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The only thing getting in the way of you following through with your work-out, or leaving work on time, or not checking email or logging back on at night, the only thing getting in the way of you holding your boundaries…is an emotion. Emotions are what drive all our actions (or inactions) and when you learn to actually feel an emotion, rather than avoid it or judge it, holding your boundaries will get immensely easier. In today’s episode I walk you through exactly what it takes to follow-through with the commitments and boundaries that will help you feel balanced.
Topics in this episode:
How to get over the urge to check your email on your phone
The simplest thing you can do when you are tempted to not hold your boundary
To stop feeling rushed in the morning, you need to be willing to feel this
The most common emotion that causes me imbalance
Show Notes & References:
Schedule a breakthrough call to learn exactly what emotion causes imbalance in your life and how to overcome it. Click here to schedule your call: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/57: 7 truths about emotions
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Transcript
Intro
The only thing getting in the way of you following through with your workout or leaving work on time, or not checking email or logging back in when you get home from work - the only thing getting in the way of you holding your boundaries is an emotion. Emotions are what drive all of our actions or inactions. And when you learn to actually feel an emotion rather than avoid it or judge it, holding your boundaries will get immensely easier. In today's episode, I walk you through exactly what it takes to follow through with your commitments and boundaries that will help you to feel balanced. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom 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.
Hey working moms. I am just getting back from a nine day vacation with my family. Oh, my gosh. So good. I went with my parents and my brother and his family and their family. So there were ten of us total, and we went on a cruise to Mexico. Nope, I have never been on a cruise before. It was my first one. And let me just say, I totally looked into more cruises as soon as we got off the boat, I would definitely do it again. And so my husband and my kids. But I will say that even 48 hours later, having gotten off the boat, I am still feeling it. I am still feeling the sway ever so slightly, particularly, like, when I get up and move, I don't know when it's going to go away, but it was such a great experience, I totally recommend going on a cruise or doing something like that.
And there's been something that I've been thinking about. I was thinking about it while I was on a cruise, and I've been thinking a lot about it since we've come home from the cruise. I decided that it would make such a great podcast that we're here talking about it today. And that is the importance of completely disconnecting from the internet and from emails and text messages. The cruise that we went on in order to get just basic social media and Internet browsing, actually, I don't even think you could get social media, but you couldn't get emails. Like, there were different tiers that you had to pay into. It was like $80 or $100. It wasn't that big of a deal. But my husband and I decided not to do it so that we can be completely offline. We could completely disconnect from work. We're in the middle of purchasing a house right now, so we've been on a big house hunt, so we couldn't check Zillow or any of the other apps that we would normally look at to look for housing. We just completely disconnected from our normal everyday life. And of course, you still have to carry your phone around with you because they have like a cruise app and that's where you find out meal times and entertainment and all of these sorts of things. So I still had my phone with me. I didn't have any way of checking email or text messages or apps or social media or any of the usual things that I just kind of swipe over to and click on hundreds of times during my day. So it was just really fascinating to me what being completely unplugged looked like. And it took a couple of days, I would say two, before I could really even get past that habit of when I would be on the cruise app, and then my natural inclination was to go off of the app and then swipe over to Facebook, or swipe over to emails and I would do that, but then of course, nothing would come up and it took about two days to get out of that habit before I just stopped altogether. My brain stopped kind of offering it to me as a habit. As soon as the boat came into port on Saturday, I immediately, of course, started checking email and kind of going through the normal motions. But in reality, I don't want things to go back exactly to the way things were. And I want to control my usage of my phone and my communication and how much I check emails and things like that, much more than I was before. Even as a coach, of course, I know the importance of not always being on my phone and shutting down my work brain and containing work. I know the importance of that, and yet it is still very hard to do. And the people that I know and the clients that I have that experience the most balance are the ones that have figured out how to do that even when they don't want to. And this is the crux of really what I want to show you today.
Balanced actions.
