Stop Surviving (Part 3): Reclaiming Time (and How My Clients Actually Do It)

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In this week’s episode of the podcast, I’m diving into the real reason time never feels like it’s enough and how to finally take it back. I’m sharing what it looks like when working moms move from survival mode into balance, with real stories and tangible results from my Ambitious and Balanced clients. You’ll hear the step-by-step process I teach to reclaim your time without needing more hours in the day. And I’ll let you in on the moment everything shifted for me. If you’ve ever wished for just one more hour…this episode is for you.

Topics in this episode: 

  • Why more time isn’t the solution to balance 

  • The hidden belief driving your time stress 

  • How to fill your calendar with “want to’s” instead of “have to’s” 

  • The 3 steps to reclaiming your time: Clarity, Confidence, Control 

  • Real client wins: from burnout to boundaries, back to concerts and joy

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Welcome to this very special series I'm calling Stop Surviving. This series is for every ambitious working mom who feels stuck in the loop. I just got to get through the day—where I'm juggling so much work, kids, laundry, meetings, and somewhere in there, you know, you're supposed to feel successful, grateful, fulfilled, right?

But instead, what you often feel is overwhelmed, exhausted, reactive, and disconnected from the life you've worked hard to build.

This series is about what happens when you stop operating in survival mode and start actually living again, where you take back control of work life balance. I'm gonna walk you through the most powerful and transformative results that women experience inside my group program, Ambitious and Balanced.

We'll talk about the internal calm, taking back time for yourself, getting out of burnout and creating boundaries, actually feeling successful and rebuilding confidence.

If any of this speaks to you, I want you to know that the September cohort of Ambitious and Balanced is open right now. A few spots are already filled and I only take 10 women. And once I do, the doors will close.

So if you are tired of feeling like you're treading water and you're ready to feel calm, in control, confident, alive again, then you can go to my website, www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/ambitiousandbalanced, to learn more and book a strategy call or grab one of those last spots.

Are you ready? Let's get to it.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, your go to resource for integrating your career ambitions with life as a mom, I'm distilling down thousands of coaching conversations I've had with working moms just like you, along with my own personal experience as a mom of two and sharing the most effective tools and strategies to help you quickly feel calm, confident, and in control of your ambitious working mom life. You ready? Let's get to it.

Working Moms. I'm excited to be talking about time with you today. And as you know, we are in the middle of the Stop Surviving series where I am walking you through what's possible when you actually pursue relentlessly a life of balance. I'm using examples from my clients and the women that are in my current Ambitious and Balanced cohort. I'm also walking you through the process of what it takes to actually achieve the results that we're talking about here in this series.

Looking Back: What We’ve Covered So Far

So a couple of weeks ago, we talked about work life balance, creating sort of internal calm and ending the negative chatter. And last week I interviewed Ena and we talked about how work life balance really allows you to take back control of your boundaries, get you out of burnout, and actually feel like a human being again.

Today’s Focus: Reclaiming Your Time

And today we're gonna be talking about reclaiming your time. Because on some fundamental level, this is what work life balance is all about, right? It's about having time to do things outside of work, whether that's paid work or unpaid work, right? It's about having time or a sufficient amount of time to be with your family, to be with your husband or partner, to work out, to have hobbies, to have a life outside of work. Right? When you're in survival mode or feeling consistently burned out or exhausted, time doesn't feel like something you own.

With each cohort of Ambitious and Balanced. And as a reminder, I am in the middle of forming the September cohort right now. So if any of this resonates with you, I highly recommend that you take me up on the 30-minute consultation call. Check out the website that has all the details in it. That link is in the show notes for you.

The Conversation Every Cohort Has About Time

But with each cohort, I talk with them about time. I talk with them specifically about their thoughts on time, right? And imagine this. So I bring out my flip chart and my easel, right? Yes. I still use those because these are like virtual working sessions. It's sort of like having a whiteboard in front of me, right? And so I ask the group, what are your thoughts on time?

And the response that I get across the board from my clients when they start working with me—because I usually do this sort of brainstorming teaching lesson right at the beginning of the cohort—their thoughts are this:

  • There's never enough time.

  • I'm always behind.

  • There's too much to do and not enough time.

  • I can't get it all done.

  • There's no time for me.

No matter what way it's worded, it always feels like it's a lack of time. That's what we experience kind of across the board as working moms.

The Hidden Belief About Balance

And there's almost this hidden belief that starts to get uncovered as we dive into more of a conversation around this—where time sort of feels like the magical solution to work life balance, right? Like, if there was just more time to get things done and accomplish more and check more things off the list and spend more time with your kids, that would somehow magically fix a lack of balance that you might feel.

