The foundation to creating work-life balance (Part 1)

Follow the show:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Everywhere else

If you're not feeling really good about you and your work, you're likely not going to feel balanced in life. If you're constantly looking for other people to validate how good you are and what you're doing, you're going to spend too long perfecting things. If you're really hard on yourself and have a lot of negative self-talk, you’re going to waste time and energy in self-judgment and indecision and likely never experience balance. A confident relationship with yourself is literally the foundation for a balanced life.

In this episode, I will explain several misconceptions about work-life balance, the truth about what it actually is and the 4 components that make up a balanced working mom life.

I will dive deep into the first component, confidence, and share why I think it is the foundation to creating a balanced life. We will cover why knowing who you are and who you are not is vital to being confident and ultimately how true confidence is being able to separate how good you are as a person, mom and worker from how much you accomplish.

This is part one of a 4 part series.

Topics in this episode:

  • What work-life balance is and is not

  • The 4 components (the 4 C’s) to create a balanced life

  • Why confidence is the foundation for work-life balance

  • How a lack of confidence creates imbalance

  • A quick tool for building up your confidence

Want some additional support to creating work-life balance? Check out the Work-Life Balance Formula, a free training where I teach you the exact equation for feeling present at home and happy at work. Click here to sign up: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.net/balanceformula

Enjoying the podcast?

Transcript

Hey there! The term work-life balance is a bit misleading because it's suggesting that there's work and then there's life. As if they are opposites! But for us, as ambitious working moms work is a big part of our life and we want to keep it that way.

So, in today's episode, I'm sharing the hard truth about work-life balance, what it is, what it’s not, and diving deep into exactly what it takes to create a foundation for a balanced life. 

This is part 1 of a 4 part series – so here we go…

Intro


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, ambitious working moms! How are you doing today? 

This podcast is 3 years in the making and I am so excited to finally get it into your hands. There are more women in the workforce than ever before. Actually 72% of women with kids under 18 years old work. Compare that to 1950 when it was only 18%. Women are on the rise in the workforce! And I created this podcast as a resource for moms that really want to stay successful in their career but don’t want to sacrifice their family to do it. So this might seem a bit ambitious on my end but my desire is for women to NEVER feel like they have to choose between their career and being a good mom. And although we have a lot of work to do systemically to get more women into leadership and to make the work environment more family-friendly there is so much we can do as individuals to be more productive, confident, and vocal in both our work and home life, and that is what this podcast is all about.

So For those of us who haven’t meet, hi…I’m Rebecca and I am a certified professional life coach that helps working moms balance their ambitious goals with motherhood. And over the course of this podcast, I'll share more about my own story, stories of other working moms who are creating balance in their own lives, and ultimately provide strategies and methods for you to do the same. 

It seemed only appropriate that episode 1 focus on the heart of this podcast: balance. 

So here we go…we’re going to talk about ‘What balance is? What it is not? How we create it!’ 

What is work-life balance?


OK here is my problem with the word balance, it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. A balanced life to me might not mean a balanced life to you. When most people think about work-life balance they kind of imagine this equality between their work and home life, where there is some kind of an equal amount of time spent at one or the other. They imagine a scale where one side goes up the other side goes down. But I don't think that's the most helpful image to use when talking about work-life balance. 

At one time in our history work truly did feel like clocking in and clocking out. Work was left at work, your home life was left at home, and never shall the two meet. That is simply not the reality of our economy any longer. Expectations are that you work until the job is done, not until a certain time. You should be available whenever you're awake, and notifications are set to ensure your availability. And then there are our own personal expectations of how good we are at our job if we choose to not meet either of these expectations. 

Even the term work-life balance is misleading because it suggests that work isn't a part of life. It's work AND life. As if they’re opposites. Have you ever met an ambitious woman who keeps their work and their home life completely separate? No! Work is so much a part of who we are and what we love about life and what we have to offer this world, it's not about containing it to a specific part.


Balance has truly nothing to do with keeping your work and your home separate, or some equality between the two.

How to feel balanced…

So if it is none of these things, what is it? Balance, very simply put, is a feeling. I don’t mean to trick you, but it’s true. Balance is literally an emotion that we feel in our body. Say we want work-life balance, what we are saying is we want to FEEL balanced. So when we talk about creating work-life balance what we're saying is creating a feeling inside of you.

