Kathi: It worked wonderfully. And that was back in the day when Google loved unique content, and unique content was the big reward with Google ranking for SEO. So that worked out nicely on all counts. But if you're listening out there and you're considering how to market, I think the big takeaway from what Amy said is to listen to the questions that you're receiving. Write around the questions. And even if you consider yourself not a good writer or author, it doesn't really matter. Put down your thoughts on paper about what you would suggest based on the situation. What is your solution? And then obviously there are so many ways to edit it into a better article in this day and age. But it's your unique response to their question that's going to make you stand out among everybody else who might be doing similar things to you. Although I've never run into a stepparent coach.

Amy: I know there was no one when I tell people that. As a new business, I'm sure you tell people this all the time: niche down, niche down, niche down. But when people asked me what I was going to do and I said, I'm going to coach stepparents, nobody said that to me. They were like, well, that is niched. So I didn't get that. But when you niche specifically, it has to be something that people will self-select into, right? And you have to be able to find them. That is a struggle with different groups of parents and adults. People rarely walk into a room, online or real, with a name tag that says,

Kathi: Exactly. "Hi, I'm an unhappy stepparent."

Amy: That's not how people introduce themselves. So putting myself in that spot is there. But I think that it is still the answer. I know there's a lot of flexibility and confusion right now in the online business space. It's weird, because I hear it from both business owners and clients. People are struggling to find answers for things that they have questions on, and people who have answers are struggling to find the people asking the questions. So I think it's going to work itself out in time, and we will all go on and be happy and joyous.

Kathi: Yeah. That's weird that you're finding people that can't find answers, maybe for their specific thing.

Amy: Their specific thing. Exactly. There's never been more information easily accessible ever before, and yet sometimes you don't get the answer that you want. My theory is that's because everything is so niched and so siloed that you have to already know the way to phrase your question. And the struggle is that you don't, when you're first starting. I don't know about where you live, but to give it a super hyper-local context: in Miami, where I live, everything is subdivided into all these itty-bitty little towns, right? It might be coded for one of the names of the town. You're like, "Hey, where do I buy shoes in Miami?" And you get answers that are 150 miles away. But if you knew to ask, "Where do I buy shoes in Coral Gables?" then you would get the four answers that you were looking for. I don't know, things are not matching up. Now you walk out and you're like, what happened? How come nobody told me? It's like there's a break in the system.

Kathi: Yeah, I totally agree with you. Are you in Coral Gables?

Amy: I'm in Coconut Grove, which is right next to it.

Kathi: Oh, yeah. I love Coconut Grove. That's great. Awesome. Okay, cool. So I have to ask you about organizing. You obviously have created some organizing systems in the past for yourself.

Amy: I have.

Kathi: What's your favorite organizing hack? Well, let's talk. Your kids are older now. What did you use calendar-wise? How did you do the family calendar back in the day?

Amy: All right. So truthfully, true story, true Amy story: the family calendar got me and my husband into marital counseling at one point, because it was not working. And this was before Google Calendar existed. Oh gosh, I wonder if I can remember any of the names of the calendars. I don't, but we were using paid systems. And every week I just felt like I was being sandbagged by whatever was happening on the weekend. I would think I knew what was going on, and my husband would come over and be like, "Oh, the big kids have these plans." And I was like, "What? I didn't know any of that." It really left me feeling destabilized and not empowered and just horrible about my life choices. And truthfully, honestly, I was blaming his ex-wife. I thought that she was not giving him the information. She knows this story, and I have permission to share it. I even wrote a book that includes the story. That was not the case. She was giving him the information. He was just not doing anything with it. So we were fighting, and we ended up working with a therapist who would sit us down, and he offered calendars that we could use, but all of them required that my husband be willing to give the information. And he would say every single week, "Sure, I'll do it. I'll do it." And you know what he didn't do, Kathi? He did not ever. Still to this day, this is a problem in our family. So I got very good at really communicating my calendar. Back in the day, I printed out a manual Excel spreadsheet of the things that repeated and pasted it up on the refrigerator. That was round one. People made fun of it. And then I will never forget, my stepson looked up and said, "Oh, well, you'll be over here, because it says that there." And I was like, "It's working. Would you look at that?" Today I live and die by Google Calendar.

Kathi: Oh, me too, girl. Google Calendar rocks.

Amy: Yeah, I live and die by Google Calendar. My husband does not. He is on Outlook. The way we fixed this is we bypassed him. We bypassed him. He still thinks that Google Calendar is like magic. About six years ago, we were looking for a new house, and I gave the realtor access to my calendar for scheduling showings and things like that. And my husband was mystified. Mystified. They always knew when I was available, and he just thought it was totally magic. So I can't say that I have a magic solution, because in our family, what actually happened was that in communication, he was the weak spot. So we had a set time on Wednesday and Thursday where he and I would touch base: what is coming up? And the kids learned, and his ex-wife learned, that anything important had to be communicated directly to me. And they were old enough to do that. It's not great communication. You're not supposed to put the pressure on the kids. But they learned to bypass their dad so that I knew where they wanted me to be. And anything that I wasn't told, I gave myself permission to not do. So if I found out on a Friday about a birthday party or an awards ceremony, and it overlapped with nap time for one of the babies or swim lessons or something else that was scheduled, I no longer took that personally. I was like, "No, nobody told me." So I give myself permission to protect my time and not feel badly about it, and not do it.

I give myself permission to protect my time and not feel badly about it.

