Unplug from work in 4 easy steps

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Learning to unplug and turn off your work brain at the end of a workday or on a weekend is an important skill when creating a balanced life. Our brains crave rest and unplugging from email and notifications is one of the easiest ways to achieve that. But, of course, it is much harder said than done. Unplugging from work is not easy for many ambitious women and so in this episode I will dive into why unplugging is important, what gets in the way of unplugging and then give you a 4-step process for how to unplug.

Topics in this episode:

  • What happens in your brain when you unplug?

  • 4 common reasons unplugging is difficult for ambitious women

  • Why rest helps you achieve at higher levels

  • What to expect when you try to unplug

  • 4 steps to actually unplugging

  • 2 tricks to set yourself up for success when unplugging

Show Notes:

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Transcription


Intro

An important part of creating a balanced life is learning how to unplug from work, we need to unplug at the end of a workday, we need to unplug on a weekend or on a vacation, we really need that time away from our work to create a life that feels balanced. And yet, even though we know that it is very difficult to do.


So in this episode, we're going to talk about why unplugging is so important, what happens in your brain when we do that, and why it's so difficult to do. And then I'm going to give you a four-step process on exactly how to unplug. You ready working moms. Let's get to it.


Welcome to The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms 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.


So I just got back from a week-long vacation with my family, it's really the first time I've been able to see some of my extended family in the last year and a half. And I was reminded on this trip of how important it is to really turn myself off from work when I'm on vacation. How important it is to really unplug from work. And I struggled in the first couple of days. I struggled to put the right parameters around myself to turn off my notifications to turn off my email, it was something that became very clear to me on about day three that it was very important that I really do in fact shut down my brain. So I don't know if it's encouraging to you, for you to hear that, that even I as a coach can struggle with this. But I did get to that point where I finally was able to really shut myself off completely. And coming back today into work, I feel so refreshed and ready and excited, I really do feel like I shut down my brain for a period of time. So I want to talk about what that process looks like. I want to talk about what it takes to actually unplug from work. So I just had the experience of what I had to do in order to get my brain there and so I wanted to share literally the four steps it took me in order to get to that point. Now really, I should have done this before the vacation started, I ended up doing it on a vacation. But the goal here is whether we're talking about unplugging from your work, or at the end of a workday, or we're talking about unplugging at the end of a weekend or on a vacation, you know, the process of unplugging is pretty much the same.


Turning off your work brain is important for work-life balance.

We all know that unplugging from work is a really important part of work-life balance. If you have to turn off your work brain, you have to rest that part of your brain, you have to give focus to something else in your life, namely your family if you're going to create balance in your life. And yet, of course, we all know how difficult that is. And so when we're talking about unplugging In this episode, I want to be very clear, what we're talking about is giving yourself space from work. So not checking your email, turning off your notifications just generally being unavailable from work. That's what it means when I'm talking about being unplugged from work, it’s literally not having your brain plugged into what's going on. It’s not having a program running in the background you are constantly thinking about. Like what you did today, what you didn't do today, what there's left to do today, some conversation you had today - all of those things that tend to run in the background, we want to be unplugged from if we are going to create a life of balance. And so that's what I mean when I talk about it here in this episode. So we are all very clear about that.


Why you should unplug from work.

Let's start with this first part, which is why we should unplug in the first place because generally speaking, most people would say this is a really good idea, they understand this on some esoteric level that we should be unplugged, that we shouldn't always have this kind of program running in the back of our brain constantly thinking about work and so forth, that it's important that we take time away. I don't think many people would question that time away from work is a really important thing if you're trying to create a life of balance. But I want to get really into the nitty gritty on why it's important because we kind of understand it on some, you know, esoteric level and yet it is really hard for us being ambitious to really, actually unplug from work. So let's take a moment and really break down why this is important so that it's not just something that's kind of out there as a good idea, but it's something that feels very tangible. 


So let's talk about the first reason why unplugging is really important. I've done an episode, episode 14 that talked about rest when it comes to productivity. And there are some of the similar qualities to that. For this reason, I will link to this in the show notes, Episode 14, if you want to go back and listen to rest, where I'll expand upon that a little bit more. But just for the sake of this episode, I really want to talk a little bit about what happens when we give our brain a rest. And so what I mean by rest is I mean that you are essentially not using the neural pathways that you have to use day in and day out to do your job.