The Morning Thought That Steals Your Balance

But let me ask you this. If you wake up in the morning and the very first thought that you have is, I have so much to do. There's just not enough time, how are you feeling as you start today? For me, just thinking about that, I feel immediately stressed out. Like my heart starts to race. I get a little bit nervous, right? Overwhelm is almost instantaneous in my body.

And yet I know so many of you are experiencing this right from the moment you get up in the morning. It feels like time is against you.

Balance Means Taking Back Control of Your Time

But in a balanced life, you have to feel in control of your time, not the other way around. You actually have to feel like you make the choices with how you spend your time. You choose what you do and what you don’t do with your time, right?

And look, I would love to be able to wave a magic wand and create more hours in your day, but the reality is, more hours is not what creates work life balance. In fact, that's impossible. It's not about creating more time. It's about being more effective with the way you spend your time.

When you can make your time more effective, that’s when you reclaim it. Your time is going to start to feel like you’ve decided it.

That’s one of the phrases I like to use. I like to talk about how a calendar full of things you’ve chosen to do—that’s a life of balance. A calendar that is full of things that you feel obligated to do, things you have to do—that’s a life of imbalance.

Reclaiming Time Is Possible—No Matter Your Job or Life Situation

So I want to talk today, in this episode, all about reclaiming time and the possibility of doing that and really how to do that and how I teach this. Women that have worked with me in the Ambitious and Balanced program have come at director level roles, manager roles, managing a team of who knows how many. Some of them have come to me working 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week on the regular. And then by the end of our three months, they feel completely different about their time.

They're in the same job, they manage the same team, they have the same demands, and yet they’ve taken back control of their calendar. They have gotten clear on their four essential priorities. They have learned how to calendar them in first and not let anything get in the way of holding to those priorities. And just three months.

Now, of course, plenty of other women are in that program too. There are business owners, there are solopreneurs, there are single moms, there are women that strictly work 40 hours a week. There are all sorts of women in all sorts of contexts. And all of them walk away with a different sense of control over their time.

Imagine Three Months From Now

So I want you to take a moment and imagine three months from now. So we're talking like, November, right? Holidays are approaching. You're in the same job, you have the same circumstances. But rather than waking up with that feeling of overwhelm and rush and feeling behind the moment that you get up and out of bed, instead you feel calm. You feel in control of how your day's gonna go.

Instead of getting up and grabbing that cup of coffee so you can wake up and check your email and start the rush of the day and get the kids out the door, you wake up with a smile on your face. You wake up with a sense of inner calm without that voice inside of your head telling you, go, go, go. It's time to get going. You're already behind.

Instead of rushing your kids out the door, you feel connected to your kids. That way, if they might be having a hard morning, you don't snap at them, but you see them. You're present for their needs.

A Real-Life Example

That was sort of like my morning this morning, actually. I woke up, I did about 15 minutes of yoga. I made my tea, I sat down and did a meditation. And then my sleepy son joined me on the couch. And he sprawled across my journal. Literally, like, laid on my journal, did not care. His legs taking up the entire sofa. He put a blanket over his head, and he could just tell he was going to have a little bit of a crabby morning.

But because I had started my morning exactly the way I wanted to, I felt in control of that. And I showed up then with the energy that I wanted to have. I didn't rush through that moment. I felt fully present with his crabiness. I rubbed his back. I got out of Highlights magazine. I started reading to him. We giggled a little bit. We laughed at a few photos. He told me how he wasn't gonna go to camp today. And I just listened.

And I showed up as the mom I wanted to be because I wasn't trying to rush myself or rush my kids. I wasn't feeling overwhelmed and stressed by other things. I felt in control.

It’s Not About Yoga or Meditation

Now you might think, man, I don't have that time in the morning and my kids are up super early or whatever your circumstances are. And of course, this kind of schedule might not work for you, but it's not really about being able to do the yoga or the meditation or any of that in the morning. It's about showing up with the mindset and the way that you're thinking about your day and your commitments and your calendar that you feel completely in control of.

A Client Who Chose Work by Default

I remember having a conversation with one of the members in the last cohort who admitted to me that most days of the week, she just logged back on in the evenings, and she usually worked a couple of hours over the weekends. And she sort of said it matter of factly, right? And she justified it by saying, her kids are in college, out of the house. It's just her. So, you know, why not?

And so I put it back to her, actually. I said, well, you tell me, why not? I mean, what would you do with your time if you didn't default to working most nights and weekends?

She thought about it. She's like, take up a hobby, maybe. Probably see more of my friends or connect more of my family on the phone, get better sleep. She sort of laughed at the thought of it because it didn't even occur to her that she was choosing to spend her time working.

