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When someone is moving from an imbalanced life to a balanced life, they go through 5 stages. In today's episode I'm going to walk you through each of those five stages so that you can see the whole process, be able to self-identify which stage you are in and understand what it takes to move from one stage to the next.
Topics in this episode:
What are the 5 stages of balance?
Why do we move through the stages in a liner path?
How does productivity and confidence play into the 5 stages?
Why tackling productivity and time management first, does work.
What is a boundary and how do we keep to them?
Show Notes:
Join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective – This is a group coaching program for working moms looking to create the building blocks to sustainable work-life balance. The program teaches you a 5-step process, includes weekly group coaching and a private community of working moms all determined to create a balanced life. Find out more information here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective
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Transcription
Intro
When someone is moving from an imbalanced life to a balanced life, I have noticed that everyone goes through essentially the same 5 stages. There is almost like this linear path and in today's episode I'm going to walk you through each of those five stages so that you can see the whole process and can get a sense of what it takes to move from one stage to the next. 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!
I have been coaching working moms exclusively for over four years and have worked with hundreds in creating work life balance. Recently I took a step back to think about the similarities that women experience when they move from an imbalanced life to a balanced one. Because I noticed that women tend to go through stages in the process. I was noticing a correlation between productivity, confidence and happiness that I thought was really interesting.
Productivity is the last stage of creating work-life balance.
In the beginning of the coaching process when women would start to work with me they would describe their productivity and confidence and their happiness all being low. Now, most work-life balance tools focus first on productivity, with the thought that if you can increase productivity you will feel more on top of things and feel better about yourself and your work and start feeling balanced… but what I have found is that working on productivity is actually the last stage of creating work-life balance because it naturally starts to happen when you are feeling confident and happy. Because being more productive requires confident decisions and likely making decisions in a way you never have before.
So I was curious and I decided to define the various stages of going from feeling imbalanced to balanced and connecting it to productivity and confidence. What has been so useful about this is it gives your brain an overview of what you will experience in the process.
Creating a balanced life is a process.
Our brains like to see things as black or white. I’m either balanced or not. I’m either doing things right or I am doing things wrong. I’m an amazing mom or I’m yelling at them and I’m terrible. But when you take a step back and look at the big picture, you will see that there is a lot of mucky middle. Creating a balanced life is a process. There will be ups and downs, forward and backward progress…you are in the process of creating a balanced life.
Ok, so I am going to break down each of the stages. There are 5 of them. We will go through them linearly. And as I go through them I'm really going to try to give you some examples of myself and clients in each of these stages so you get a really clear picture of what's going on in the middle of this stage and then I also want to connect it to what's happening with your confidence and your productivity at that same time.
OK so stage one I called trial and error.
This is the stage where you know you have to do something and so you basically just throw spaghetti at a wall hoping something sticks. The most common thing people try is adjusting their work schedule. They work less hours or change hours or get up early so they don't have to work late. Some women even quit their jobs. I had a client that started coaching with me and immediately quit her job. She didn't like the company or the boss or the work anymore and she just had to get out. So she stayed home with the kids, I think her son did 3 days of preschool and her daughter was 1 year old, and to her surprise even after weeks and months of not working, she still described life as being very out of balance and crazy and overwhelming. Certainly, it got easier in some ways, managing meals and household tasks and drop-offs and pickups and so forth but it didn't really get to the heart of what balance is all about.
I have had clients that have gone down to part-time but then feel like they are managing the same amount of work in just less time and it feels even more stressful.
I've had clients that work part-time because they want to spend more time with their kids and they feel like the extra time with the kids is nice but it just never feels like quality time cause there's still so many things to do around the house they have a hard time shutting off their work brain on days they don't work. And they find they're trying to squeeze in little tasks here and there during nap time and between errands and life still feels rushed.
For sure gaining more time back in your day is going to make some things easier but it's not some magic bullet that creates balance.
So in this stage, there is an attempt to essentially change your external circumstances to create balance. Adjust your hours, change teams, maybe even change your job, hire a nanny, hire a housecleaner, try to get your husband to do more around the house, pay for babysitting, squeeze in more massages and other self care rituals. And what I often see is some momentary relief, but it's never actually sustainable. Old patterns, habits and rhythms eventually come back and you're right back in the unbalanced stage of life.
In this stage I would say confidence remains low, because you don't actually feel better about yourself, you really haven't changed anything going on inside of you, but productivity might take a slight up turn.
Balance is found inside of you, not externally.
So the big thing to notice about stage one is that it is focused mostly on trying to get your external rhythms of life, time, schedule and to-do's into a manageable place. And the reason it doesn't work and you don't actually create sustainable balance is because you're not focusing on the heart of where balance is found, which is inside of you. Remember balance is a feeling - it is something that we generate inside of our body, not outside. There is no question that having a more manageable life circumstantially would make feeling balanced easier but it isn't the thing in and of itself that creates it.