Giving your neural pathways a break.

Okay, so let's talk about what a neural pathway is, because I think that's really important if we're going to talk about resting them. A neural pathway is just literally one part of your brain to another part of your brain, it's sending information. If you want to think about it as a road, I think that's the easiest way to think about it. It's like a road from one spot in your brain to another spot in your brain. That's a neural pathway. And when we are in work mode, we tend to use very specific neural pathways or roads in our brains over and over and over again. So our brains like to work in habits, okay, so it likes to use the same neural pathway over and over and over again, because it's kind of the easiest pathway to go down, it feels very familiar to your brain. So in order for you to type on a keyboard, that requires a certain neural pathway, in order for you to problem solve in the way that you problem solve at work that requires a certain neural pathway, in order for you to communicate, or coach or give feedback to your clients or to your team that requires a certain neural pathway. So all of the skills that you use at your job, whether they're like hard skills, or they're kind of or they're soft skills. Either way, your brain uses basically the same set of neural pathways to do your job. And what happens is those neural pathways get fatigued, they're essentially like muscle, if you just continue to lift a weight, day after day after day, in the same way, or hour after hour after hour, your muscle is going to get fatigued and in the same way, or neural pathways get fatigued as you use them for hours and hours and hours at a time in order to do your job. So when we talk about unplugging, we're talking about giving your neural pathways a break. And that's really important. Because what happens when you give your neural pathway a break, just like when you set down the weight, and you don't pick it up again for a couple of days, you allow your muscle to rest, you allow your muscle to regrow itself. If we were to use the example of a workout, when you work out, you don't use the same muscles every single day because they need time to repair. Right, if you were to work them every single day and you didn't give your muscles time to repair, then they would not grow as strong, and you will not get the same benefit or shape as you would like out of them. And in the same way for our brains, they need time to repair as well. It needs time to put all of the information that you input into it in the day, all of the data, all of the conversations, all of the information, everything that you took in for the day, your brain needs time, those neural pathways need time to basically rebuild them with new information. And if you don't give it time to do that, that's when things tend to feel overwhelming. They feel very confusing. It's harder to access information, right? Access your memory and critical thinking because you haven't given those neural pathways a chance to basically reformat itself so that it can be a very clear path again, it kind of plugs itself up with all of the information, you're like stuffing the neural pathway with more and more information and the hole or the tube is getting smaller. And so when you unplug what you're doing is you are giving time for that neural pathway to open back up again.


Okay, so it's really one of the biggest reasons why we need to give our brains a break. Why we need to unplug when we're creating a balanced life is because those neural pathways are getting overworked. And if we want them to work at their highest level, if we want to enter back into work and be more productive and be more successful and be faster and more focused. We need to give them time to rest in order to operate at that optimal level, that's a really big reason why we need to take the time to unplug.


A second reason we need to take the time to unplug from work is because work is not the only thing in life that's important to us. We have a family that's important to us, we have friends that are important to us, we ourselves as individuals are important to us. And so we can't always have the pop-up windows open from work going in the back of our brain if we want to be focused on other things that are important because inevitably, your brain is kind of switching between the two, it's multitasking between thinking about the things going on at work in the background, and then trying to be focused on the person, likely the family member or the child that's in front of you. And so when we want to unplug, we want to allow the person, the family member, the child in front of us to have our full focus because they are equally, if not more important to us than our jobs and our work and our career and our success in our career. And so in order to make them the most important thing, we have to close down all of those pop-ups, we have to stop using those neural pathways, we need to find time and space to unplug in order to bring our focus to another thing in our life that is most important. And so that's where the balance comes in. If we were always focused on our career and our success in our career, and we allowed those scripts and those pop up windows and all of the ongoing tasks that we still have to do, if we just allowed those windows to always be open in the back of our brain, we really wouldn't be living a balanced life, it would be a life that's completely one-sided about one thing, which is success in our career. But as moms, we want to be successful in motherhood as well. And in order to be successful in motherhood as well, we have to give our brains time and space and focus to give all of ourselves to our family. And so, the second reason why we need to unplug is because there is something else that is equally if not more important to us than our career. And we want to give that thing that our family members, our friends, our life outside of work an equal amount of attention.


