Cultivating satisfaction at work

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There is one emotion that almost feels like magic when creating work-life balance: satisfaction. When you feel satisfied, you don’t feel the need to do more. You feel like what you have is enough, what you’ve done is enough and how you showed up is enough. In today’s podcast I am sharing 3 ways you can cultivate this magical feeling of being satisfied and explain why it is not the natural place for your brain to go.

Topics in this episode:

  • An abundance mindset creates work-life balance

  • Why your brain needs to see the glass as half-full

  • Your brain is hard wired to say “you didn’t do enough”

  • Lessons you can learn from satisfying hunger

  • The magical moment that satisfaction needs to be cultivated

  • 3 ways to cultivate feeling satisfied

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

There is one emotion that almost feels like magic. When creating work-life balance, it's essential to be able to shut down your work brain at the end of a workday and truly rest in everything that you've achieved. You ready for it? A feeling of being satisfied. When you feel satisfied, you don't feel the need to do more. You feel like what you've done is enough. What you've achieved is enough. What you have is enough. How you showed up is enough. There isn't this need, this drive for more. And in today's podcast, I'm sharing with you how you can cultivate this magical feeling of being satisfied and explain why it's not really the natural place for our brains to go. You ready? Let's get to it.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, the 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.

Abundance is a completely subjective thought.

So I've been reading this book called The Soul of Money by Lin Twist. It's been such a good read on the subject of sufficiency and changing our relationship that we have with money, kind of shifting our mindset around the way that we feel about money and the abundance of it. And the woman that wrote it, Lynn, did an immense amount of work with a nonprofit called The Hunger Project, which is an organization that has a mission to end world hunger. And her experience with money around the world was fascinating to read. This book is just filled with stories about how people around the world experience money, their relationship with money. And then she kind of juxtaposes that against the Americans view of money. And she talks about the billionaires that she talks with and has relationships with, and their inability to give, like, their need to hold on to money. And then she talks about indigenous people that don't even have a currency and their breathtaking ability to be generous and to sacrifice all that they have, which to them, they don't even see as sacrificial at all. She makes this connection to our own generosity and our own experience of money based on not really how much we actually have in our bank accounts, but on how we feel about what we have in our bank accounts. And recognizing that abundance is a completely subjective thought. It's not really based on anything tangible. It's just based on our perception of the things that we have. I have been just deeply moved by this book, but it's been one of those that you can't really read through it super fast. I've taken my time to read it over the course of months because it's really been pushing my brain outside of its usual comfort zone. And so I've just kind of let myself digest this book slowly over the last several months. And as I'm coming to the end of the book, my thoughts have shifted a little bit towards the importance of feeling abundant when you're creating a balanced life. It's really struck me some of the things that she talks about when she speaks about sufficiency and enoughness when it comes to money and the things that we have and how parallel that is to how I talk about balance. Because a balanced life is one where it feels enough. It's a life where you feel like you are exactly where you should be, where you feel like what you've achieved today was enough for the day, where your glass is more full than empty. In an imbalanced life, you are always feeling behind. There's never enough time to get everything done. You don't have enough energy to kind of give to all the things that you want to, or you're not really living up to the standards that you have for yourself or your life, where it doesn't matter how much you do or what you do, it just never really feels like enough. It's a life that is often described as being overwhelming and exhausting and too much. And in many ways, this description fits what we would call a scarcity mindset.

High achievers have what I think is an insatiable need to do more, where there's always more to do, more to achieve, where the to-do list is literally never ending and where the need to check one more thing off the list almost feels uncontrollable. Hunger is a very powerful emotion, one might even call it an experience. And whether you're hungry for food or you're hungry for more - more time, more money, more achievement, more success, it's a very powerful experience to be in this place of hunger for something and the opposite emotion or experience. It's the feeling of being satisfied.

Feeling good about what you did today.