So stage 2 happens when someone realizes that they have to really change what's going on inside of them to create balance. Just making all of the external changes isn't going to be enough. It's this moment where someone realizes that they have to change the way they're thinking about things and the way they're responding to things and the way they're feeling about things and they need to be able to let some things go and they need to feel more confident. Essentially they need to focus on what's going on inside of them. So they enter stage two.
Stage 2 - The Separating.
Stage 2 is called separating. It's the part of the process where someone begins to separate their identity and who they are as a person from their job. Women that are in the middle of this stage often will say things like, this can't be the only thing. There has to be more to life than constantly doing and doing more. And this is very important, it's a foundational piece of creating balance, because ultimately I’m talking about learning how to stop overworking and stop always prioritizing work. And as long as your identity feels so tied to work, your brain is going to freak out every time you try to prioritize something else. Every time you want to leave work at 5:00 PM to go be with your family for the evening, your brain is going to go through a panic attack because it thinks you're threatening what makes you a good human. I know that sounds sort of extreme but that's where our brains like to go.
You can't be making changes to when you work and when you don't work, and creating more flexibility in your day to be with your kids, and learning how to not log on at night or over the weekends, AND learning how to say no to your boss and set reasonable expectations - you can't be doing all of these things that are going to help you create more balanced rhythms in your life with your brain freaking out and thinking that you're not going to be good at your job anymore, and that you're failing, and that you'll never get promoted, and everybody is going to be disappointed in you, and you're not pulling your weight on your team.
Your work identity isn't who you are as a person.
So in this stage, you begin to really recognize that your work identity isn't really who you are as a person. Like you exist outside of your job. With my clients I take them through a process of identifying their core values and identity and purpose in life. They start to really name the things that energize them and motivate them, not from a work perspective but just from a human perspective. I described it to someone recently almost like I helped them create an avatar of who they are apart from their work, and we do that because your brain really needs to see that there is more to you than always needing to achieve and succeed and do well at work. Now, I know I've been talking about this mostly from a work perspective, but when I think about work I also think about the work we do to run our household. Because we fall into the same trap there as well. That we need to get through our to-do list, and have our house looking a certain way, and our kids behaving in a certain way, and the activities we need our kids to be involved in, and there is this constant need to prioritize chores and a clean house over the things that are actually important to us.
For a lot of people, this stage can take a while, because you're teaching your brain a new way of thinking about yourself. But with all of that hard work comes a huge increase in confidence. Productivity doesn't necessarily get better, in fact sometimes it gets even a little worse because you're much more willing to let go of constantly needing to do things and accomplish things but you feel so much better about who you are as a person, and what you have to offer as a mom and the value you bring your company. You are just creating a new foundation of the way you think about yourself.
And that opens a pathway to stage 3, which I call clarity.
In this stage three things are becoming clear: career direction, bigger life vision and goals enter day-to-day priorities. The goal here is direction. If your brain doesn't know what's most important to you and it doesn't really see a path forward on where you're headed in life and why you're doing the things that you're doing, It's gonna feel like you're drifting. And ultimately because your brain is wired for comfort - which means it just wants to keep doing the same thing over and over and over again because it's the most comfortable thing to do, that's what will happen. And life will feel just rinse and repeat. I've had many clients that have told me, “you know I only planned my life up until this moment. I wanted a good career, to get married, to start a family and here I am!” And they often say to me, “like, is this it?”
No! This is not it. Life does not have to feel like it is just diaper changes and feeding, and shuffling the kids from one place to another, and go go go and then collapse out of exhaustion when the kids go to sleep. This is the stage of the process where you begin to really decide what is next for you, what are the rhythms of life that are working for you, and which ones are not.
I have a client that recently was going through this stage and decided to quit a board that she'd been on for several years, because it just didn't fit her life anymore. She had several other commitments that she let go of too because it just didn't fit into the life that she wanted.
That is what this stage is all about, it's answering the question: what do I want?
I read a study once where they dropped a group of people in a desert and told them to walk a straight path, that was the goal, just walk in a straight line for miles. And what they found is that when the sun was out and they had some sort of marker to help guide them they walked in a straight line, but as soon as any cloud covering would come and cover the sun they would walk in a circle. I find that to be such an interesting illustration when it comes to this stage of the process where you're creating for yourself a guidepost, a Northstar… because when you don't have it you find yourself simply walking in circles.
The fourth stage of balance is boundaries.
The reason it comes at this part of the process is because now that you are feeling confident about yourself and clear on what it is you want and why you begin to start putting boundaries in place to protect yourself and the things that are most important.
A boundary is a protective barrier, think of it as a fence. We put up fences to protect the things that are most important to us. A fence around your property is protecting your house and your things. With regards to creating work-life balance, the thing we are trying to protect is our time and our energy. They are our two most precious commodities, and in the barrier, we have to protect them is our choices.
Our choices hold or break our boundaries.
