Podcast · Kids & Family

3 in 30 Takeaways for Moms

A podcast with 3 actionable takeaways in every 30-minute episode because you are a busy mom with a full schedule and an even fuller brain. Listen in to feel encouraged and inspired, as we learn together how to overcome overwhelm and find more peace and magic in motherhood. Hosted by Rachel Nielson,

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 38 min
Latest: 12 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

12 Oct 2026 · 38 minNew

506: The Episodes We Almost Skipped (and Why They Stayed With Us) // A 3 in 30 Birthday Celebration 🎉

Nine years ago this month, I recorded the very first episode of 3 in 30 in my closet, took a deep breath, and pushed publish. That night I celebrated with my husband and our two little kids, never imagining the people I'd get to learn from or the women I'd get to work alongside in the years ahead. Every October I look back on that day with a little bit of awe and a lot of gratitude, and this year I wanted to celebrate the show's birthday in a way that felt especially meaningful to me, by handing the microphone to my team members Emily, Christy, Abby, and Steph, who are each sharing the 3 in…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

5 Oct 2026 · 33 min
505: Minimizing Power Struggles (from Toddlers to Teens) // Denaye Barahona
The power struggles in our home used to be about car seats and leaving the park. Now they're about phones, sleepovers, and YouTube. But whether you're dealing with little kids you can pick up or teenagers who tower over you, the key to handling power struggles is usually the same. When a power struggle starts, it's so tempting to dig in and prove who's in charge. But I've learned that the tighter I grip, the harder my kids pull, especially as they get older and need more room to grow. This week's guest is Denaye Barahona, PhD, child development expert and founder of Simple Families.In this…
E504 · 28 Sep 2026 · 31 min
504: How to Build Sturdier Self-Worth as an Adult // Dr. Marisa G. Franco
The first time my therapist asked me to picture "little Rachel" on the playground, glasses and all, and offer her the comfort she needed, I thought it sounded so woo-woo. I went along with it, but I was skeptical that imagining my younger self could change anything about how I feel today. What I didn't know then is that there's real science behind exercises like that one. Our sense of worth is built on our memories, and researchers are finding that when we revisit those memories in the right way, we can actually change how they're stored in the brain.This week's guest is Dr. Marisa G.…
E503 · 21 Sep 2026 · 39 min
503: Stop Comparing Yourself to Other Moms (Do this Instead) // Shawnee Burt
When I interviewed Shawnee for this episode, I had to chuckle, because one of the things she listed as soul-care was volunteering for her kids' PTO. As an introvert, I think of the PTO as the classic example of something moms finally learn to say no to, so seeing it on her list of things that fill her up was the perfect reminder that there's no single right way to be a good mom. That's the heart of the Self-Assured Motherhood Program. I'm not here to tell you what kind of mom to be. I'm here to help you figure out who you already are, what you need to thrive, and how to love your people in a…
E502 · 14 Sep 2026 · 36 min
502: 3 Principles that Carried Me Through a Really Difficult Summer
A few weeks ago, I wasn't sure I was going to open enrollment for my Self-Assured Motherhood Program this year. Of all the work I do, SAM is where I feel like I'm making the biggest difference, but I honestly didn't know if I had it in me. My brother-in-law Logan died unexpectedly this summer, at 44 years old, and I spent most of the season at my sister's house doing dishes, walking the dog, and sitting with her in her sadness. I barely worked at all, which was exactly how it needed to be. But when my kids went back to school and I thought about gearing myself up for another enrollment…
E501 · 7 Sep 2026 · 39 min
501: How to Thrive, Not Just Survive, Your Kids' Extracurricular Activities // Meesha Slade
The sign-ups have started coming in. Fall sports, piano, dance, school plays – it's a lot. And while we know we want our kids to be involved in things so they can thrive, too often we're left burned out and... not thriving. It's easy to assume the problem is the number of activities, and that the fix is to cut something. And sometimes it is. But a lot of the time, the schedule isn't actually the thing making us feel resentful or burned out or exhausted, and cutting out activites won't necessarily touch what's really going on. This week's guest is Meesha Slade, a mom of three busy kids, and…
E500 · 31 Aug 2026 · 38 min
500: Habits for Moms Who Are Bad at Habits (Like Me!) // Monica Packer
Consistency has never come easily to me. I'm a scattered creative, I have ADHD, and I have struggled with routines and habits for pretty much my whole life. For years I assumed that meant something was wrong with me, and I felt like it was my fault that I couldn't stay consistent with anything. But this week's guest, Monica Packer, has changed how I feel about habit-building. Monica hosts the podcast About Progress, she recently wrote the book Sticky Habits, and she's one of my best friends in real life. She has spent a decade teaching women to build habits in a way that is compassionate and…