Working evenings and weekends just felt like something she had to do. She didn't get enough done during the workday. She was behind at work. There just wasn't enough time to get everything done. So she had to work during her off time.

And it wasn't until she joined this program and she intentionally stopped to think about her decision that it even occurred to her that she could make a different choice.

Proactive vs. Reactive Work

Now, look, I want to be clear. It's okay for you to choose to work your evenings and weekends. I just want it to be a choice, right? I want it to be something you have proactively and intentionally thought about and decided based on your values and your goals and your priorities for that day.

For my clients, I tell them, you're not allowed to reactively work in the evenings and weekends or during your time off. Meaning you don't get to get to the end of your workday and tell yourself, oh, well, I guess I didn't get enough done today. And so you work late that evening.

Because if you continue to operate reactively and choose to work during your off hours when you don't intend to, then your brain never learns how to be more productive during the day. This is one of the concepts that we talk a lot about in the ambitious and balanced program.

Right? Your brain is always just gonna think, well, I can work a little bit later today, or I'll just log on for a couple of hours over the weekend and complete that. It's always gonna think that's the solution—essentially, working more.

And that's not what we're about when we're creating sustainable work life balance. It's always about being proactive with your decisions on how you want to use your time and spend your time.

Reclaiming Your Time Starts With Clarity

So let's talk for a moment about the process of reclaiming your time and filling your calendar with want to’s instead of have to’s. This is how I teach it inside of my program.

It all starts with clarity. You have to know how you want to spend your time. Right now in this program we focus on four essential priorities. Because over the last eight years, coaching over 250 working moms and teaching them how to manage their time and create sustainable work life balance, I have found it really does come down to these four key priorities.

And that when you learn how to prioritize these four key priorities, you're going to shift the way you feel about your time and your life, and it's going to feel more balanced and you'll prioritize the things that matter most.

But it always starts with getting clear on what those four priorities are, how specifically you want those priorities to play out in your life now when you're feeling overwhelmed and stressed. But it starts with deciding what truly matters most to you in your day, what commitments really matter to you and which ones don't.

Saying No to Really Good Things

I remember having a conversation with a client who just love, loves supporting families with new babies and their family like new moms, right? With meals and with food. She was a part of lots of food chains and so forth. And it felt so good to her, right? It felt nourishing. It felt like she was kind of living her values by prioritizing being so available in cooking meals for new moms.

And I certainly, I wouldn't argue with that. But I asked this question of her based on what I knew her priorities to be. What she had stated was most important to her in her family and her work life. I said, is that the best use of your time?

And I know it would be truly difficult for her to let that go, but that's the life of being ambitious and balanced. You actually have to say no to really good things. You have to say no to opportunities that you know would be fun for you or would further your career in some way.

The Power of Clarity in Your Priorities

If you listened to my interview with Sarah Armstrong a couple of months ago—she was, is, excuse me, a VP at Google—she talked about having to pass up a promotion opportunity because it just wasn't one of her core priorities at that moment. I think her daughter was pretty little at the time.

It was so hard for her to do, but she just trusted that another priority was gonna come up at the time that she wanted it to come up. And at that point she would take it because that's how it works, generally speaking, right?

I live within the belief system that there's endless amount of good opportunities out there for you. There's not a single good opportunity for you. So you're never going to actually miss out because eventually the right opportunity is gonna come at the right time, which means it's okay to say no to good opportunities sometimes.

So you have to have clarity first around what really matters to you right now in this season, what your core priorities are. Again, in my program, I teach four really specific ones that we focus on. But of course, you can have more or different flavors of those four.

The Second Key to Reclaiming Your Time: Confidence

The second thing you need in order to reclaim your time is you need confidence. Because when you start to say no to really good things and you start putting up boundaries and pushing back and people start to feel a little bit irritated and a little rubbed the wrong way because you're not prioritizing the things that they think that you should, you have to remain confident in the midst of all of that.

You have to know that you know that, you know that you are amazing, that you are valuable to your company, that you're a good manager, that you're a great mom. Like your belief in yourself cannot get shaky in these moments. Otherwise you're always gonna cave in.

Client Story: Ranjita’s Restoration of Confidence

My client, Ranjita, who you're gonna hear from in the podcast coming up in a couple of weeks, she said in her final evaluation, “My most significant takeaway from this program has been the restoration of my self confidence and the time to pause and reflect.”

So you have to bolster your confidence if you're going to reclaim your time. That's the second thing that you have to do and that you have to work toward if you're gonna take back control of your calendar. It's exactly one of the things that we do inside this program.

