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There are many different perspectives you can have of your year. Some of them will leave you feeling dissatisfied and disappointed, and others will leave you feeling inspired and proud. Which perspective you choose is up to you. Perspective is a choice and as you look back on 2021 I want you to feel good about what you achieved and who you were. In this episode I will help you actively cultivate a perspective of your year that makes you feel good and leaves you feeling satisfied.
Topics in this episode:
How do you cultivate a different perspective?
Why does the human brain default to a “not enough” perspective?
Why ambitious women often see life as half-empty
A simply analogy to help you see your year from a different angle
5 questions to help cultivate a new perspective of your year:
What do I love about what I created, made, did this year?
How is what I created, made, did awe-inspiring?
How is what I created, made, did this year enough?
How is this exactly where I should be?
How is it the best place for me?
Show Notes:
Would you like to chat with me about creating a working mom life you love? A life that includes fulfilling work but not at the expense of your famuly? Then apply for a free breakthrough call by clicking here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
Have a podcast topic you’d like me to cover? Send me an email and let me know, rebecca@rebeccaolsoncoaching.com
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Transcript
Hey, working moms, excited to be connecting with you today. We're coming to the end of 2021, and for most people, the end of the calendar year is a time of a lot of reflection, a time of looking back, looking over accomplishments, looking over goals, looking over failures, looking over all sorts of things; and it is for me as well. And because I plan to be taking a couple weeks off during the holidays, I'm starting to think about 2021 and some of the bigger goals that I set for myself this year.
It just got me thinking about perspective, and the perspective that I have as an ambitious working mom, and that I hear from so many other women that I work with that feel the same. As ambitious working moms, we have the perspective that there's always more that we can do, and we can achieve - always.
To be ambitious is to be somebody that has a lot of drive, whether that's a drive to succeed or to hit goals or just simply be the best human you can be.
An ambitious person always sees more.
They're always aware of the potential that they have and the potential that's there and their ability to strive toward it. But of course, then the flip side of being ambitious is that you're never really resting in what you achieve or create; it just never really feels like enough.
And I think for ambitious women, this gets really highlighted when they become moms. Because when our tiny humans are born, all they really need is their basic needs met. We literally spend all day trying to help them eat and poop and sleep - it's an exhausting season of life where you are constantly doing something, you were constantly on, but you never feel like you achieve anything.
But of course, we know that that isn't true. In reality, we know that keeping our tiny little humans alive and helping them learn how to sleep and eat - these are really, really important, and huge achievements for them and for us. It truly is just a matter of perspective.
And the perspective of ambitious working moms tends to be 'not enough'.
I didn't do enough. I didn't achieve enough. I wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. I could have done more. I needed more time. There wasn't enough time.
And that's really what I want to talk about today in this episode - I want to talk about this 'not enough' perspective. The way I like to think about it, is that you can actively shape your perspective. You can choose the way you want to think, the perspective that you want to have, the thoughts that you want to think about anything really.
Our thoughts don't just happen to us. Our perspective doesn't just happen to us.
We create it. We cultivate it. Now there are some, sort of default, perspectives that are within us that are either just innate parts of our personality or have been cultured into us. But ultimately, those default perspectives can be changed. They can be shifted into something else.
We have ultimate control over the way we want to think over something, around the perspective that we want to have.
Now, I had some pretty lofty goals for 2021, particularly in my business. I wanted to have my first multiple six figure year, meaning I wanted to hit $200,000 in my business. And to be honest, I didn't come close to that.
So as the end of the year is approaching, I can feel myself already experiencing a lot of disappointment and failure. And to be honest, I'm sort of calling BS on my brain, because yes, it is true that I didn’t, and I will not hit my goals. But that's not the only thing that's true from this year.
Now what's also true is that I created this podcast that has had over 20,000 downloads already. I've created the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective, which is a coaching program that teaches sustainable work-life balance to ambitious working moms.
I also worked with over 25 amazing women.
I helped one replace her salary as an entrepreneur.
I helped one fulfill a dream of leaving her job and being a stay-at-home mom.
I helped all of them learn how to leave work at 5PM every single day and truly prioritize their family. I helped several get promoted and sort of end this mindset that if they got promoted, they were going to have to work more.
When I think about the impact of the work that I did in the lives of the women that I touched, am I disappointed? Do I really feel like I failed? Of course not.
It's all about which perspective I choose to dominantly tune my brain into.
The reality is the human brain defaults to the glass being half empty. It's actually something our brain does for survival. And actually, the glass being half empty is a huge motivator for those that see themselves as ambitious.
They're often comes a time in coaching ambitious working moms - in the coaching that I do - where I ask them:
What would really happen if you stopped feeling like there was more to do?
What would really happen if you stopped telling yourself, "I didn't do enough"?