E499 · 28 Aug 2026 · 13 min
499: Support Their Struggles // The Back-to-School Check-In for Moms #6
My instinct, when one of my kids is struggling, is to solve it, save them from it, or to worry about it so intensely that the worrying becomes consuming. These instincts are natural because I love my kids so much, and I hate to see them in pain. But they also don't work, at least not very effectively. Our children need to experience hard things in order to grow, and the most useful thing I can do, as their mom, is to walk beside them, listen to their big emotions, and help them find resources. It doesn't come as instinctually because it's a slower process, but it's what they really need when…
E498 · 26 Aug 2026 · 16 min
498: Gather the Good // The Back-to-School Check-In for Moms #5
What you look for, you will find. I have believed that about motherhood for a long time now, long enough that I built a whole journal around the idea, and I have heard from hundreds of mothers who have had the same experience. They weren't finding more good because their children had suddenly changed. They were finding more good because they had started looking for it. That is the whole heart of today's principle, and I love teaching it because it is such a happy way to parent. It makes you feel like a good mom. It reminds you that your kids are awesome, even on the days they are hard. And…
E497 · 24 Aug 2026 · 16 min
497: Sanctify Your Soul-Care // The Back-to-School Check-In for Moms #4
I have a confession. Of the six principles I teach in Self-Assured Motherhood, soul-care is the one where I'm still not where I want to be. I've taken good care of my mind and my spirit over the years, but when work gets busy, the first things to go are exercise, sleep, and eating well, and I'm starting to feel the cost of that in my body as I get older. I say soul-care rather than self-care on purpose. Self-care has gotten a bad rap over the last few years, and I understand why. It has come to sound like bubble baths and expensive skin care, which can be an overwhelming (and not always…
E496 · 21 Aug 2026 · 14 min
496: Balance Your Boundaries // The Back-to-School Check-In for Moms #3
After years and years of therapy, I have gotten pretty good at setting boundaries with almost everyone in my life. My weakest area, by far, is my own children. I'm a softie, and it is very difficult for me to let my kids be unhappy and not immediately try to resolve it. That instinct comes from something real, because connection with my children is one of my true strengths and I lean into it on purpose, but it can tip over into permissiveness pretty easily. And since I work from home, the line between when I'm mom and when I'm working has stayed blurry for years, which means I have been…
E495 · 19 Aug 2026 · 16 min
495: Celebrate Your Strengths // The Back-to-School Check-In for Moms #2
I have spent so much time, energy, and money over the years trying to get good at the things I am simply not good at. Routines are my big one. I am not great at keeping our home organized and running on any kind of rhythm, and there have been whole seasons where I decided that fixing that about myself was the most important work I could possibly be doing. Now, there's nothing wrong with striving to be better, and I am fully on board with growth, but we all have a finite amount of energy, and every hour I spend hyper-focusing on a weakness is an hour I don't get to spend magnifying the things…
E494 · 17 Aug 2026 · 18 min
494: Voice Your Values // The Back-to-School Check-In for Moms #1
It's back-to-school season, and our kids are about to be assessed on their reading, their math, and their writing. But what if we gave ourselves an assessment for how we're doing as moms? (And I don't mean a test involving balancing equations... I would rather not know my score for that. 😬) Instead, we can assess ourselves on our emotional wellbeing, because that affects everything about motherhood. And so I've created a mini series to give us exactly that.In this mini series, there will be six short episodes that walk you through each of my six principles of Self-Assured Motherhood. These…
E493 · 10 Aug 2026 · 44 min
493: How to Calm Your Nervous System in 60 Seconds (And Other Small, Practical Pauses) // Layne Burkette
I have never been much of a meditator. Sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, waiting for my brain to go quiet, has never once worked for me. I'm too in my head, too cerebral, too prone to just thinking harder instead of actually feeling calmer. So when I recorded this episode, I wasn't expecting to walk away from it more relaxed than I've felt in weeks. But that's exactly what happened.This week's guest is Layne Burkette, a licensed therapist who specializes in somatic and nervous system work.If you're heading into back-to-school season already feeling the overwhelm creep in, this…
E492 · 3 Aug 2026 · 39 min
492: Why Abby Is Done Fighting Over Screen Time (and Other Back-to-School Shifts) // 3 in 30 Team
If the back-to-school season is already creeping up on you (the supply lists, the new routines, the mental math of who needs to be where and when), you are not the only mom feeling that low hum of stress. Every year it sneaks up faster than I expect it to, and every year I tell myself this is the year I'll feel ready. And... I never quite do. (Maybe you can relate! 😆) So today I'm handing the mic to three of my favorite people to talk this through with: Abby, our Finance Director, Emily, our Marketing Director, and Christy, our Operations Director. Each of them is going to walk us through…