The Third Step: Building a Toolkit for Control

The third step to reclaiming your time and your calendar is to build a toolkit that allows you to feel in control. That's the third C. Right. It's clarity, confidence and control.

This is about actually being able to follow through with the things that you say that you wanna follow through with. Right. You can't just give lip service to the four priorities or whatever you choose to prioritize. You can't just say family time is important, but then stay plugged in and distracted when you're with your family. Or you can't just tell your husband, “Yeah, I promise I'll unplug this weekend or on vacation,” but then not actually do it.

The Mindset Behind Follow-Through

In order to be somebody that follows through and is in control of your commitments, what's required is a really specific mindset where you feel grounded, like you are enough, and that you’re doing enough all of the time.

And it also requires a toolkit to process all of the emotions that come up throughout your day.

Dropping the Heavy Backpack

I find most women carry their emotions around like a heavy backpack—when they're feeling overwhelmed, stressed, when they don’t knock it out of the park in a presentation, or when they feel behind. They just stuff those emotions down and carry them until it literally feels like a boulder on their shoulders.

But you can’t experience a balanced life while carrying that weight. You have to learn effective ways to calm your nervous system throughout the day, so that when people try to steal your time or convince you their priorities matter more than yours, you can stand your ground.

So those are the three steps: Clarity, Confidence, and Control.

Reclaiming Time, Reclaiming Joy

Now, one of my favorite conversations that I get to have with my clients and that we have within the program—and it's so much fun—is talking about what you would do with the time that you are taking back.

I know so many of you are like, “Oh my gosh, I don't even know what I would do with my time if I had time.” Right? You're not even sure what you like anymore, because maybe your old hobbies don’t appeal to you, or you’ve lost all sense of enjoyment and fun. Life has become monotonous.

Rediscovering What Lights You Up

In this program, we actually get to have really fun conversations and make decisions about how you want to explore and how you want to use your time.

Dana, who was in the last cohort of Ambitious and Balanced, started going back to concerts again. She absolutely loved them but hadn’t gone in over seven years since having kids. During the program, she booked tickets and went with friends—just that step alone felt amazing.

Kathy began taking evening strolls by herself. Sometimes she listened to podcasts, and one night she even took herself out to dinner while her husband handled the kids. It was so rejuvenating.

And Erika—who you’ve heard here on the podcast—picked up reading again. She’d sit with a book for 20–30 minutes before her kids got home, and that really filled her cup.

A Schedule Filled with “Want To”

Isn’t that fun to think about? It doesn’t have to feel overwhelming—we’ll explore your interests together. When you actually reclaim your time, you also get to reclaim hobbies, joy, and fun.

At the heart of work-life balance is this: a schedule filled with “want to,” not just “have to.” Filled with things that bring joy, laughter, and lightness back into your days.

Join the Next Ambitious and Balanced Cohort

When you join Ambitious and Balanced, I'm gonna walk you through the process of thinking about your time differently—allowing for space for things that matter most to you. Your family, a good book, a concert, your marriage, your priorities.

If you're ready to take back control of your time, join me for the next Ambitious and Balanced cohort. I only take 10 women and several spots have already been filled. Once they're filled, they're filled—and that’s it.

This is the last cohort of the year. I’m sending out the virtual classroom materials on August 18, and we start meeting weekly in mid-September. We meet for three months, and I guarantee that at the end of this time, you will start calendaring time for yourself. You’re gonna feel way more present with your kids, make time and space for your marriage, and learn how to stay just as productive and successful at work.

The investment is $2,000, and there are payment plans available. If you're ready to reclaim your time, then go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/ambitiousandbalanced. And of course, you can get all of that information in the show notes.

Working moms, let's stop surviving and take back control of your time, your calendar, and your priorities.

Until next week, let’s get to it.

The Daily Kickstart Tool

If you wake up most days spinning with 100 different priorities vying for your attention, then the Daily Kickstart is exactly what you need. It’s a simple six-step process that helps you get your thoughts out of your head, reset your mindset, and refocus on what actually matters.

It’s designed to shift you out of overwhelm and into calm, confident action before the chaos hits.

Start Your Day with Calm & Clarity

This daily practice is the same tool I offer to all my clients, and it’s going to show you exactly how to lead your day instead of react to it.

It takes just 10 minutes a day and the impact will ripple through everything—your mood, your energy, your presence with your kids, and how you lead at work.

My clients say time and time again that this tool made the biggest difference for them, and I’m offering it to you totally free.

You can download it by going to www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/dailykickstart and of course, I’ll have that for you in the show notes as well.

All right, working moms, let’s get to it.

Rebecca Olson