When creating a balanced life, we still need to have fun!

The third reason why we want to unplug is because life needs a bit more enjoyment and fun. Life is not all that serious. When we're creating a balanced life, there has to be some element of it that feels uplifting, and there's levity and there's excitement, and there's enjoyment, and there's adventure, and there's fun. Almost every woman I work with as a coach tends to value adventure and tends to value going after big goals not just in their work-life, but just in their life generally. That's why they call themselves ambitious. And so ambition tends to have some excitement to it and tends to have some enjoyment to it. But for most of us, work can have an element of that. But it can also feel very serious. There are very serious tasks to get done. There's a kind of a go, go, go feel to it. Where when we're creating space for fun and enjoyment and adventure, there's usually a very different kind of go go go in that we're creating space for release, we're creating space to experience something new, we're creating space to laugh more and smile more. And when we unplug, we're giving ourselves a greater opportunity to find activities and experiences that are going to increase that levity in our life so that life doesn't always feel so serious and so bogged down with the to-do’s and the drive to move our career forward.


Turning off our work brain to open up for more creativity.

The fourth reason we want to unplug is because when we allow ourselves that space of rest when we don't use our neural pathways, all the time, every day all the time. What we're doing is we allow our brains to create space for creativity, and deeper thought. So a lot of studies have been done that showed that some of the greatest problem-solving spaces happen when we're in the middle of rest. When we're doing something not related to our career at all. When we're taking a shower when we are laying down to take a nap. When we're reading a book, when we're going for a walk, when we are literally unplugged from technology, we are allowing space, the greatest amount of space for our brain to problem solve, to think creatively to just enter into deep thought in a way that our brain can't, when it's constantly plugged in to work when it's constantly plugged into our phone when we're constantly getting notifications, and that sort of thing all day, every day.

And so when we unplug, we're are creating space for more creative problem solving for more creativity, for more beauty for more enjoyment, just simply because we're giving ourselves some white space, if you will, some space in the margins in our life, for our brain to do what it wants to do naturally and that it does really well when we're unplugged.


Those are the four reasons why it's really important for us to unplug. So our brain needs the rest, our neural pathways need the rest. The goal is not just to be successful at our job, the goal is to have success in motherhood as well, which means we need to give it our full focus and attention. We want to increase our enjoyment and our fun and our adventure and the laughter and smile in our life. And then we also want to create space for creativity and for problem-solving and for deeper thought. All of these things sound great, I'm sure you're nodding your head going yes, of course, this is exactly what we need. And yet, it's really, really hard to do. So let's talk about why it's so difficult for us to unplug, even though we know all of the benefits of it.


Not wanting to let people down stops you from switching off from work.

So the first reason why most women find it difficult to unplug is because people are depending on them. And they don't want people to be disappointed in them. Right. It's kind of like classic people-pleasing on some level, they just don't want people to be disappointed. Because, and I'm sure you've heard me talk about this before. It's not really that you fear people being disappointed in you or you don't want other people to feel disappointed in you. It's that you don't want to feel that icky feeling that comes when people are in fact disappointed in you. Because when you know that people are disappointed in you, that makes you feel kind of icky inside, and you don't want that icky feeling, right? So it's not that you are trying to make them not feel disappointed, you're trying to control their feelings, it's really you're just trying to control your own feelings. And the best possible way to do that is just to make everybody happy with you all of the time. Because that's going to help you control what's going on inside of you.


And so really, when we get to the heart of it, why it's so difficult to unplug is our emotional state, it's our feelings that get in the way, we don't want to feel bad when we have to tell somebody no, or when we tell somebody we're unavailable or when they have to wait on us. You know, all of that makes us feel bad. And we want to avoid that at all costs. So that's really the number one reason why people have a really hard time unplugging, it's not about people-pleasing at all. It's not that people are depending on you, it's just that those things bring up a bunch of icky feelings, and you don't really want to feel those feelings most people don't.