What would happen if you stopped telling yourself, "Oh, I got to get this right”?
You could stop right now and ask yourself these questions. And actually, I encourage you to do that.
What would really happen?
What would you think?
What would you believe?
Because 100 percent of the time with my clients - with ambitious working moms - there is a mixture of relief and fear. Relief because they wouldn't have to continue pushing themselves; and fear because they wouldn't know how to continue to achieve at the level they're at without it.
The glass being half empty is sort of the signal to your brain that there's more to do.
There's more to achieve.
There's more to get right - you haven't arrived.
And so, your brain uses it as a way to push you forward out of complacency, into success, into the top of your game and ensure that you always remain there, and you always remain valued.
Now, I called this a survival technique because I really do believe it is. If you think back to tribal days, if you were someone in the tribe that was no longer valued and no longer motivated to get their work done, you were kicked out. The tribe is no longer going to feed you if you no longer are giving back to the tribe.
And so, in those days, you couldn't survive without your tribe. So being valuable and useful to your tribe was literally a matter of life and death. And our brains really haven't evolved much since then.
Our brains are still wired for survival, which means your brain is always going to push you to be more valuable and useful and successful to society. The 'glass half empty' perspective is one of the ways our brain does that.
Now the problem is that a glass half empty life is not often a life that feels good. It's a life that never really feels like enough. A life that feels insufficient - where you feel dissatisfied, disappointed, maybe even like a failure constantly.
So, these default emotions like insufficiency and disappointment, they're going to stay with us. They're going to be dominant unless we actively cultivate a different perspective. Now what I love is that your perspective is neither right nor wrong.
A perspective is just simply a point of view.
Think about a model that sits in the middle of an art class. The art students are all in a circle around that model. Each of them drawing what they see from their point of view. Now, some students are sitting in the front of that model, and so they see their face, and that's what they draw.
Other people are sitting behind the model and what they see is their back and their behind. And so that's what they draw.
Their drawing is not going to be right or wrong -it's just going to simply be from their perspective. Now imagine your life is sitting in the middle of that circle. What you do every day, your interactions, the people in your life, what you choose to do, what you choose to not do; and depending on which angle of life you are looking at it from, your perspective is going to be different.
When you're cultivating a different perspective, all you're really doing is you're getting up and you're choosing a different point in the circle to look at your life from.
So, when I put 2021 in the middle of my circle, my initial perspective - my default - is I see failed goals. That's the most dominant view that I have of my year.
But I can get up and I can move to a different spot and take a look at my year and see 25 women that I touched so deeply. The women whose lives will never be the same, who have learned the tools of work-life balance, who've made decisions to follow dreams or stand up for themselves.
When I move to a different place in the circle and I look at my life, I can see all of that from that perspective. Neither perspective is right or wrong, but they definitely evoke very different feelings.
So maybe the more poignant question here is: "How do I want to feel about my year?"
That's such a great question, isn't it? Yes, you could actually choose how you want to feel. For me, I want to feel deeply satisfied from my year. I want to feel inspired by what I did. And so, I need to find a perspective that's going to help me to feel satisfied and inspired.
I get to walk around the circle with 2021 being in the middle and just simply decide which angle is going to help me to feel inspired and satisfied; and then I dominantly want to look at my year from that perspective.
I'm basically going to take my chair - I'm going to pull it up into that point of view, make myself comfortable and just intentionally choose to see my year from that vantage point over and over and over again.
So here are some questions that I'm using right now to help me find the spot in the circle that's going to make me feel satisfied and inspired.
What do I love about what I created, made, or did this year?
How is what I created - or made or did - how is that awe inspiring?
How is what I created, made, or did this year enough?
How is this exactly where I should be?
How is it the best place for me?
Now remember, my goal is simply to find another perspective and make that perspective more dominant than any of my other default ones.
My commitment is to answer at least one of these questions every single day, now until the end of the year.
And every time I answer one, what it's going to do is it's going to reinforce in my brain that this year was satisfying and inspiring, and that that perspective is true because I'm finding evidence for it by answering these questions.
Already, as I've begun this practice, I'm really beginning to see my year from a very different perspective. The glass truly is half full if I choose to see it that way.
This year was satisfying and inspiring in so many different ways.
Working moms, it's time for you to cultivate this perspective that you want for your year. I'm going to post the questions that I was just mentioning - I'm going to put those in the show notes so that you can access them easily.
But let me also say that if you're trying to answer these questions and you just can't come up with the answers, it might be a good time for us to connect. I will help you rekindle a love for your work and life, and help you figure out how to balance all of that with your family.
You can go to RebeccaOlsonCoaching.com/book to fill out a quick form and then find a time for us to connect either before the end of the year or just into the new one. All right, working moms - let's get to it.