E491 · 27 Jul 2026 · 31 min
491: How to Change Someone's Life (Without Even Realizing It)
With back-to-school season right around the corner, I keep thinking about a moment from my own high school years – a moment so small I barely registered it at the time. I noticed a kid sitting alone, stuck out my hand, and said hi. That was it. What I didn't know was that it would change his life, and honestly, mine too. This is a re-air of one of my favorite episodes from the archives, originally recorded as an interview I did on the podcast Becoming for Teens. I'm bringing it back now because our schools need more kids brave enough to look up, reach out, and make someone feel like they…
E490 · 20 Jul 2026 · 38 min
490: 3 Things to Remember When Parenting is Difficult
Lately, my kids have been watching a lot of TV. More than I'd like to admit. And for a while, I let myself spiral about it. What kind of mom lets her kids zone out on screens all day? What is that doing to them? But then I caught myself, because I've learned that there's a difference between self-confronting and shame-spiraling. And, once I stopped the shame-spiral, I reminded myself that our family is going through a hard time right now, and if some extra screens are going to support us through it, that's not the end of the world. What our home needs most right now is compassion. My kids…
E489 · 13 Jul 2026 · 47 min
489: How My Mom Helped Me Know Myself
Grief has been close to my family lately, and in the weeks since losing my brother-in-law Logan, I've found myself returning again and again to the memories that hold the people we love, long after they're no longer here. This July 14th marks twenty-three years since my mother passed away from breast cancer. I was nineteen years old. And this episode (one of the most personal I've ever recorded) is my tribute to her. My mom had a gift for seeing strengths in her children before they could see them in themselves — and for my mom, helping me find my voice, quite literally, was one of the most…
E488 · 6 Jul 2026 · 40 min
488: A Letter to My Body (and Two Other Essays I Wrote in Recovery)
I have been a writer my whole life. Long before this podcast existed, writing was how I made sense of my hardest seasons, how I figured out what I actually thought and felt, and how I slowly found my way through pain I didn't know how to carry any other way. Some of that writing happened in therapy. And some of the most important pages I ever filled were written during my recovery from an eating disorder.In this episode, I share three of those pieces: an essay I posted on my personal blog, a narrative therapy piece my counselor guided me through, and a letter I wrote to my own body.…
E487 · 29 Jun 2026 · 38 min
487: How to Raise Patriotic Kids When It Feels Complicated // Sharon McMahon
I'm a word person. (Occupational hazard of spending years as an English teacher, I suppose.) I notice when words shift — when something that used to feel simple and clear starts carrying extra weight, or gets claimed by one group of people until the rest of us feel uncertain about whether we're still allowed to use it the way we always meant to. That's what's happened, at least in my experience, to the word "patriotic." And more than my own discomfort, I started to feel genuinely unsure how to teach my kids how to be patriotic in a country that often feels so divided by partisan politics.…
E486 · 22 Jun 2026 · 36 min
486: Let Go of the "Shoulds" That Don't Fit Your Family // Amy Marie Hann
For years, I had a vision in my head of the kind of mom I was going to be. I would be present and patient. I would have snacks ready after school and summers full of creative activities. When I finally became a mom, I struggled to match the realities of the daily motherhood grind and the ideal images of motherhood I had in my head. This week's guest is Amy Marie Hann, author of Master the Mundane. I asked Amy Marie to come on the show because of a Substack article of hers I read all about letting go of "shoulds." Amy Marie shares three big things she finally let go of and what opened up for…
E485 · 15 Jun 2026 · 39 min
485: The Resentment that Moms Don't Talk About // JoAnn Crohn
I have a friend named Laney who genuinely does not experience mom guilt. Not because she's a perfect mom, but because she's decided her kids are lucky to have her — and she means it! I used to laugh when she said things like that. But, now, after working for years on myself (I've come so far!), I understand that what I was struggling with wasn't only guilt over my shortcomings as a mom, but it was also guilt over the resentment I felt for everything I was carrying that led me to not enjoy my motherhood very much. The guilt was coming at me from every direction! If any of that sounds…
E484 · 8 Jun 2026 · 40 min
484: In Memory of Logan McKenna: A Conversation with my Beloved Brother-in-Law
I am recording the intro to this episode during one of the saddest weeks of my life. My beloved brother-in-law, Logan McKenna, died unexpectedly last Sunday morning. He was only 44 years old, and we are simply shattered by this loss. As soon as I got the call, I got into my car and started driving to Utah to be with my sister and her two teenage children. And as I was driving, trying to wrap my mind around the immensity of this loss, I thought, "I am so glad that Logan agreed to be a guest on my podcast a year ago so that we can have his goodness and wisdom recorded forevermore." This…
