You don’t need more time to feel balanced (part 5)

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If you cannot create more hours in a day, in order to achieve balance, the only two things you can do are: learn how to achieve more in less time and change the way you think about time. Because in a balanced life, the time you have feels like “enough” and you feel at peace with the ways you are spending it. In today’s podcast I am going to challenge the way you think about time and give you 3 necessary shifts in your mindset on time. This is step 5 of a 5-part series on creating sustainable work life balance.

Topics in this episode:

  • 3 mindset shifts you must make in order to change the way you feel about time

  • Since you can’t create more time, what can you do? Two things…

  • How you already know how to achieve more in less time

  • Exactly what NOT to think about how much time you have

  • How procrastination leads to balance

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

More time feels like the solution to creating work-life balance for many working moms - If only I had more time, if only I could get more things done. But in a balanced life, you feel in control of your time, you feel at peace with all of the ways that you're spending it, and it always feels like enough. Yes, working moms, in a balanced life, you feel like you have enough time. And there are really only two things that you could ever do in order to feel like you have enough time because we don't have an ability to create more time. So the only things you can do is learn how to achieve more in less time and change the way you think about your time. In today's podcast, we're going to be covering both of these. This is step five of the Five Steps to Work Life Balance series. 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.

Hello, working moms. I hope you are having such a fantastic day today. We're talking about step five of the five step process that I have been teaching in this five step series on creating work-life balance. Now, these are the same five steps that I teach inside of my paid group coaching program, The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. And the steps are all broken down into bite size pieces. There's 30 lessons that are all eight minutes or less and then some of those lessons come with workbooks or exercises to really help you put all of these learnings into practice. Now, you certainly don't have to listen to this series in order, meaning you could listen to today, step five and then go back and listen to the other steps in the series on another day. But there is a reason that I teach the steps in this order. When you join, you are going to get access to a membership site that's going to walk you through the steps in a very specific order, and there's a reason for that. I want to explain a little bit about the reasoning behind how these steps work and how they build on each other.

“You need to be thinking and feeling really good things about yourself in order to create balance.”

Now, step one is really all about you. It's about you thinking and believing amazing things about yourself. It's step one because you are the only common denominator in your life. Your life is centred ultimately around you, and you need to be thinking and feeling really good things about yourself in order to create balance - that is why it's step one.

Getting clear on exactly what it is you want.

Step two is clarity. And it comes next in the process because as soon as you start thinking about yourself differently and really shifting how you see yourself into a much more positive light. A fog starts to lift, confusion and stuckness. They naturally start to lessen, and you're able to start giving your brain some direction. And that's really what step two is all about, getting clear on exactly what it is you want and why you want it, both in the short term and the long term. Now, by the time you get to step three, you're starting to feel better about who you are as a person. You feel clearer about what it is you want and why. 

Controlling your mind.

Next, it's time to address what gets in the way of you being that person and having that life that you just named. And that is ultimately step three, I call it controlling your mind. It's your mindset, your perspective, your thoughts. They are the only thing that ever really gets in the way of you feeling balanced. And in step three, you start to make connections to the way that you are specifically thinking that is causing you to feel balanced or imbalanced.

Boundaries.

You could see how this is starting to build on each other because step four, which is what we talked about last week, that's all about your boundaries. And there are really only three things that ever get in the way of us holding to our boundaries:

People pleasing

Perfectionism

Overachieving (or hyperdoing, as I like to call it.)

And the thing behind each of those that causes you to be a people pleaser, a perfectionist or an overachiever is mindset. It's a thought. It's people pleasing thoughts that lead to people pleasing actions that keep us from holding our boundaries. And the same thing with perfectionism and overachieving. So in this step, you're starting to do the work of flipping those thoughts so you stop the people pleasing, perfecting and overachieving behavior so you're able to hold your boundaries and actually follow through with your commitments and your priorities in the way that you want.

In a balanced life, you feel a sense of control and peace and calm.

And that leads us to our last step. Step five in the five step process of creating work-life balance, and that is, changing the way you think about time. It would be super difficult to talk all these five weeks about balance and not really address how we spend our time. The quintessential stressed out, overwhelmed, out of balance working mom tends to be the one that states they have too much to do and not enough time. More time feels like the solution for many working moms - “If only I had more time. If only I could get more things done. If only I wasn't so busy. If only I can get through this season.” In a balanced life, you feel a sense of control and peace and calm. And I think the same is required for how you feel about time. In a balanced life, you feel in control of your time. You feel at peace and calm with the way you're spending your time. You feel like you have enough time. Now, my guess is that last statement kind of hits you a little bit, right?