The only thing that ever gets in the way of you taking the balanced action that you want to take - things like leaving work at 5pm every day, not logging back on, putting away your phone when you're with your family, working out, not thinking about what's on your to-do list tomorrow, not answering or checking your messaging apps, things like that. These are the things that I call balanced actions. They're the things that you need to do in order to feel balanced. We all know that these things would be helpful, they're useful to us in order to feel balanced, and yet they're really hard to do. Why is that? Because most of the time we don't feel motivated to do them. We know that they would be good for us. We know that they're helpful. But when the moment comes to actually follow through and do them, we don't usually feel motivated to do them. In fact, oftentimes it feels bad to do them initially. And it's really easy to do something when we feel motivated to do it. Motivation has this sort of energy behind it, this natural push that comes when we feel motivated. But most of the time, most of the things that are good for us in life, most of the things that make us feel balanced, we don't feel motivated to do them. And when I first start speaking to women about creating balance, I start asking them what it would take for them to actually follow through with the balanced actions that they know that they should be taking, most of the time what they tell me is that they just need to feel more motivated to do it. They just need to feel less stressed or less behind. I think that women that experience the most balance are not the ones that have figured out how to conjure up motivation on demand or learn how to manage stress in a way that seemingly nobody else can. It isn't that at all. In reality, all that they've learned how to do is follow through with boundaries and the things that they want to do or the things that they don't want to do, despite not feeling motivated or despite feeling stressed and overwhelmed at times, they're willing to do things even though they feel hard. And feel is the most important word here because that's really all it is. They are willing to feel something that you are not. When it's 5pm and it's time to leave work and they feel behind and they feel overwhelmed, they don't let those emotions get in the way of them leaving. When they're sitting and playing games with their kids and their brain reminds them of a dozen people that are waiting for them to answer an email and they feel all guilty and inadequate, they don't let those emotions get in the way of them staying present and focusing on their family and not getting up to go get their phone to check their email. When they have a planned workout during their lunch hour and someone requests a meeting during that time and says it's the only time that they can meet and they feel selfish and guilty for taking time for themselves during their lunch hour instead of rearranging everything to accommodate their team, they don't let those feelings of selfishness and guilt get in the way of them following through and working out anyway.
All that ever stands between you and the action that you want to take or not take, depending on what it is, is an emotion.
It's a feeling, and usually one that doesn't feel so good. I want you to literally imagine it like a hurdle you're standing on one side and on the other side is the balanced action that you want to be taking. Leaving work at 5pm, or putting down your phone, or working out all of these things that we're talking about here today. So you're standing on one side, and on the other side of that hurdle is that action that you want to be taking. And the thing that is in the way that hurdle all it is, it's an icky feeling emotion. That's it. And the people that experience the most balance in their life have figured out how to experience that icky emotion and not let it linger with them and not make it mean anything personal about them. They're the ones that have figured out the secret to balance. Now, there's two things that I want you to know about emotions. And I did a podcast called the seven truths about emotions a couple of months ago, so I will link to that in the show notes for you. There are two things, for the sake of this particular podcast that I want you to know about emotions:
The first is that all an emotion is, is a series of vibrations that we experience in our body. In other words, it's just a sensation, and different emotions have different sensations connected to it.
The second thing I want you to know is that the process of feeling an emotion, it's simply the process of letting all of those vibrations pass through your body. That entire process. If we don't resist it, it can happen in two minutes or less. Of course, the problem is we don't like feeling disappointed, and we don't like feeling stressed, and we don't like feeling anxiety, and we don't like feeling fear, so we resist it. And then it takes much longer to process that.
So let's just recap this for a moment - the only thing that is getting in the way of you taking the balanced action you want to take, following through with the thing that you want to do, for me, it is controlling technology, it's staying off of my email in the evenings. That's the thing that I've been thinking a lot about since this cruise. The only thing that is standing between you and taking that action is an icky emotion. And that emotion is a series of vibrations that are taking place inside of your body that if you allow it, it could pass through your body in two minutes or less. So going back to this visual that I gave you around a hurdle, I want you to imagine that that hurdle is you sitting with or feeling that emotion for those two minutes. Not resisting it or trying to work through it, not trying to think that you shouldn't be experiencing it, not shaming yourself for it, but sitting in it and allowing it to be there. I practiced this the other day when we finally got home from the cruise, and I was sitting on my bed and I was kind of winding down to go to sleep now. I kind of have a rule for myself that I don't keep my phone with me at night. I plug it in in a different room at night so that it's not the last thing I see when I go to bed and it's not the first thing I open when I get up in the morning. But here I am, sitting in bed. I had this thought I should check my email before I shut down my phone for the night. But there was really, of course, no reason to at all. I had checked my email earlier in the day. There's really nothing that I would find in my email that would be remotely helpful to me as I am trying to go to sleep. There's no reason to engage my work brain in that moment when I'm trying to get to sleep. And I knew that not checking my email was the best thing for me. And I felt this rise of anxiety literally swell up within me within moments. This anxiety that was coming from worried about being out of touch or somebody needing something from me and not responding in a timely manner. And instead of relieving that anxiety by checking my email, because that would do it, I could check my email, and then all of a sudden, I won't feel anxious about it anymore, but that would be doing the thing I don't really want to do. Instead, I sat with it. I took a couple of deep breaths. I noticed the sensations that were associated with that anxiety that were happening in my body, those vibrations. And then just after maybe 15 seconds, it passed. And then I put my phone away for the rest of the night. It really can be that simple. It really is that simple. It's hard to do, but it's simple in terms of a process. I remember a conversation I had with one of my clients, Cathy, when we were talking about how she was always feeling very hurried to get out the door, and she was always trying to push her kids out the door. It was causing a lot of conflict while her kids were trying to get their shoes on and trying to get their backpacks on and so forth. And she was in this hustle to get out the door and it just was causing stress in her morning that she didn't want. And it was leaving her feeling sort of icky after she dropped off her kids in the morning. And so, as we were talking about that, I remember we talked about what it would look like for her to just stop in the middle of the hurry, take a couple of deep breaths to allow that stress and that feeling of hurriedness to pass by her, as if she could literally just breathe it out. And she found, though it was hard to do, she found that it was this life changing moment where she could stop, breathe for a couple of seconds, let the wave of hurriedness pass by her, and she could crouch down, look her kids in the eyes, help them with their shoes, help them with whatever they were doing, and actually have a very connected moment with them in the morning, where before she was never able to do that. The only thing that was standing between her and her ability to have a connected and less stressful morning with her, being willing to sit with that experience or that feeling, those vibrations of hurry.