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Kathi: I love that. I love that. And I love the fact that with Google Calendar you can share it with everybody.

Amy: Oh my god. Yes. People put stuff in it, everybody, everything.

Kathi: Yes. I mean, I pay for it through Google Ads. Click on little ads. Please, everybody, shop with Google Ads, because Google Calendar is the best product ever, and it's free.

Amy: It is. I know.

Kathi: It's an amazing tool. Back in the day, it was like, let's have family meetings. I would counsel my people: let's have a family meeting on Sunday. Let's figure out who has to go where and when and how, and who's going to be the driver. And without the family meetings, the calendar will fall apart. I can't even imagine how you handled that back in the day. The Excel spreadsheet.

Amy: We had Excel spreadsheets, and we had a scheduled, mandatory meeting. Sometimes it was a phone call. The idea of a family meeting can get oversold, but it was an intentional, scheduled conversation, and the point was: we need to know what's happening on the weekend. Who needs to be where? Who has an orthodontist appointment? All kinds of things like that. Because it's a lot.

Kathi: It is a lot. You're a brave, brave woman.

Amy: Thank you.

Kathi: We talked about reflecting back, but we didn't know what we didn't know when we were 18. If you had to tell your 18-year-old self something now, what advice would you give the little Amy that's just starting out in life?

Amy: Oh. So 18-year-old Amy was pretty bold and had lots of ideas about what she wanted to do, and I was really courageous, and I think that was good. When it comes to big life decisions that we make, I think the advice I would give myself is to really think about why this is the best decision for me and my future life, as much as you can. Because sometimes we get wrapped up in the way life is supposed to look, the plan we're supposed to have. I need to be married by 30. I need to have kids by this age. I need to own a house. I need to be at this level in my job. All of those things. And that's fine. I think all of that is good. But it can put you in a spot where you might make a decision that is just based on: this is the person or the house or the job that's in front of me in this moment. And it might be the best decision, but it might not. And specifically with stepparents, I had a choice, right? I could have walked away from that relationship. And people did tell me that it was going to be hard. They told me. It's not that I didn't listen. I just didn't know what it meant. Specifically, my mom looked at me and she was like, "This sounds like a lot." And I took it as a challenge, Kathi. I was like, "You don't think I'm up for this? I'm a hard worker. I can do whatever I want." And I don't regret the decisions I made, but I can see how, if I had taken longer to step back and say, why do I think that this is my best future? Why do I think that this relationship is the best for me? I might have done things in a different sequence. Maybe not, but yeah.

Really think about why this is the best decision for me and my future life.

Kathi: Yeah. How old were you when you married into your first set of stepkids?

Amy: So I was 25 when we started dating. Because I didn't know any better, we bought a house together before we got married. It worked out for me, and I'm really, really lucky, but I've talked to hundreds of people where it doesn't work out. It's not a great decision to make. And then we were married when I was 27, I think, and 29 is when I added the kids.

Kathi: Wow. Okay. It's an amazing journey that you've been through, and what you offer. I'm just so glad to have you on the podcast, because I know that I have a stepparent audience out there who are probably wondering what to do. And also my audience are entrepreneurs, so we've given some tips. Amy and I both are like, do Google Calendar. I just finished a Google master class, and Google Calendar is the most important thing that you can do: integrate your life with that, for sure. So I know you probably have a free, valuable resource that people can download. Let's talk a little bit about that before we wind up.

Amy: Sure. If you are a stepparent, I do have a stepparent-specific resource, which is a Stepparent Success Kit. It's based on a book I wrote called Blend, which is about the 10 things I think I learned in 20 years of being a stepparent, and it's a quick highlight of those things. That's available for free at stepparentsuccessschool.com. And for everybody who's not a stepparent, all the other people, I have something called a Serenity Scorecard at imperfectadulting.com. It's a quiz where you go through and score different things, and it helps you figure out which area of your life might be stressing you out. It's interesting, because sometimes it's the pile of stuff on your desk, and other times you take the Serenity Scorecard and you're like, oh wow, it's not actually this. It's that I don't feel like I have control over my meals, or whatever it is. So that's available at imperfectadulting.com.

Kathi: I love that. We'll put the links below in the show notes. If you're listening on YouTube, it'll also be in the YouTube notes, so you can grab those free resources. That's super generous, and it's something that everybody needs, actually: where do you need serenity?

Amy: Exactly. I love that I call it serenity. When I named it, I was totally thinking of that old Calgon commercial, where it's like, "Calgon, take me away." That is exactly where that came from.

Kathi: I love that. Well, I love the title of your book, Blend, too. I think that's just a really great title. You're a good marketer, girl.

Amy: Thank you.

Kathi: Okay, cool. So is there anything that I should have asked you that you really wanted to talk about before we close out?

Amy: No, I think you asked some really enlightening questions, and I loved having this conversation.

Kathi: Absolutely. It's been fun. Okay, everybody, grab the download, and until next time, we will see you next week. Every week you can catch a podcast on Organized and Energized! The Podcast, and we will see you there. And by the way, if you like it and you see it on YouTube, wherever you see it, please give me a thumbs up. Please give me a good review. I ask all my podcast guests to review other podcasts. Let's grow the channel and spread the word. Especially if you know people who are stepparents who are struggling, make sure to pass on this video to your friends. They will appreciate it, and they will thank you. Thanks, Amy.

Amy: Thank you, Kathi. Thank you so much.