The second thing that comes up when we talk about not being able to unplug is that being available at all times, or having a really quick response time is actually a measurement of success for some people. It’s what they have seen themselves build up a reputation for being quick to respond, they see that as a part of their identity at work. It's something that makes them good at their job is that they are quick to respond. And so they see it as a measurement of success. If you put stricter parameters around that, and you say I'm not available after a certain time, or you're going to be completely unavailable every weekend, or on vacation, or whatever it is, all of a sudden, your ability to be successful feels like that's on the line - at least in your brain, it feels that way. So it makes it very difficult to put parameters around that and to actually unplug. I know for me, one of the biggest reasons why I struggle with unplugging is not that I find my response time a measurement of success but I like to look at the number of emails are the people that are reaching out to me are the inquiries that I get, the people that want to book calls with me, or are asking me questions about the work that I do and so forth. I measure all of that, like the volume of all of that, that makes me feel good when people reach out in that way. It makes me feel important. It makes me feel significant, right. And so it almost gives me this little hit of dopamine every time I see that somebody booked a call with me or somebody joined my program or somebody reached out for speaking or whatnot. And so I crave more and more and more of that and so I don't want to unplug because I get this good feeling hit every time I see that. So it's kind of the same thing. It's like success as a measurement of response time or like the volume being a measurement of success or people reaching out to you as a measurement of success, all of that kind of gets wrapped up until this reason on why it's difficult to unplug.


A balanced life is all about control, it's about you being in the driver's seat.

The third reason I have found is that we want to turn off our brain, except that there's something that feels lingering out there, and our brain just is fixated on it. And so you know that you're going to have a hard time shutting off your brain until you complete that task. So it seems very logical to you to just log on and complete that task so you can actually unplug, so you can actually separate yourself from work - I mean, it feels logical, on some level. But of course, always having the login, always having to finish that one task, always having to get that email out or whatnot. Having that control you in that way is not really living a balanced life. Because a balanced life is all about control, it's you being in the driver's seat. And if you have to write that email, in order for you to shut down your brain, all of a sudden, you're not in the driver's seat anymore, you're not really creating a balanced life. But it feels very logical to your brain. And so it's just easier to just log on and to finish that task and, and have the dedicated time without anybody interrupting you to finish that project, that will always feel easier than it will be to manage your brain and manage your feelings and emotions, and not do that and to stay unplugged. So really, the third reason is ease.


And then, of course, the fourth is company culture. Because for a lot of working moms, they work in teams, they work in teams that are striving for big things, doing big projects, working for big clients, whatever it is. And so there might be a lot of people on your team that maybe are not moms or don't have families or whatever their situation is, and they don't have a problem, you know, working late at night, just like probably you didn't have a problem working late at night before your kids came along. And so you don't really want to be seen as the one that's not contributing and not kind of measuring up in the way that everybody else is. You don't want to be seen as less committed, you don't want to be seen as somebody that's kind of letting down the team or not pulling your weight. And so it's perception - that if everybody else is logging on, you will too. There's a bit of peer pressure in that. So those are the big reasons that I hear from working moms and why it's really hard to stay unplugged.


Alright, so we've talked about why it's important. We all know it's important and now we've talked about some of the science behind it, and why we really need to focus on it. We've talked about why it's really hard. And the last piece of this is really talking about what it's going to take? How do we bridge the gap? We know it's really hard over here. And we know it's something that we have to strive for if we're wanting to create an ambitious and balanced life. So how do we get from here to there, so I have a handful of things that I'm going to give you on what needs to happen for you to really unplug, I'm going to give you four steps. But then I'm also going to talk to you a little bit about what it takes to set yourself up to follow those four steps. So I'm going to give you some ways of easing the process if you will.


The first step to unplugging.

So the first thing that has to happen if you're going to get from where you are now, which is that you know that you should unplug, but you can't do it or you're having a hard time doing it to where you want to be, which is that you know, you need to unplug and you're actually following through. So the first thing that you have to do is you have to believe unplugging is worth it. I just gave you four really solid reasons why. But your brain needs to believe those reasons, not on the esoteric level, it has to believe down to your core. You have to believe it so much and you have to love your reasons behind it so much more than the reasons for why you might log back on and stay plugged when your reasons for unplugging feel more purposeful and motivating to you. Then your reasons for not staying unplugged or for keeping plugged in when your reasons feel stronger and more motivating, then you'll do it. That's one of the first things that you have to do is to convince your brain that being unplugged is better. It's more purposeful. It's going to get you to your goals. It's going to make you more successful. It's going to help you achieve the balanced life that you want. It's going to help you be a better mom. It's going to help you be a better wife. It's going to help you move up in your career. You have to find those reasons for you. And you have to love them so much more than the reasons you have for staying plugged in. 