I want you to think about how it feels after a day of working all day in the yard, where you've cleared out all of the weeds or you've turned over all of the dirt. Or maybe it's a day where you cleaned out your entire garage, you got rid of a whole bunch of crap and you threw things away and you cleared space and you swept and you moved things out. When you put an immense amount of physical labor towards something and then you're done with that project, there is an immense amount of satisfaction that comes with it. It feels good to watch something be transformed. Whether that's your yard or a closet or your garage. There's literally a physical experience, this feeling of being satisfied where your body feels tired, yes, but it also feels calm, and it feels relaxed and it feels good and it feels full and it feels sufficient. There's that feeling of a job well done, pat on the back, go me. Now, if we translate that into your job - what that looks like is, it's a day where you set out to achieve ten things and you accomplished twelve. It's that day where you have a really, really big meeting that you've been working all week for and then you just nail it. It's a day where you answer every email that comes in, you make quick and decisive decisions for every single person that walks in your door. Where you don't stare endlessly at the clock and endlessly scroll through social media in your in between moments. Those are the days when you leave work and you say, yes, I feel good about what I did today. I feel satisfied, I deserve a break, I deserve to be off. We all know what a satisfying workday feels like. You look at everything you've done and you just label it as being enough for the day. Where you focused on all the things that you did accomplish and all the things that you do achieve. That day where you have that sense of peace and calm inside of you. Where you just know that today was good and the decisions that you made were right and you label it enough.

The feeling of being satisfied in your life is how you create a balanced life.

Now the problem is, this is not our default that our brains are hardwired to live in. Your brain's primary job is to keep you safe and alive. Which means that it is always looking for places that you are falling short, for areas of life that aren't quite working right, for the ways that you might be missing the mark, for the things that you could have done. And then for high achievers, that scarcity voice is even heightened because your identity is wrapped up in that ability to achieve in your high capacity to do. And so anytime your brain just sniffs the possibility that you could be doing more, it wants to let you know so that you can live even more fully into your identity as an achiever. So what we know is that the experience of abundance, that feeling of being satisfied in your life and in your doings in your life, it's in that experience that you create a balanced life. And yet our brains are doing everything possible to keep us in the opposite way of life. To always point out our lack, to point out our not enoughness in an effort to keep us alive.

Your brain's default is a place of scarcity.

So here's the first thing I want you to know. Your brain's default is a place of scarcity. It's a place of showing you all of your wrongdoings, showing you all of the things that you didn't achieve instead of the things that you did. Your brain is going to be living in not enoughness. And that is 100% normal. And in order to get to that place of abundance, that experience of being satisfied in what you've accomplished, you label as being enough and it feels good and it feels satisfying, you feel calm, you feel rested in what you've accomplished - that requires intentionality. You actually have to cultivate that muscle because it's not going to happen on its own - unlike with food, with the experience of being satisfied or satiated. That happens when you eat enough, when you've literally put enough calories in your body that you feel satisfied with what you have eaten that day. That same experience we can have when it comes to our achievements and our accomplishments. But it isn't about any caloric intake. There isn't a number of things that we have to achieve in order to get there. It's a completely subjective amount of calories, if you will, and we just simply get to decide we have to direct our brain in a certain way in order to experience the ‘enoughness’ of the things that we do accomplish in our day. So cultivating that feeling of being satisfied, that takes practice. It literally requires you to think and give yourself space to think about your achievements in a different way.

Having worked with hundreds of working moms and helping them develop the muscle of being satisfied. I love that word. It's such an odd and amazing word to say in your mouth when you feel satisfied around your achievements, where you start labeling your achievements and your successes as being enough, as being good. I have found, having worked with so many women in this, that there is a crucial moment in your day. There's an opportune moment that really is going to help turn the tide for you to experience balance with so much more ease. And that moment is the end of your work day. It's a moment that absolutely unlocks for us our ability to feel satisfied and rest in our accomplishments and feel good about all of the things that we've just done at work so that we can enter into our home life feeling much more present and ready.

Do you long for a life outside of work?