E481 · 1 Jun 2026 · 35 min
483: Types of Support that Every Mom Needs
I've spent a lot of time thinking about what the word "self-assured" actually means in the context of motherhood. And I think somewhere along the way, a lot of us accidentally absorbed this idea that being self-assured means being self-sufficient — that if we were really emotionally healthy or mature or confident, we would just… handle everything on our own. But what I observed at my SAM Retreat last month completely reframed that for me. The women who seemed most grounded and alive and resilient weren't the ones who never needed support. They were the ones who knew how to seek it, receive…
E482 · 25 May 2026 · 34 min
482: It's Never Too Late for a Fresh Start // Wendy Snyder
If you've ever worried that you've messed up your relationship with your kids — whether it happened this morning or years ago — this episode is going to bring you a lot of comfort. This week's guest is Wendy Snyder, founder of Fresh Start Family and author of the brand new book Fresh Start Your Family, and she is living proof that it is never too late to start fresh.Wendy shares some of her own biggest parenting mistakes in this episode with a vulnerability that I find so rare and so refreshing — and the hope she offers on the other side of those mistakes is something every mom needs to…
E481 · 18 May 2026 · 40 min
481: What to Do When Your Child Says "I'm Fat" // Steph Wood
Last week, Dr. Lexie Kite gave us tools for our own body image resilience. But there's a particular kind of helplessness that comes from watching your child struggle with theirs. It can be heartbreaking to hear them say something and not know what to do with it. This week's guest is my Communications and Podcast Manager, Steph Wood, who has done deep personal and practical work in this area and brings both wisdom and hard-won experience to this conversation.This episode is the perfect companion to last week's — if you haven't listened to that one first, I'd love for you to start there, and…
E480 · 11 May 2026 · 44 min
480: How to Stop Letting Your Body Image Steal Your Summer // Lexie Kite
I have spent so many summers halfway out. Physically present at the lake, the pool, the family barbecue — but mentally somewhere else entirely, cataloguing how I looked instead of actually living. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. This week's guest is Lexie Kite, PhD, co-author of More Than a Body and leading expert in body image resilience.Lexie and her twin sister Lindsay have spent decades researching how women can stop letting their bodies hold them back from their own lives — and in this conversation, she gave me some of the most practical, grounding tools I've heard on…
E479 · 4 May 2026 · 39 min
479: Teaching Kids Life Skills This Summer // Katie Kimball
My kids are 11 and 14, and I will be the first to tell you that teaching them practical life skills is not my strongest suit. I am genuinely good at the emotional work, the hard conversations, the staying connected through difficult seasons. But the cooking, the chores, the keeping-a-home-running piece of parenting is an area where I know, with great compassion for myself, that we have room to grow. Summer has a way of opening up just enough space to do something new, and this episode will give you a clear and hopeful place to start if you're like me and it's not your biggest strength. This…
E478 · 27 Apr 2026 · 37 min
478: What Every Mom of a Teenager Needs to Hear // Emily Ricks
There comes a point in parenting where you realize the approach that worked when your kids were little just doesn't work anymore. The rules, the structure, the ability to redirect and reset — it all starts to feel like it's slipping. And if you have a teenager, you might already know that feeling well (iykyk 😅). The older our kids get, the more we bump up against a humbling truth most of us weren't quite prepared for: We never really had control to begin with. And once we accept that, we can finally ask a much better question — not "how do I get my teenager to behave?" but "how do I stay…
E477 · 20 Apr 2026 · 32 min
477: How to Process Your Emotions (Even When You Don't Know Where to Start) // Kim Christensen
All of us have hard feelings that need somewhere to go — frustration, resentment, grief, the anxiety that just sits there and won't quite leave. And if you're anything like me, finding a reliable way to process any of it doesn't always come naturally. We push through, or we vent to someone who didn't necessarily sign up for it, or we just wait for the feeling to pass on its own. And sometimes it does. But sometimes it doesn't, and it just kind of settles in. This week's guest is Kim Christensen, a published writer and master's graduate in creative writing who has spent her career helping…

About 3 in 30 Takeaways for Moms

3 in 30 Takeaways for Moms is a English kids & family podcast from Cloud10. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Cloud10
Language: English
Category: Kids & Family
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 38 min
Latest episode: 12 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1296627876
Rights: Cloud10

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