This is going to take a little time. This is probably not just a one-time deal where you dive into it and you answer some questions about it or you journal about it or you talk about it, you probably are going to have to dive into this question for a while. And what I always suggest when you're trying to convince your brain of something, is rather than spending one 30 minute session or one hour, however long it takes you to dive into it - rather than just doing that once, I would rather you take 10 minutes a day for the next two weeks to answer this question. Because if you answer it more days over the course of more time, and you answer multiple times, that's going to be more impactful for your brain than it will be to just dive into at once.


So for you to sit down and answer this question every single day, for the next two weeks. Why is being unplugged more important to me than logging in? And people potentially being disappointed that I'm not logged in tonight? Why is that important? 


Answer that question for yourself or come up with an answer around why being unplugged is important to you, it could be as simple as that. So when you feel really clear about that, I mean, you don't need to do anything else until your reasons behind being unplugged actually bring about a feeling of energy and motivation of some kind, right? Because that's when you're going to know that you can capitalize on that energy and that motivation at that point. So first you have to find that energy around it and know that it could take days, it could take weeks for you to get there, and be patient with yourself. For sure you're going to get there for sure, you will get to a point where you decide that being unplugged is 100% worth other people being disappointed in you, or it's 100% worth you being able to get through the discomfort of having to remain unplugged, for sure that will happen as you do that work.


You have to decide when you are going to work and when you are NOT going to work.

Once you're there, the second thing that you need to do, the second step is you have to decide when you are going to work and when you are not going to work. You need to decide when you're going to be plugged in, and when you are not going to be plugged in. You want to decide that ahead of time. Because generally speaking, our brain is always going to come up with really creative and what feels like very logical reasons for logging back in and working right, the project isn't done and you need more time to do it, the deadline is approaching somebody is waiting for you, right? It's all going to feel very emotional in the moment. And you don't want to have all of that emotion there when you're deciding if you should log back on tonight, or not. Or if you're going to work a little bit during your vacation or not, you don't want that to be an emotional decision that's driven in the moment when you're feeling it. You want to separate yourself from all of that emotion. You want to decide ahead of time when there isn't all of that emotion there. When you can think more strategically about when is the best time to be on and when is the best time not to be on and what are the reasons behind that. And when you have a lot more perspective over it. And it's not an emotional decision, that's going to be the more purposeful place to be deciding from. You need to decide ahead of time. So that's really the second step, what are you going to be on and when are you not going to be on?


Communicate with your team when you will be unplugged.

The third thing you need to do is you need to decide how people can get ahold of you, if truly this was an emergency. So likely you need to communicate to your team, to your boss, to whomever that you're going to be unplugged. I will be unplugged starting at six o'clock every weekday, for example. And you need to communicate that to them in some way so everybody is very clear and has set expectations. But, maybe you have that kind of role where you need to be available in an emergency. And that's okay. And so you need to decide, what does that look like and what emergencies are you available? Can they call you? Can they text you? What's going to be the best way to get a hold of you so that when you are truly unplugged, somebody has a way to connect with you. That's just going to ease your brain a little bit as you go about really sticking to your boundaries. So you know that truly, you're available if needed.


You must be willing to feel discomfort.

The fourth step in truly being unplugged is you have to be willing to feel discomfort, people will be waiting for you. People may be disappointed and people might be frustrated. Your client might be frustrated with you and let you know that they're frustrated with you. We're going to expect some discomfort and you're going to need to be willing to feel it. 

