Does your job need to be fulfilling to create balance?

Follow the show:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Everywhere else

We spend over a third of our awake life working. So, having a job that you want to go to every day is important, but is it necessary for creating work-life balance? If it is true , then you might just be chasing a perfect set of circumstances that will never exist. In this podcast I will share why a fulfilling job is NOT in fact required when creating a life that feels balanced and talk you through what is necessary instead.

Topics in this episode:

• 4 tricks to cultivating commitment to your job

• Why setting a date to re-consider your fulfillment is important

• The trap of thinking a more fulfilling job will create balance

• When creating balance feels hard, don’t do this…

• How to create natural motivation and connection in your job

Show Notes:

• Want to speak to me directly about if you should change jobs or careers? Are you looking for a specific process to help you be certain of you next steps? Then apply for a free breakthrough call by clicking here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book

Enjoying the podcast?

• Make sure you don’t miss a single episode! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

• Leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.

Transcript

Intro

We spend over a third of our awake life working. So having a job that you want to go to every day is important, But is it necessary for creating work life balance? If it's true that you need to love your job and be fulfilled by your job in order to create work life balance then you might be chasing a perfect set of circumstances that just never will exist. In this podcast I will be sharing why a fulfilling job is not in fact required when creating a life that feels balanced and talk you through what is necessary instead, 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! 

Hello amazing working moms out there, if you celebrated Halloween last night, I hope it was a safe and memorable one! I’m recording this before Halloween, but I can tell you one of the traditions we did before the pandemic was to move our fire pit that is usually in our backyard into our front yard and to sit and chat with our neighbors as they walk by to pass out candy from our front yard and this year we will turn on a movie and open our garage, with surround sound and a big TV, so we will just let the kids and families stand and watch and enjoy the festivities together! So we are super excited about that. We are also, for the first time, honoring the day of the dead. We have put up pictures of our loved ones - we have lost a couple of really close family members during these C0VID times and so it’s been fun to start to share stories with my kids about that and beginning the holiday season.

I am really excited about what we will talk about today because it is a topic that comes up a lot when talking about work-life balance and talking about creating a fulfilling life - and that is your job. The question I get asked a lot is how important is your job, specifically how fulfilling the job is, when you are trying to create work-life balance. And it makes sense that this comes up a lot because we spend a lot of time at work. We spend 1/3 of our waking life working at a job. And that's only if you work 40 hours a week. Before I was a coach I also had a commute to my job over an hour each way and when you calculate out the commute, plus the lunch break, plus the hours worked, about 47% of my awake hours were spent at work.

When you're spending that much time working or getting to work, or just being at work, it makes sense that we want that to be fulfilling. And when it's not, it can cause a whole lot of internal imbalance.

You cannot wake up every day and dread going to work if you want to create balance.

It is true that because your job takes up so much time you cannot be hating your job wishing you were in another if you want to create balance. You cannot wake up every day and dread going to work, if you want to create balance. You can’t be at work and be thinking the whole time how you wished you weren’t there, or you are daydreaming about being with your kid, or wishing you could quit your job, or being at another job…our thoughts are like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The way you think about your job, or the way you think about yourself in that job, that is ultimately what creates balance. That's at the core of it. The right job or the right boss or the right company that is “family-friendly”, these are not what create balance and you cannot depend on these to create balance. 

Now it is true that if you work in a family-friendly company that gives you flexibility, where it’s the culture of the company to be with a sick kiddo or take off work to attend a school play… when you’re in that type of company it is true that balance is easier to create but it in and of itself doesn't create balance. I really want you to hear that, family-friendly companies make it easier to create balance but they do not actually create it. 

It is not the job, or the company, or your boss, that creates a balanced life. It is you!

I had a client who worked in one of the most family-friendly companies of any clients I had ever worked with. Lots of flexibility, they never questioned if you needed to be gone for any family reason, create your own schedule as needed, during the pandemic very accommodating with generous paid family time, and yet when she came to me she was still averaging 50 or 55 hours a week, working every weekend at least a few hours and weeknights were not uncommon… but the company wasn't promoting that. The message from her boss and the company was to take time off and to be with her family and prioritize her family… and yet, she still overworked. Because it is not the job, or the company, or your boss, that creates a balanced life. It is you!