Now, you can feel satisfied leaving your workday and entering into your home life if in that transition between work and home you cultivate a feeling of being satisfied, you are infinitely more likely to actually shut down your work brain and be present with your family, to feel like you have a life outside of work because you're not always thinking about work, where you have an identity outside of work, where you can focus on being a mom, on being a neighbor, on being a wife, on just being a woman. This is a crucial moment that if you give it just a little bit of intentionality, you can shape it just the way you want it to be. Now, you probably know I have a program, I talk about it a lot. It's called The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. And in this program, I teach five steps to work-life balance. There are literally 30 lessons that you walk through in the five steps and you get access to it on demand. And then there is weekly group coaching where you can connect with me personally where I'm going to literally coach you through the process of creating balance. And then there's also an amazing private Facebook community where you have access to me and the other women that are in the program as well. And one of the most impactful lessons that I hear from women is the one where I teach a work-to-home transition. And the work-to-home transition is literally an exercise of cultivating a feeling of being satisfied right at the end of your work day before you move into your home life. I also did a podcast on this a while back, so I'll link to that in the show notes as well. So you have access and you can go back and you can listen to the way that I talk about a work-to-home transition. So you literally have resources that will walk you through a process like this where I can literally coach you in creating an effective transition. The moment that you join the collective, you have access to all of that. So if you feel like this is a topic where I can literally coach you in creating an effective transition the moment that you join The Collective and this is also one of the topics that I give workshops on. So if you feel like this is a topic for your company or for your women's group at your company, or a parent group of some kind, I can come in or virtually teach this topic of being and learning how to cultivate feeling satisfied in your work life so that you unlock for yourself a balanced life, because it is that important to the experience and your ability to create balance.

But, I want to share with you just a couple of thoughts on how you do this. It's really about focusing your brain on three things. 

  1. Focus on the things that you did accomplish in your day instead of the things that you didn't. 

  2. Focusing your brain on your progress instead of your lack of progress. 

  3. Focusing on how you uniquely showed up that day and how you had a unique impact, maybe in a way that nobody else did that day. 

Your brain is wired to think achieving is what it needs to do.

Every day, you want to be pointing your brain to these three things to sit down with intentionality and write them out, or type them out, or just say them out loud. You could take ten minutes at the end of your work day. You could do it while you're commuting home. I had one client who had a really short commute, and so she would just sit in her driveway for a few minutes before she entered her house. In order to do this practice, and remember, this is going to require some effort. It's going to require space. Like, you're going to have to carve out a little bit of time, five to ten minutes in order to do it, because it's not going to come naturally to you. And then in the first few weeks of you writing this out, you might not have almost anything to write. You might have to be pushing yourself to just find one, two, or three things to write down. But once you start pushing your brain to focus on progress and to focus on the accomplishments that you did have that day, to be focusing on your unique impact, it's going to start to get easier because your brain is going to start to note that more throughout the day. And then as you sit down and write it down, you're going to be able to recall it. But at first, if your brain isn't hardwired to see all those things, then it's going to take a bit of effort. It's going to feel tedious to you. And then, of course, your brain is 100% going to think that checking one more thing off the list or answering one more email, that that is a better use of time than the ten minutes that you're going to spend doing this transition. Because your brain is wired to think achieving is what it needs to do - achieving is its natural state instead of feeling satisfied.

So I want you to just take a moment and really consider how different life would be, not just at the end of a work day, but likely all day, every day. If your brain was wired to think about all the things that you're doing well, all the things that you're good at, all of your accomplishments, all of your achievements, when it focuses on progress and growth, instead of fixating on things that you haven't done, on your to-do list, that feels endless, on your achievements that were maybe slightly off the mark.

Abundance mindset at the core.

Close your eyes in this moment and take a couple of deep breaths and really allow yourself to imagine a life where you feel truly satisfied and you're able to cultivate that on demand. It's an abundance mindset at the core. It's a belief that you are always doing enough, that what you do is good enough and who you are is enough. 

All right, Working Moms, I want you to go out there and feel satisfied today. Feel satisfied knowing that no matter how much you achieve or how much is still left on your to-do list or how many things that you got done today or what you accomplished, no matter how much you want to quantify that, it is always, always, always enough. See you next week.

Outro

I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you're looking to create a life where your career and your home life never feel at odds, where you're working less, but achieving at the same level, a life without regret, where you know you are doing exactly what you want to be doing, then join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. This is a group of ambitious working moms who believe that work-life balance is possible for them and are committed to creating it. The program includes 30 short videos and workbooks that teach you how to create the building blocks of a balanced life, as well as weekly group coaching and in-depth support within a private working mom's community. And did I mention that when you join the community, you get lifetime access? That means you have access to coaching and material to help support your balanced life in every season. You can find out more information and sign up for The Collective on my website at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective

Rebecca Olson