Follow the show:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Everywhere else
Balance is a feeling. It is not found in a perfect set of circumstances, it is found inside your body. This is an important distinction to make because the process to creating balance isn’t found in changing your job or working less hours, it’s found in you. You are in control of creating a balanced life and it is only possible when you are feeling confident in yourself and your work. This is part 1 of a 5 part series covering the proven 5 step process I teach inside, The Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective.
Topics in this episode:
The importance of thinking amazing things about yourself
What it takes to end all the scripts that say “I am not good enough” or “I didn’t do enough”
Why your job never creates balance
Balance is not dependent on the number of hours you work
Show Notes & References:
Ready to create sustainable work-life balance? Join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective
Don’t forget to leave a rating and review to help spread this resource to other working moms!
Enjoying the podcast?
Make sure you don’t miss a single episode! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or where ever you listen to podcasts.
Leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.
Transcript
Intro
Hey working moms, happy monday. I'm just really excited today because I have a very special treat for you. I am on a mission in life and in my business to help working moms create a balanced life. I 100% believe that the issue of balance can be eradicated in our generation and my generation. As a working parent, we no longer have to choose between being a great mom and having a really successful career that we love, we can have both if that is what we want. And that is really my goal as a coach and in all of the programs that I teach is to help working moms feel empowered in that choice, to give them the tools that they need in order to successfully balance both in their life. And over the next five weeks, I am going to be teaching right here on this podcast, the exact five step process that I teach in my coaching program, the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. These are the five steps that are required for anyone that is looking to achieve work life balance. I formed this process after four years of coaching and having helped hundreds of working moms achieve what can often feel like this very elusive and mysterious feeling of balance. And really the goal when I started the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom's Collective was to take the mystery out of balance.
I want work-life balance to feel attainable to everyone.
It doesn't matter your job, your boss, your team, or the amount of things that you have to do on your list. It doesn't matter if you are a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher, if you work at a startup, or if you work on a team with people that don't have kids. The five steps that I'm going to walk you through over the next five weeks, they focus on the only thing that you ever have control over. When you follow these five steps, you are taking ownership over your own balance in your life. When you follow these steps, you are telling yourself, I am in control.
My approach to work life balance is ownership. I never want you thinking that you need a different job in order to attain work life balance. What I teach is that work life balance is possible for you all of the time, and you control it. And the reason I teach this is because it's really the most useful belief to have. Because when you're thinking that in your job work life balance isn't possible, your only option in order to have a balanced life is to quit. That sort of sucks if you don't really want to quit your job, if you've worked really hard at getting where you're at in your career, if you're an accountant and tax season is always a time that you feel completely out of balance and you work crazy hours and it feels like work life balance is completely unattainable if you're believing that then your only option is just to slog through it and work obsessively through that season until it's over. And that sucks to think that balance is only possible half the year. I don't want you to believe that. I want you to have the tools that put the ownership of a balanced life in your hands.
So here's how it's going to work; we're going to spend a little time talking about what balance actually is because we have to get very clear on the goal of what a balanced life even means to you. Then I'm going to cover the five steps to creating sustainable work life balance in your life. These are the same five steps that I teach all of my clients, and then we're going to dive really deep into that first step. Are you ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom podcast, a place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
What is balance?
Okay, before we can start talking about the five steps, we have to get really clear on the goal. What is balance? Balance is sort of a catchall word, right? That describes a very individualized experience for everyone. I mean, if you asked five of your working mom friends what balance really means to them, you'll probably get a pretty varied response. For some, they're going to talk about wanting to be present. For others, it's going to be this feeling like they're not working all of the time. For others, it will be having more time for themselves, having more time for their family. For others, it's going to be feeling like they are on top of things and they're not behind. I highly suggest that you spend some time considering this question for yourself. If the goal is work life balance, and that's probably a big reason why you're even listening to this podcast, you need to understand that your brain needs to have a really clear picture about what a balanced life even looks like for you. You have to take the mystery out of it so that your brain can truly understand exactly what it is you're trying to attain. This is one of the exercises that I take all of my clients through when you first join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, you start with really naming for yourself this goal and painting for yourself a picture of what a balanced life means to you. What would you be doing in a balanced life? What wouldn't you be doing in a balanced life? Your brain really needs to see it. And so I spent a little time walking my clients through that process of getting clear on the end goal. Now, although a balanced life might really look different for you, than it does for me and for any other working mom. There for sure is a commonality balance, at it’s core it is a feeling. Even think about the way you talk about balance, you probably say, I want to feel balanced. Balance is an internal experience on some level, and this is a really important thing to understand because it tells you exactly where you're going to go find balance. You're not going to find it outside of you in a job or with your husband, doing more chores around the house, or in finding a more equitable schedule where things feel a little bit more even in your time, or even by spending more time with your family. Those are all things that happen outside of you that do not, in fact, create balance. Because balance is something that you're going to find inside of you, it comes from the ways you are thinking about yourself and your life and your achievements and your job and yourself.
