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Before kids our ambitions were focused on our career. But after kids, our goals seem to change. Success is no longer just about our career, it's about being a great mom as well. And those two things can often feel like complete opposites. In this podcast I will to talk about the shifts that are required when we set a new ambitious goal of having both a successful career AND a happy home life. I will breakdown how being successful in your career actually supports you being a great mom and talk through what to expect when you set out to achieve both.
Topics in this episode:
The difference before kids and after kids
Why you need to reframe the goal after motherhood
How work decisions are actually family decisions
How do you achieve both success in your career and success as a mom?
How work and family life are intertwined
4 shifts that are required when setting yourself up for success as a working mom
Show Notes:
Join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective – This is a group coaching program for working moms looking to create the building blocks to 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
Before our kids came along our ambitions were focused mostly towards our careers. But then once we have kids, our ambitions change. Success is no longer just about our career, it's about being a great mom as well. And those two things can often feel like complete opposites. In this podcast, I want to talk about the shifts that are required when we set a new ambitious goal of having both a successful career AND a happy home life. I will break down how being successful in your career actually supports you being a great mom and talk through what to expect when you set out to achieve both.
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!
Before my kids were born I worked in high-level event management for tech companies. It was a demanding career, that was detail-oriented and high stress. We executed events for 10,000 and 20,000 people, juggling not just the content of the events but the security and trash and cleaning schedules and parking plans and permitting. There was always a tension between what my client, which was the tech company, wanted and the rules of the site. It was very good at planning for worst-case scenarios, thinking about the what if’s, taking into account a guest’s experience, and the goal of course was to plan so well that the execution on-site, at the actual event, would go smoothly.
I was somebody that couldn't just turn off my work brain when I got home. I was addicted to checking emails and answering emails during off work hours, I always wanted to be working on bigger and better events or projects. I worked nights and weekends as needed.
Success in my career, at the time, was to make the clients happy. If they were happy, I was happy.
But, then my daughter was born and although I still wanted my clients to be happy and I still wanted to be successful in my career, that was no longer the goal.
My new goal after maternity leave.
The new goal, after I returned from maternity leave, was to have happy clients AND happy kids. In other words, the goal was to be successful in my career AND be the kind of mom I want to be. If one of those was failing, meaning my clients weren't happy or I wasn't having the kind of motherhood experience that I wanted then I wasn’t meeting the goal.
After motherhood, the goal needs to be reframed for all of us and that is what we are focusing on in this podcast: the goal shift from successful career to successful career & great mom.
So, what does being successful in your career and being a great mom mean? This feels like an important question to ask yourself so that you are crystal clear on what you are aiming for.
A successful career is quality work, happy clients, hitting sales goals, a supported team…but here is what it is not…accepting every meeting request, getting through your to-do list, answering emails as soon as you receive them, being available whenever someone needs something from you. You can see where I am going with this, I am sure.
What does being a great mom mean?
And then, what does it mean to be a great mom? For most of my clients, it is about being present and focused when with your family. It's not just about the time that you spend with your family though for sure some needs to be carved out, it's about how you show up when you're with them. You're not distracted by your phone or thinking about something that happened at work. You’re not just going through the motions, but you feel connected to them and their needs. You listen when they are talking to you and engage in what they have to say. You have energy when you are with them, which means you didn’t expend all your energy at work.
Now the question is, how do you achieve both of these at the same time?
One thing I want you to notice is that this goal is not either-or it's a both/and. This means, if your family is suffering, then you're not succeeding. There is a symbiotic relationship between your career and your family. This means two things…
When work isn’t going well, it has an effect on how you show up as a mom.
One, you are a whole person. You are not a worker over here and then a mom over here. You aren’t two separate people. You are one. That means when work isn’t going well, it has an effect on how you show up as a mom. When your mom life is not going well it has an effect on how you show up at work. When you are energized and excited about what you do in your job that has a positive effect on your mom life then when you are energized and excited about your life as a mom that has a positive effect on your work life. It's really hard to not think about your child when they're at homesick. And it's really hard to not think about a project you didn't get done when you're at home. We aren’t trying to completely separate the two because one naturally affects the other. You’re not a worker and a mom you’re a working mom. And being a working mom is an asset. It brings value to your company and it brings value to your family. I might just have to do a whole other podcast on this because it's so important for your brain to be on board with this idea. You are a better worker to your company because of your life as a mom, you have better ideas, you have more compassion, you bring a different perspective, you can problem-solve in different ways, your company won the lottery when you became a mom. Your family also benefits, and not just financially, because they have a leader of the family that is making an impact, making the world a better place, bringing home energy and insights, and possibility. Everyone wins!