In a balanced life, you feel like you have enough time and there are really only two things that you could ever do in order to feel like you have enough time. Because we don't really have an ability to create more time. We'll always be limited to the 24 hours that we have in a day and the seven days that we have in a week, the 365 days we have in a year. So if you cannot create more time, the only thing you really can do is to achieve more in less time or just change the way you're thinking about time. And in this step, we do both. 

Daniella redefined success in both her mom life and her work life.

There's a story I like to tell about a client I had in one of my past group coaching programs. I used to run eight week group coaching programs several years ago. Her name was Daniella and when we first started working together, one of the things that she told me is that she didn't spend enough time with her kids and she really only had 2 hours with them every single day in the evenings when she would get home from work and before she had to put them down, those 2 hours just simply didn't feel like enough. To be honest, I was right there with her. When my first was born, I literally spent about 1 hour with her while she was awake. She went to sleep at 5:45pm every single night. She was a very early sleeper. We tried so hard to make her not an early sleeper and push it back and push it back and she was just like a disaster and she never really worked out. She went to sleep at 5:45pm and I went to work an hour earlier so I could just get home in time to pick her up and get home and at least have an hour with her. And that never felt like enough time. And that's where my client Daniela was at too with these 2 hours that she spent with her kids, it's all she ever got in a work week and it just never felt like enough. She was telling herself that it wasn't enough. And then in her evaluation of coaching with me, she wrote something that just simply blew my mind. She said, “I still only spend 2 hours with my kids, but it feels like all I need. I'm creating everyday memories in our time and it's enough.” The amount of time that she spent with her kids, it didn't change, but how she felt about the time that she spent with them, that changed dramatically. And what Daniela did through her work with me is redefined success in both her mom life and her work life. Success no longer meant time. It meant being present. It meant showing up as her best self. It meant feeling like she was contributing or making an impact in some way. You know, if I were to ask you what success as a mom looks like, my guess is those are the same types of things that you would say. You would never say success as a mom is about spending all of your time with them. And yet a lot of moms act that way, they act as if having more time with their kids would make them a better mom. But if that was actually true, that more time with your kids made you a better mom, that would mean that every stay-at-home mom is better than every working mom - and of course, we know that that's not true. Time and success as a mom are not connected to each other. Similarly, if I were to ask you what success at work looks like, you would probably say being productive, getting things done, being a team player, and problem-solving at a deep level. You wouldn't say working as many hours as possible. And yet we have a culture that rewards those that work more hours. And so there's a lot of confusion in our brain around what success really means.

She stopped thinking success at her job was getting more things done. Instead, she said success was based on the level of impact she had that day.

I have a client right now who just over the course of seven weeks of working with me, went from feeling super out of balance and feeling a lack of control of her time and her energy to seven weeks later telling me how different her life was, how she was working less hours, she was saying no to more meetings, she was feeling present at work and at home, she was prioritizing her workouts in the middle of her work day, her time with her family and her extended family were being prioritized. And when I started asking her what she was doing that was helping to create this new, balanced life for her, one of the main things she said was that she stopped thinking success at her job was getting more things done. Instead, she said success was based on the level of impact she had that day. She started asking herself every day, what impact did I make today? Who did I help? How did I help them? And that little shift changed everything for her.

Redefine success.

So the first thing that I want you to do in this step is redefine success for you. If success and time are not related in any way, how else would you define success? How else would you measure it? The second point I want to make as we talk about time, is that your thoughts about time and how much time you have or you don't have either help or hinder you feeling balanced. When you think I don't have enough time, how does that make you feel? Anxious, overwhelmed, hopeless, even? And when you're feeling anxious and overwhelmed and hopeless, what are you doing? Do you think balance is going to come from a place of feeling overwhelmed and hopeless and anxious? Of course not. ‘I don't have enough time’ has to be eradicated from your thoughts and from your lips because it is simply false. Here are some of my thoughts that I have on time:

There is plenty of time to get the things I want to get done.

I control my time.

Time helps me focus and curate my life.

I get to decide how I feel about my time.

I have the exact amount of time that I need.

Your thoughts about time matter.