I remember a celebration that one of my clients, Nicole gave me when she talked about leaving her work on Friday feeling very unprepared for a presentation that she had on the following Monday. And she said her inclination was to kind of take some time to work over the weekend. But she had decided that she was not going to work that weekend, that it was going to be a completely work free weekend. She was going to spend it with her family. But she hadn't been fully prepared for this presentation. And so her brain wanted to justify the couple of hours she would spend preparing. And when she had to say no, there was kind of this rise of stress that came up, this feeling of like, inadequacy, this feeling of being unprepared. And what she had to do is she had to notice those feelings. She had to take some moments to breathe through them, kind of let those vibrations pass through her and say, no, I'm prepared enough. I am going to spend time with my family. It was one of the most uncomfortable things that she said that she could do because it was like a moment, we have these moments where we are making a choice to either follow through with the thing that we want to do or not do, or to not. It literally is a moment. And all that's coming up in that moment is an emotion. In her case, it was a feeling of being unprepared. And if she was unprepared, it made her feel inadequate, ultimately. So really, just sitting with that, taking a couple of deep breaths, letting herself get over that hurdle, that wave of emotion, so that her brain is no longer responding from a place of emotion, but is from a place of priority, from a place of higher thinking. And she could tell herself, no, I'm prepared enough. I'm going to spend the time with my family that I had planned to spend with them.
When you bring awareness to the emotions that cause you the hurdle, then you have a process to overcome them.
Having worked with hundreds of working moms and coaching them on creating, fulfilling and balanced working mom lives, I have noticed that we tend to have these go to emotions that get in the way of us taking action or not taking action. They're usually just a few of them for each of us. For me, that emotion is inadequacy. It's one that often comes up that I find when I'm feeling that, I tend to take actions that I don't want to take. I tend to check my email when I'm feeling inadequate. I tend to browse social media casually when I should be working on something else. I tend to go clean my kitchen because I work from home instead of focusing on writing an email or writing a podcast, something that I'm supposed to be doing when I am feeling inadequate. Like, that is a go to emotion for me that causes a lot of imbalance and unproductivity. And in coaching, I help all of my clients name these. We get very specific about the actions that they want to be taking or the things that they want to be doing or not doing, and then the emotions that are getting in the way of them doing that, and then I teach them how to just let those emotions be. When you bring awareness to the emotions that cause you the hurdle, essentially the emotions that are causing you to not follow through in the way that you want, when you have awareness of that then you have a process to overcome that, then I guarantee that you're going to start following through. You're going to start leaving work at the time that you want. You're going to start feeling in control of how much time you're on social media or when you check your email. You're going to start working out more if that's what you want to do. You're going to start prioritizing time for yourself. You're going to stop scheduling over meetings that you have planned for just you for heads down time. You're going to start doing the things that you want to do when you know exactly what's getting in the way of you following through, and then you learn the tools to overcome them. So if you are wanting someone to walk you through this process, really help you understand how to follow through and prioritize the things that you want and the things that you don't want, then I really encourage you to take time to connect with me now.
Conclusion
Anyone that's interested in working with me, I offer them a free breakthrough call. This is a chance for us to talk about what it is you really want and what's getting in the way of you having it, to start naming some of those emotions on this free call, and then to discuss how coaching together is going to really help you get to the life that you want to be leading. If you want to take me up on that free call, you simply go to rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book. You're going to be directed to a quick form that you will fill out, and then you'll be directed to my scheduler where we can find a time to connect in the next couple of weeks. All right, working moms, the only thing getting in the way of you taking the balanced action that you want is an emotion. Figure out exactly what that emotion is and learn how to allow it to be there, and I guarantee you'll start following through.
Hey, before you go, I want to take a moment and tell you about an opportunity to speak with me directly. If you've been listening to this podcast and still feel like you need help balancing a fulfilling career with motherhood, then I encourage you to schedule a free breakthrough call. On this call, we will get crystal clear on exactly what it is you want out of your career and how you want to balance that with motherhood. And then we'll craft next steps for you to start moving toward a more calm and fulfilling working mom um, life. Head over to ebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to apply for this free call. Till next week working moms, let's get to it.