We either make choices that protect our time so that we can use it on the things that are most important to us, and make choices that protect our energy so that we can be present and focused on all the things that we want to be present and focused on, or we don't. Now there are three common types of choices that cause a leak in our boundaries: People pleasing, perfecting, and hyper doing.
Think about it, you make a choice to attend that last-minute meeting instead of having dinner with your family out of fear of what your boss will think...that is people-pleasing. Now I know many people would say they feel like they don't have a choice in these situations but of course that's not true because nobody is tying you down and forcing you to do anything. You're deciding for yourself and there is always a tradeoff to our decisions. In this stage what you're deciding is ultimately which tradeoffs are worth it to you and which ones are not.
I want you to think about this stage as being ownership over your yes and your no.
I had a client once that created a list of criteria to help her make decisions at work. Because she was in a very fast paced company, with lots of demands and lots of people needing things from her and there simply wasn't enough time in a day to get through whatever everybody wanted from her, so rather than doing it all which was causing her burnout she had to get much more selective about what she did and what she didn't do and who she said yes to and who she didn't. So we came up with a very simple, I think it was a 5 question criteria. Things like ‘am I the only one that can do this? Does it fit one of my three initiatives right now?’ - there were a couple more questions to the criteria but it really helped her see how often she was making decisions not based on her own priorities and her own needs, but instead on other people and what they wanted and what they needed - which didn't always align with what she wanted and what she needed. The criteria she created became this neutral document she could look at to help her make powerful decisions that protected her time and her energy.
Confidence really begins to increase during this time because you're focusing so much on what matters to you and putting yourself first and your priorities first and it's almost like the signal to your brain like, hey I matter! Productivity often starts to go down a little bit during this stage because you're not doing as much, you're saying no more. You're just literally spending less time working and so you're spending less time getting things done.
And that's when stage five begins to happen. Stage 5 is when you begin to strategically think about how you're spending your time so that you protect the things that matter most to you but without losing productivity. This is when time management strategies can really make a difference because you're pushing yourself to think about how you spend your time, and manage your energy, and manage your schedule, and manage your focus in ways you never have before so that you can squeeze as much productivity out of the time that you spend working.
Pushing your brain to be more strategic with your time.
Notice though, that this is the last stage. You have to go through stage two where you build up your confidence, and then you have to go through stage three where you decide what's most important to you, then you have to go through stage four where you begin to really take ownership over your choices and start protecting the things that are most important to you before you can get to this stage where you begin to push your brain to be more strategic with your time. Because inevitably when you start making some of these changes and you start protecting your own priorities over other people and their priorities, people are going to get mad and you might even create a few enemies, though not likely - but seriously people are going to be disappointed and they're going to be frustrated and they're going to want more from you and you're going to say no. And in order to do that, you have to feel really good about YOU and really clear on what's most important and see your decisions and your choices as your own.
It's at this point that your confidence in your productivity really is at its height and you are feeling really good about yourself, your work, and the time that you're spending with your family feels focused and present when you feel like work isn't the most important thing anymore.
The feeling that always comes to mind when I think about living in that balanced stage of life is sufficient, like you're not lacking anything. Like all your needs are met and you're just where you're supposed to be. Peace is another feeling that comes to mind when I think about what you achieve as you go through these five stages, and certainly not that your life is peaceful, because life with kids is probably never peaceful at least not in my experience, but there's inner peace. There's just that deep down knowing that you have created a life and you are living a life that you want, where there aren't any regrets, where you are in control, where you are loved, where what you do is valued.
Conclusion
OK so a quick recap here, stage one is trial and error. We are trying to create external balance without really addressing all the things going on inside of you. Stage 2 is separate. Separating your identity from your work and your accomplishments. Stage 3 is clarity. Giving your brain direction or what's most important to you and where you want your career to head and what you want most out of life. Stage 4 is boundaries. When you begin to protect those things and put up boundaries. Stage 5 that's where you learn how to be as productive as possible in the time that you have. I'm curious where are you? Just take a moment to self-identify what stage are you in? What stage is next for you?
Creating a balanced life is a process.
What I really wanted you to see as I went through this is that there is a natural linear path through these stages and the way to get to the next stage is by deepening the stage you are in. Remember there's no rush, creating a balanced life is a process and you will almost always be somewhere in the middle of doing that. At every stage of life, as new circumstances arise, you'll have to go back through the process. It doesn't mean anything has gone wrong, it just means that balance is a process and it's something that we always have to be working on.
If you are looking to be coached through this process and you want me to walk you through each of these stages by giving you step-by-step guidance, exercises, teachings and reflections, then join The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. I walk you through a five step process to creating work life balance, and when you sign up you get access to that process immediately, there is a weekly group coaching call where I help you apply the material to your own life and you can come with your own personal experiences and circumstances and then there is a private FB community of just the women in the program that where you can go for daily support and daily questions and coaching. You will never feel stuck or alone. You can get from where you are today to where you want to be. Join the Collective and I can help you get there. Alright ladies, see ya next week.