Sounds pretty different, right? How does it make you feel to think that you have plenty of time to get done what you need to get done? For me, I feel control. I feel committed. I may even feel a little bit of ease. So the second point I want to make here is that your thoughts about time matter. They dictate a lot of how you use your time and how you experience your time.

More time can no longer be a solution in a balanced life.

The last thing I want to talk about as it relates to time and creating for yourself a sustainable, balanced life , you need to redefine success in your life so that it's not connected to time. Also, time can no longer be the solution. This is what I mean; I see a lot of working moms when they start feeling overwhelmed and like they need to get more done and they need to be more productive - They just work more. More time becomes their solution to getting more things done, or if they want to be more prepared for a project or a presentation or a meeting, they give themselves endless amounts of time to feel prepared. More time can no longer be a solution in a balanced life. In The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, as a part of this step, I give a very detailed workbook to help you start managing your time differently. I teach the women in The Collective to give themselves containers of time for things to decide ahead of time, how long they want to actually spend on something, and then to only give themselves that amount of time to fall through. This is really the secret to achieving more in less time. You have to stop giving yourself more time to do things. You have to problem-solve for how you can achieve more in less time. And the only way you can do that is to actually start doing it. And we actually all know how to give ourselves less time. It's called procrastination. And probably for a lot of you, you have used that tactic in a lot of different ways over the course of your life, probably very acutely. In College, you have a project due at 9am the next morning. You haven't done anything toward it, it's 10pm and now you're going to have to pull them all-nighter, but you know, you only have this amount of time to get it done. So what do you do to set yourself up for success? You probably close your door. You turn off your phone. You turn off your email. You tell people you're not available. If somebody comes knocking or somebody texts you, you don't answer. You are unavailable to anyone else. It's like heads down, you got to get this done. And then when you're in the middle of that project and you feel like all stuck, you're like, I don't really know what to say or where to go from here, but you kind of just have to push through that because you don't have time. You just got to get something down on paper and turn it in, so you don't allow yourself to sit in indecision and in perfectionist thoughts about what's the right thing to do here because there just simply isn't any time. And then as a result of your ability to do those things, what do you do? You hand in a paper.

You already have the skill set to achieve more and less time.

Now, I know a lot of you have also done this at your job. A client needs something from you at 5pm today. You have to get it to them and it's 3pm now and you haven't really started it. So what are you going to do to ensure that in the next 2 hours you turn this thing into your client? Probably are going to do all of the things I just said before. You're going to put your phone on do not disturb. You're going to close your door. You're not going to answer your phone or your slack messages, maybe you put an out-of-office on. When you feel stuck and you want to go ask somebody their opinion or seek out some kind of validation that you're on the right track or you're making a point, whatever it may be, there's like no time for that. So you can't. You just put something down on paper. You get it done. You get it to them on time. You already have the skill set to achieve more and less time. You just need to learn how to use it on demand. Because I guarantee that when you stop giving yourself an out by saying, I'll just work on that later or I'll do it over the weekend or I'll work late tonight. When you stop giving yourself more time to do things, you will start problem-solving for how to achieve more or achieve at a higher level in less time. And that is what I teach you inside The Collective, I break down this step into five lessons:

Lesson one, your thoughts on time and why they matter.

Lesson two, redefining success.

Lesson three, achieving more and less time.

Lesson four, developing a transition routine. (A routine that's going to help you transition from work to home specifically so that you really set yourself up to be present and shut down your work brain at the end of a workday.)

Lesson five, deciding your schedule ahead of time.

And there are three workbooks that help you put into practice what it is I'm teaching you. And then, of course, if you have questions, or you need help applying all of these principles, you can attend our weekly group coaching call where you can coach directly with me. You can post in the Facebook group and ask questions and hear from other working moms in the community as well.

Conclusion.

Working moms, you do not have to feel trapped by time. You have all of the time you need to live the life that you want to lead. When you start believing that, I promise you lots of things are going to change. All right, working moms, let's get to it. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're interested in being guided through the five-step process that I'm teaching here on the podcast where each of the steps are broken down into many lessons that are each ten minutes or less so they fit easily into your day where you are in community with other amazing career driven moms learning to balance the demands of their job and their life as a mom, where you have the opportunity to coach with me personally to ensure that the process and steps are tailored to you and your unique circumstance. Then join me in The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. The Collective is a group coaching program that is designed specifically for ambitious working moms. The doors are always open and as soon as you sign up you will get instant access into the five-step process so you can start right away. You can get more information and sign up at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective

Rebecca Olson