One of the foundational principles that I teach all of my clients whether you are in The Collective or if I work with you one-on-one, is that you are in charge of your own work-life balance. It is just simply not useful to think a job creates it or being fulfilled by your job creates it, or having a more family-friendly company creates it, because then you are not in control of it, you're completely dependent on someone else or something else - in this case, your job or your boss in order to have the life that you want to have. 

I don't want you to be thinking that a fulfilling job is required in order for you to create balance because then you're going to be waiting around until you find that perfect fulfilling job. And there will be so much emphasis placed on ensuring you get the right fulfilling job with the right flexibility and family friendliness that you want, so you will likely feel paralyzed by the process. 

75% of the women I work with one on one, part of why they hire me is to help them figure out their next steps in their career so they're both fulfilled and balanced. The problem is for many of them they've been in this career path for a decade or more, have a nice salary and benefits but yet they're unfulfilled. They want to make a change, but it feels so risky to them to leave the stability of their job and their career and they want to ensure they make a change. They don't want to leave their job then go work for another company or maybe even change careers entirely only to find out that it’s also not fulfilling and they still have the same overworking tendencies. For many of these women, they have been considering a job change for years but have been completely paralyzed by needing to make sure the change is RIGHT. 

Now what is so interesting is that a good portion of these women end up deciding to stay in their current role. What happens is they start taking ownership over their schedule and how much they work and they start exploring what they love about their job and why it’s the RIGHT fit for them and they start feeling fulfilled again and they decide to stay. Some of them start asking for what they need from their boss (flexible work hours, to be on a promotion track and even for some to move down to part-time) and that brings fulfillment. 

What I really want you to see in all of this is that our job and the way we think about our job and how fulfilled we are in the job and how much we work or overwork…all of this has an effect on our ability to create work life balance. But it's not black and white. There isn't a perfect cocktail of fulfillment in your work and time spent working and flexibility that creates work-life balance.

And I don't want you waiting to figure out that perfect cocktail either. I want you to experience it now.

So the answer to the question, do you need to be fulfilled by your job in order to create a balanced life? The answer is no. 

However, you do need to feel committed. You have to feel committed to your job if you are going to create a balanced life. Because when you’re committed, you stop the constant second-guessing in your head and you start problem-solving differently. 

So here's what I mean by commitment. Commitment is all about dedication. It’s about seeing something all the way through. You are very committed to your kids. You are going to be with them, supporting them through all of the ups and the downs. When you're having a bad mommy day, you don't throw in the towel and quit on your children, because you are committed to them and you are committed to being the best mom you can be for them. 

The same thing needs to be true for your job. Through all the ups and downs, the successes and failures, you don’t consider throwing in the towel and quitting because you are committed to being a highly valuable employee. 

Being committed to your job is deciding to be there and be fully dedicated no matter how hard it is. 

So I want to talk about 4 tricks that are going to help you build up commitment to your job. Now what’s going to happen, interestingly enough is what I see from working moms is that when they start to build up their commitment, fulfillment also increases at the same time.

The first one is: Not taking “this is hard” and extrapolating that out to mean maybe this is a sign you should quit. 

I see this a lot particularly with moms with young children, learning how to balance their job duties with life as a mom is hard. There's a lot of trial and error involved in figuring out how to be as productive as possible during your workday, and how to shut off your work brain at the end of your day so you can be fully present. And what I see a lot of working moms do is when it feels hard they start thinking ‘maybe I'm in the wrong job...or maybe I can't handle this...or maybe I should take a break and be home with my baby for a while.’ So they take that feeling of it being hard and they make that mean something about their job, versus your learning a new skill set of how to be a working mom and learning to create balance in the job, isn't going to happen overnight and it will be hard along the way… it doesn't mean that it's still not the right job for you or that you're not the perfect person for it or that you won't eventually figure it out. 

Because remember, thinking I can't handle this, or I'm not as good as I was before…these thoughts are going to create unfulfillment in your workplace… So you want to steer clear from labeling the challenges of creating work-life balance in your job as being a sign that you should be looking for other work.