As a mom, I want you to take a moment and really consider how different the process of creating balance would be if you were looking to attain balance outside of you versus looking to attain balance inside of you. It's a completely different process. What I teach inside the collective is that we are not trying to chase some perfect set of circumstances, we don't want to depend on your job, or your spouse, or the amount that you can produce, your productivity, your time - that can't be our focus. Those things are not always inside of our control. Instead, as we talk about these five steps and what I teach to all of my clients is that I want to focus on creating the internal experience that you desire. I want you to create this feeling of balance and I also want you to consider that this is really good news because it is a lot easier to create a balanced life when you realize that it is something that is fully inside of your control, that you're the only one that can make you feel anything. No one else can take a feeling and put it inside of your body. Your feelings are your own. You are fully in control of it. So as we go through these five steps, I want you to know that of course, things externally do need to change. You probably do want to be more productive with your time. You probably don't want to be on your phone all the time. You probably do want to feel more present with your family. You probably don't want to feel like you are always on. You probably do want some uninterrupted time for yourself and with your family. For sure there are some external changes that need to happen that you want to happen. What I'm offering to you is that when those external changes happen, they in and of themselves are not what creates balance for you. They can't actually make you feel anything and I know this because I have clients that come to me working 60 hours a week, and I have some women that come to me working 40 hours a week, and then I have some women that are coming to me that are in the middle of a job change and they're not working at all. And all of them say that they feel out of balance. Why? Because their circumstances, your circumstances never determine an internal experience for you. They never determine whether you have a balanced life or not. So although we do want to potentially change how many hours you work and we do want to make some changes to the way you are interacting with your work and how you are structuring your time and things like that, we do want to make those changes, but we don't start there. We start instead with the things that are 100% in our control, which is our thoughts and our feelings.
Moving from a state of imbalance to balance.
Okay, so let's talk about the five steps. And the way I like to think about it is as you follow these steps, you are moving from a state of imbalance to balance. It's almost like these are the stages that you have to walk through.
Step one is that you have to feel really good about you. You have to believe that you are valuable, successful, adequate enough, no matter what. No matter if you are making $200,000 or you're making $50,000, no matter if you get everything done on your to-do list today or you get nothing done on your to-do list, no matter if you spend 3 hours of time with your kids at the end of a workday or 30 minutes, no matter if you get promoted or fired, you have to know deep down at your core that you are amazing, and that that is unchangeable and unshakable based on your circumstances.
Step number two, you have to be very clear on what it is you want. What do you want out of your career? What do you want out of motherhood? What are the things that are most important to you? You have to give your brain some sense of direction on where the priorities lie.
Step number three, you have to learn how to control your mind. Your brain cannot be living in a place of negativity all the time. You have to learn how to shift your thoughts away from feeling not enough and being not enough and feeling like you're lacking and feeling inadequate and thinking that you haven't done enough for the day. You have to learn how to notice when they're happening first and then learn how to shift them in the moment in order to really create balance.
Step number four, you have to learn how to protect your priorities. I would call that boundaries. You need to learn how to protect the things that are most important to you. No matter if somebody's going to be disappointed, no matter if anybody else is on board, no matter if somebody looks down on you for doing it.
Step number five, it's about learning how to optimize your time. Now, I want you to notice that this is the very last step. You really cannot learn how to achieve more in less time until you start to give yourself less time to do things. And your ability to give yourself less time to do things is going to happen when you have learned that no matter what you achieve, you're still amazing. And when you have learned what truly is the most important thing to you, so that not everything feels like the most important thing. And when you have learned how to shift your thoughts out of the negative, when it kind of gets into the spirals downward, you can't learn how to truly optimize your time until you've learned how to do all of those other things. Which is why this step comes last.
So every Monday, listen up because there's going to be a new episode that's going to drop. I'm going to go through each of these five steps, make sure that you've subscribed, so when you hit that subscribe button it automatically downloads for you, and it pings you when the next episode comes out. I just really can't wait to be sharing all of this juicy information with you over the next five weeks.
Step one: Confidence.
Okay, so let's talk about step number one inside the ambitious and balanced working mom's collective. I called this step confidence because at the essence, that's what it's really all about. It's not caring about what anybody else thinks. It's about owning your own strengths and being unashamed of any of your weaknesses. Now this step is first for a reason. Remember, balance is a feeling, it's an experience that you have inside of you that you control, not through your circumstances, but through the way you think and feel. And your most important thoughts that are going to either make you feel balanced or not are the thoughts that you have about yourself. You could be the best mom on the planet. You could be doing absolutely everything right. And everyone else looking at you would say so. And yet, if you don't think that you're doing everything right and you don't think you're the best mom on the planet, it doesn't really matter. Because what you think about yourself is what makes you feel amazing, not what other people think about you. You could be the best at your job. You could get a raise every year. You can constantly be promoted. You could be named number one on your team and highly praised by everyone in your company. And yet, if you don't think you're great at what you do, then it doesn't matter. It's the way you think about yourself that is either going to make you feel amazing, successful, or not.
“I teach you how to think amazing things about yourself and your life, no matter what your circumstances are.”