This is really important to understand. Because this means the solution cannot be outside of you. It’s not going to be found in a perfect schedule, or in evenly distributed household tasks, or more me-time, a more family-friendly boss… it’s going to be found INSIDE of you. In the way you are thinking and feeling about yourself and your life. 

The 4 C’s to a balanced life.

And although that feeling is going to be cultivated a little bit differently in each of us, I have spent the last 3 years working with hundreds of working moms to really understand what it takes for ambitious women to cultivate a balanced life. And I’ve broken it down into 4 components. I’m calling them The 4 C’s to a balanced life.  

I'm going to do an overview of all four right now and then do a deep dive into the first one in this episode and will spend the next three episodes diving into the other C‘s. 

Confidence is the first step to work-life balance.

So the first component of work-life balance, or the first C, is confidence. If you're not feeling really good about you and your work, you're likely not going to feel very balanced in life. If you're constantly looking for other people to validate how good you are and what you're doing, you're going to spend too long perfecting things and not being efficient with your time. If you're really hard on yourself and have a lot of negative self-talk, and spend a lot of time second-guessing - you're not going to experience balance. Your relationship with yourself is literally the foundation for feeling balanced – we are going to dive into this a little deeper here in a moment. 

Why you need clarity for work-life balance as a working mom.

The second component to work-life balance is clarity. You have to kind of know what's most important to you, your priorities, where you're headed in your career - if you're going to experience balance. If you don’t know where you’re going in life and what you’re aiming for… it’s going to be hard to get there. When you have clarity over what's most important and where you're headed, you can start to actually make decisions to move you closer to those goals and that vision. And we're going to talk more about this in the next episode.

How to control your mindset and self-talk.

The third C is controlling your mind. There's a lot of different ways we can talk about mindset and thoughts and self-talk, we could kind of use any term we want but at the heart of it is controlling the words that go through your brain. Our brain is so powerful, that our thoughts are like a self-fulfilling prophecy. They either move us forward or they hold us back. So you have to be able to really control what's going on up there if you want to have the ambitious and balanced life you want. 

Commitment as a working mom striving for work-life balance.

The last C is commitment. And funny enough I didn't set out to find words that all start with the same letter, it just turns out that they all start with C so we're going to call this the four C’s to balance and the last one is commitment. You have to commit to the priorities and goals you set for yourself. Going after a balanced life doesn't always feel good. You have to say no to a lot of people. You have to turn off your computer at the end of a workday even when there's more work to do. You have to push yourself to get things done in a fraction of the time you used to give yourself to do it. There's a lot of discomfort in going after a balanced life, then you’re going to have to commit yourself to the journey. 

So there you go. The four C’s to create a balanced life: confidence, clarity, a controlled mind, and commitment. 

This is so good. I get so fired up talking about this because even though it feels kind of hard and for a lot of people sort of impossible, I've been able to create this life for myself, I've helped hundreds of moms be able to do this in their life, and I know that you can do it for you too.

Alright, so let's dive into that first component to creating work-life balance: confidence. 

My story on finding work-life balance in my life.

I have met a lot of women that are really high in their career and yet describe themselves as lacking confidence, and I was one of them. Before I became a coach I worked in event management. I planned 20,000 person events in The San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. These were like developers’ conferences for Facebook and other tech companies. I was in charge of creating massive schedules, creating emergency plans for 20,000 people, thinking through everything from security to connectivity. My clients spent millions of dollars on these events and often used them to make big announcements about their company. I was really good at the job, I kept getting raises and promotions but all the while I questioned myself. I NEEDED to hear I was doing a good job or that I was doing something RIGHT. A lot of who I was, was wrapped up in the success of my career. After my daughter was born, I knew I wanted to change careers but I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do. I didn't really believe that my skill set was transferable. It almost felt like a mini identity crisis. Who was I if I didn't do this type of work? Who was I if I wasn't always trying to move up and do more? I had always been very goal-oriented, always going after the next promotion or the next big event to work, but when my daughter was born I had to sort of slow down. My instinct was to just want to keep going to work on bigger and better events for bigger and better companies, to find the next big gig, but when she was born none of that seemed to matter. I was 33 when I had my daughter and the ambitious go-getter that I had been up till that moment felt lost when daily life was all about feeding, changing diapers, and sleeping. In a lot of ways, I felt held back by her schedules, pumping, endless research on how to get her to sleep through the night or when to introduce solids, I felt very stuck. And not just in figuring out what I wanted in my career, it felt like I didn't know who I was.