I have a student in the collective that has I found this to be the crux of what creates imbalance for her in life. When things feel hard her brain likes to escape the hardness by quitting. And it makes sense, nobody wants to be swimming in thoughts of “this is hard” for very long. That’s exhausting…but the problem is when you start entertaining thoughts of quitting or looking for other work in order to escape how hard it feels…what you are NOT doing is thinking strategically about how to make your current job not hard anymore. You are not problem-solving for how to create balance RIGHT NOW. Instead, you are expelling all your energy on hoping to create it in the future…after you quit!  

The second trick that is going to help you create commitment to your job is to know/remember why you are there. 

Just because you've been working at your company or been in that job for many years does not mean that you need to continue in it. You need to decide why you're there today. Why do you still choose to work for the company you work for? Why do you still want to be doing the type of work that you're doing? Even if it's not the perfect place for you or you're not doing the exact job you want to be doing, answering these two questions is going to help you bring some perspective and purpose. 

A lot of people don't take the time to stop and consider why they continue to do what they do. It's as if they graduated from college in a particular major and they thought they were supposed to stay for the rest of their career even if they're extremely unhappy and lack balance. Regular seasons of listing out what you love about your job and what you love about your company will help fortify your commitments and your reasons for being there and bring lots more fulfillment. Remember, your brain is really good at pointing out all the reasons why your job doesn't work or your company isn't the right fit, and we're not ignoring those, instead, you're just focusing on the other side of the ledger on why you want to be there and why you want to be doing the job you're doing.

The third trick is to decide when you want to reevaluate if you want to stay in the job.

You don't want to leave it open-ended, because then your brain is always going to have this pop-up window thinking about and searching for evidence of when it's time to leave. And I don't want you wasting any energy thinking about leaving. I also don't want you making the decision to leave to be an emotional one, which is what we tend to do when we're feeling unfulfilled. Instead of looking at the job objectively, we take that unfulfillment and we make that mean it's time to leave, when it may not be the best move. Remember I was telling you about how 75% of my one-on-one clients think that they need to change jobs? I would guess to say that over a third of those women decided to stay. But if we hadn't worked together and they were left up to their own emotional decisions they probably would have left. And I don't think staying or going is a right or wrong decision, I just want you to make the decision to leave your job or change your schedule or change roles or companies - I want that decision to come from a place of power, from a place of strategically thinking about your reasons, not from an emotional place.

The way you do that is you make a decision for when you are going to evaluate if you want to continue on your current job and you don't keep it as an open decision to make. That way whenever your brain wants to start thinking of leaving or daydream about changing jobs or being home with your baby for a while, you can redirect it and remind it that on January 1st you will evaluate and make a decision, but right now…you want to strategize for how you can make your current role better, how you can stop overworking or how you can make it more interesting…whatever the challenge is. 

The fourth trick is to consider how you and your strengths are PERFECT for your current job.

This is particularly important if feeling unfulfilled in your job is coming from a place of inadequacy…like you aren’t good enough or since having kids you can’t handle it or you are feeling really out of balance in the job. Remember, the goal is to be committed to the job, not to put all your emphasis on being fulfilled by it and getting it perfect. 

So, why are you perfect for your job? What makes you really good at it? What are you doing really well in the job? This type of intentional positivity toward us in our job creates natural motivation, which is what being fulfilled is all about, right? You want to feel more connected and motivated by your work…so all you’re doing here is intentionally creating that connection and motivation. 

There you go, 4 tricks to creating commitment to your job which will create natural motivation and connection to your work. 

If you are feeling out of balance right now and you're thinking that the job is the problem and that if you were more fulfilled or were in a different company that was more flexible then you would be able to create that balance if this is you right now the most powerful thing you can do is start creating balance right now in your current job. Essentially make this job work for you. Assume that you could never leave this job and if that was the case how would you go about creating work-life balance in your life? These four tricks are going to give you some guidance, but the reason I want you to consider this is because after you’ve done the hard work of creating balance in your current job you will know you can create it anywhere. You will know that no matter your work circumstance YOU ARE IN CONTROL OF YOUR OWN BALANCE. 

Conclusion.

It’s simply not useful to think that your job MUST BE FULFILLING, that your company must be flexible… for you to create work-life balance because it takes away all the control. 

And I want you in control of balance, always. 

Ok working moms see ya next week!