I've had a number of clients hire me as their coach because circumstantially in their life, things were great. One particular client comes to mind who worked for a billionaire. This billionaire did amazing things for the planet. She was super connected to the work she was doing. She made a lot of money. She had three amazing kids that she adored. She was in a marriage that she absolutely loved. And yet when we started working together, she told me, I'm not happy. I feel like I should be happy. I have everything I want, but I'm not happy. And the reason why she wasn't experiencing the happiness that was possible for her was not because her life wasn't amazing and her circumstances weren't great. It was because of what she was thinking about herself and her circumstances. She had endless negative chatter going on in her head that was constantly telling her that she wasn't enough, that she wasn't doing enough, that she was letting people down, and she felt guilty and lost and inadequate. In this five step process, I don't teach you how to create a circumstantial life that's perfect. I teach you how to think amazing things about yourself and your life, no matter what your circumstances are. In America, when you first meet someone, Besides asking them their name, the most common second question is, what do you do? And the most common answer is to tell them your job, who you are and what you do is not the same thing, but we mix them up a lot. In America in particular, we have a culture of more, of achieving more, of having more, of being more, of more money is better than less money, and more success is better than less success. And I don't want to suggest that that's a bad thing. But usually when it comes to balance, it isn't about having more and doing more. It isn't about achieving. It's about actually doing a little bit less. It's about focusing your time and energy and your money in a very specific way towards very specific things that matter most to you. In a society that values achieving more and having more dialing it back and becoming hyper focused, that's probably not going to feel great.
And so step one of this five step process, I've called it confidence. But really, it's about learning how to define yourself apart from all of your achievements and successes. It's separating yourself from your job and from what you do and seeing yourself in a whole different light. I want you to think about confident people. They don't care what other people think. They're not constantly worried about letting down the people on their team, or they're not wondering or second guessing if their ideas are any good. They just know confident people don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about getting things right or not or making the right decision. They don't research the heck out of things. They don't procrastinate, or people please. All of these imbalance behaviors. They don't do those things because they're willing to fail. They're willing for other people to be disappointed because they don't make those things mean anything about themselves. They don't define themselves by what other people think of them. When they don't define themselves by their successes, they define themselves by something else completely. What I teach my clients is to define themselves by their human value. It's what makes you valuable as a human being, not a human doer that matters. And this is truly the foundation to creating work life balance. It's believing that your value is not found in what you do and what you achieve, but in who you are. It's the only way in your brain to stop focusing so much on achieving and on doing and on getting things done and on making sure you're the best or you're the most successful. It's the only way to calm down that part of your brain that is constantly hyper focused on needing to do more and be more and say more and achieve more. It's the only way you have to believe that that isn't really what defines you, that your identity as a human being is not found in that.
I want you to close your eyes and really imagine this for yourself. A life where you are not always pushing yourself to do more, where you're not always trying to buffer people's disappointment or being worried about what you have or haven't done. Just imagine for a moment all of those scripts just dropping, and now your head feels pretty calm, right? Maybe your shoulders dropped a little bit as you imagine that you relaxed ever so slightly. It probably feels a little scary too. And that's because it's just simply a new way of functioning. Do you think that creating a balanced life is more possible without those scripts running in your head? Of course it is.
Step one to creating a balanced life is all about you. It's about what you believe in yourself and what you don't believe about yourself. In the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, I actually give you several exercises to help you flip the script on how you're thinking about yourself. I know that as a high achiever, your brain is hyper focused on achieving and doing more and accomplishing more and positioning yourself. So I simply walk you through several tools for redefining who you are and finding confidence not in your achievements, but in you as a person - because here's what I know; a balanced life is going to come much easier and quickly to you when you know that you are an amazing human being with an immense amount of value and worthiness, despite a less than ideal performance review, or despite five people waiting on something from you that only you can give, despite not being able to hit a sale or hit a quota, despite not accomplishing everything on your to do list today, I know that a balanced life is going to happen quickly and with a lot more ease when you know that you are a great mom despite yelling at your kids on occasion or tantrums that happen in the grocery store every single time you go, or your first grader who's continually acting out in class or only having an hour to spend with your kiddo before bedtime every night.
This is how we are going to shift the paradigm…
When you know that you know that you know that you know that you are a badass woman that is unique and lovable always. That is when balance is going to happen because you stop needing all of those things in order to feel good about yourself. So you start saying no to projects that you don't have time for. You deny meeting requests when the meeting isn't necessary. You prioritize a workout at lunchtime because people can just wait until you get back. You tell your team you're not available from 5pm to 8pm every single night because it's your family time and you can do these things that you already know are going to help you feel balanced because you know that you are still an asset to your company and you do kick ass work regardless. This is how we are going to change the culture for Working Moms. This is how we are going to shift the paradigm. This is how you can have both when you stop depending on your achievements and your successes and on what other people think of you in order for you to feel really amazing about you.
Outro
All right working moms, I cannot wait to share the rest of the five-step process with you over the next five weeks. And I want you to know that the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective is open, it's open to you right now. If you have been wanting to create a work-life balance that is not depending on your job or your team or your boss, where you feel 100% control over your priorities and the way you spend your time, I guarantee this is the program for you. You can go to rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective for more information and to sign up. All right working moms, let's get to it.