The second thing I want you to notice about this symbiotic goal of success in your career and being a great mom is that when you're making work decisions you're also making family decisions, we have to stop thinking about these goals as being separate.
Let me give you some examples, when you are making decisions about how you're going to approach a project, the way you approach it is going to have an effect on your family because your approach is either going to give you energy & time or take away energy and time.
What feels like a work decision, it’s not, because it has a direct impact on your energy & time as a mom.
I have a client who works in marketing and when she is approaching a project with a client she tends to put the client's satisfaction and needs first. So what that looks like is she sort of tailors everything she does to accommodate their tastes, which means nothing is standardized. Even if she does the same task with every single client, she builds it from the ground up. She also likes to give status updates in person, which means she spends a lot of time in meetings over things that could easily be communicated in an email. So because she approaches each client and project with a very customized experience, she always has happy clients but the customization takes a lot more time and energy which then affects her off-work hours with her family. So even though the customized experience for the client is a great approach to her work it doesn't actually help her meet her goal of success in her career AND being a happy mom. What I really want you to see is that even with something that feels completely like a work decision, it’s not, because it has a direct impact on your energy & time as a mom.
This one might seem a little bit more obvious but the way you manage your time at work has a large effect on how you show up as a mom and thus your family. If you are stuck in meetings all day and not able to be productive on tasks and communications that need to get done, the likely thing you'll do is work late or work after the kids go to bed.
Making a shift in your brain to make better decisions.
So, the goal is to achieve both success in your career and happiness as a mom. That is an actual shift that must happen in your brain when you're making decisions. it's not what's the best thing for my client or for my company or project, it's what's the best thing for them AND my family.
So here is what shifts when you reframe the goal in this way.
Perspective - to hold both success in your career and success as a mom at the same time, to be going after them simultaneously, requires constant perspective. Every decision about your time and your energy requires that you zoom out to think about the bigger goal. When you are making work decisions, a little piece of your brain needs to be thinking about the impact this decision is making on your family.
Change in process - the way you went about being successful in your career before you had kids is likely not exactly the same way you will be successful with this new goal of success in your career and being a great mom. You cannot expect to do exactly the same things you were doing before to meet this new goal. It will require you to think about your time differently, it will require you to say no more, it will require you to get projects done in more efficient ways. The new goal is going to require a change in the process.
Expect failure - you've never had this as a goal before, so you don't really know how to attain it. So you can expect some trial and error. You might find that you can't do back to back to back meetings all day because it exhausts you too much and you have nothing left over at the end of the workday for your family. You might find that your kid needs to go to sleep at 5:30 PM because that's when she's tired (this was our experience with my daughter) which means if you want to spend time with her on a weekday you may have to get home from work at 4:00 PM and log back in later. Whenever we are doing something we've never done before, there is always failure. And it's better to expect it and plan for it so that you can have some compassion for yourself when it happens instead of thinking you should have got it right the first time and then feeling terrible when you don't.
Normalize discomfort - going after a goal is not always going to feel good. If you have to say no to someone, or reject a meeting request, or not return somebody's email for a week because you just can't get to it, or ask the nanny to stay late so you can have a little time alone. A lot of the time these things don't feel good. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong, it doesn't mean that you aren't meeting your goal, it just means that doing big things and I consider this goal to be a really big thing because it essentially encompasses a life of having it all, going after big things is uncomfortable and it should be. It means you're doing it right.
OK, so the new goal is to have a successful career and be a great mom. Spend some time this week really considering what changes when you reframe the goal in this way. Get your brain crystal clear on what success in your career and being a great mom really means to you and name the things that are going to get in the way of you meeting this goal.
Outro
Alright working moms I want you to have a great week as you balance success at work and home and go after big things…so, let’s get to it!