At the core of confidence is…

And at the core of confidence is truly knowing yourself. It's about knowing what you're really good at, and what you're not. And the reason that's so important is because a confident person doesn't beat themselves up for things that they're not good at. A confident person just accepts but they can't be an expert on everything. A confident person accepts there's just a learning curve and it doesn't mean you're a terrible person or a terrible mom or a terrible worker when you get something wrong. 

I realized that I had spent a lot of my adult life thinking my successes are what defined me which meant that I had to keep having more and more and bigger and better successes in order to really feel good about myself. Which kind of meant I was delegating out my confidence to something else other than me. And then I started doing it with my daughter too. I saw her ability to nap, or sleep through the night, or eat certain foods, or not cry, as what defined success for me as a mom. It's what made me feel confident that I was doing something well. My confidence cannot hinge on someone else doing something or not doing something or telling me I'm doing something well or not doing something well. My confidence has to be found within me. 

So it wasn't long after my daughter was born that I started building a new foundation for my confidence. Because I knew the way I was operating was not going to work for me any longer. I couldn't be dependent on her, or someone else, or some type of accomplishment for me to really feel good about myself.

The reason this is so important is the foundation for confidence is the same foundation for balance. We don't want balance to hinge on someone or something else other than you. 

What living a balanced life DOESN’T mean…

We don't want balance to hinge on your boss not asking you to work over the weekend – because you feel like you have to say yes. Or being able to afford a nanny vs daycare because it makes you feel like a bad mom for putting your kid in daycare. Or having a full 4 hours to work on a presentation to feel like you’re prepared. Or having accomplished everything on your to-do list before you leave on Friday, so you don’t feel anxiety about what you didn’t get done. Or even needing more than 2 hours a weeknight to see your kid in order to feel like you’re a good mom. 

When we talk about being committed to balance, we are going to talk about saying NO to people, learning to accomplish things in less time, being willing to not work at night even if someone else is waiting on you for something….and in order to do these things you have to have a foundation of confidence. 

True confidence is being able to separate yourself and how good you are as a person, as a mom, or as a worker from how much you get accomplished, how successful it was, or if anyone recognized you for it. A confident person has a foundation of belief in themselves that comes from nothing/no one else but them. 

How to build your confidence as a working mom.

So…how do you build this confidence? With my clients, we spend several sessions defining who they are. We name their core values, their identity (apart from their work), and their purpose. And we do these three exercises because it was what built my foundation almost 7 years ago when my daughter was born. It built what I like to call a compass for who I was and who I was not. 

Knowing who you are NOT is almost as important as knowing who you are. For example, I remember looking at my list of values, identity, and purpose and realizing empathy and compassion were not on any of those lists. Which didn't really surprise me a whole lot as I wouldn't have told you I was extremely empathetic but now that I named it for myself I stopped beating myself up for not being that person. I'm just not the friend that people come to cry with. I'm the friend that they come to fix their problems. 

We waste a lot of time and energy questioning “why can't I be XY or Z?” or “why can't I be more empathetic like ?” These kinds of thoughts just eat away at your confidence and balance. 

An easy exercise to build confidence in yourself every day.

One exercise I give my clients - and feel free to steal it from me, is at the end of the day, set a timer for 5 minutes and make a list of what makes you great. What makes you a great mom? What makes you a great worker, wife, friend, human…make a different list each day. 

It's not that you don't know these things, it's just that you’re likely in a pattern of thinking more negatively and we want to get your brain to a place where it very quickly can remember all the good stuff about you. Which means you have to spend some time naming it! Whether that is informally doing an exercise like this or more formally in something like coaching or reading a book. You’re going to have to really dive into who you are at the core and start believing that person is good enough. This is going to create that foundation of balance.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you’re looking for more support be sure to check out The Work-Life Balance Formula, a free training to help you feel more confident in your career and fully present with your family. You can find that at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.net/balanceformula

And, if you haven’t already, please leave a rating and review giving me your honest feedback. I’d love to hear what specifically you liked and if there are any topics you want me to cover in the future. Writing a review will take you less than 2 minutes and is one of the most helpful ways to spread this resource to other working moms. Thanks in advance and let’s get to it moms…

Rebecca Olson