Because what's going to happen is you know you will feel very purposeful on why you've decided to unplug. You will be very clear on when you are going to be unplugged. People can get a hold of you if they 100% need you. And then all of a sudden that moment comes when you put your kid down and you want to have the urge to log back on. And in that moment, you're going to have to be willing to feel the anxiety, the overwhelm the discomfort of the moment, however, you want to label that emotion, you're going to have to be willing to feel the discomfort of the moment, because for sure your brain is going to want to offer to you lots of reasons why you should continue to work that evening, right. So you're going to have to be willing to feel discomfort, and you're going to have to expect that you will feel discomfort that your brain is going to try to get you to plug back in. And you're going to have to allow that discomfort to be present. So you're not going to push it away, you're not going to judge it, you're not going to be hard on yourself, because you have the urge to log back on, we're just going to expect that that urge is going to be there. And that it's going to be uncomfortable for you to take a moment and say no, here are all of the reasons why I've decided to do this and why this is the best thing for me and my family and for my career and for me as a mom, here are all of the reasons and it still feels uncomfortable. For me, when I am allowing discomfort, usually what that just looks like is a couple of really big deep breaths, sometimes my hand over my heart, and just a willingness to say, yeah, I feel anxious about that, right now I'm feeling a little scared about that I'm feeling fearful, or whatever that emotion may be. I'm feeling that right now. And here's still all of the reasons why I'm not going to follow through.


Those are the four steps, that's all you ever really have to do to unplug. You need to believe that it's worth it to you and convince your brain of that and really feel the purpose behind that. You need to decide ahead of time, when you are going to be unplugged and when you're not. You need to have an emergency plan just in case somebody actually does have to get a hold of you. And then lastly, you're going to need to in the moment, be willing to feel the discomfort when you're when your brain wants to offer to you and send you that urge to log back on.


Creating a work-to-home transition is important.

There are a couple of things that you can do, though, to set yourself up for success when you're working to unplug, or when you're building this habit. The first and I talked about this a lot is building a work-to-home transition. That's really important. I will link to the episode where I talked about the work-to-home transition. The work-to-home transition is basically just a set of things that you do at the last 15 minutes of your workday to set yourself up to be able to be present and unplugged when you're with your family. The whole feeling that you're cultivating and that work to home transition is accomplished and prepared. We spent time in the work-to-home transition really thinking about all the things that you accomplished that day and kind of getting your brain out of a place of lack and feeling like you didn't do enough, we want to get out of there. Because if you're feeling like you didn't do enough, of course, your brain is going to want to log on at the end of the day, right? So we want to counter that in this work-to-home transition. We're trying to get your brain to this place where it feels like it accomplished enough today that it feels really good about what you did today. And that's a big part of what we do in that work-to-home transition. And, that you have a plan for what you're going to do tomorrow. So of course, your to-do list is long. And of course, there were lots of things that you didn't get to today that you had hoped that you would have or you know, emergencies came up, you didn't accomplish everything. That's the way of life and being an ambitious woman. That's just what's going to happen. So we just want to decide preemptively what are we going to do tomorrow? What are the most important fires we want to put out tomorrow? What are the most important things on our task list? So whenever our brain wants to say, Oh, you should really log back in and you know, and prepare for tomorrow, you should really log back in and answer those emails. So you can hit the ground running tomorrow, whatnot, you've already decided ahead of time here's what's most important, I know I have to get these things done tomorrow, I'm going to do them. First thing when I sat down, I already looked at my list, I wrote them down. So your brain isn't, isn't thinking about all of those things. While you're trying to be present with your family. That's really going to help set yourself up to succeed in really following through with all of the steps to unplugging and creating that work-to-home transition.


Turn off your phone notifications.

Now, of course, another thing that's going to help you is if you physically turn off all of those notifications on your phone, or you place your phone somewhere else, or you turn off your phone, or you remove email from your phone - whatever you need to do. It’s like physically setting yourself up so that you can't, in fact, plug yourself back in because there's just another barrier to doing that. And for some people that feels like a little bit of a failure. Like I should really be able to control my urge. But yet we're ambitious women and we have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things that are pulling us in lots of different places. So if we can set ourselves up physically, to just create one more barrier to help remind our brain No, I turned off that email. No, I've turned off those notifications. No, I can't hear the notifications - whatever it may be, it's just going to be one more way to help you actually follow through with your plan to unplug. 


For me I actually remove my email from my phone when I'm trying to unplug. That's the easiest way for me. So if I have the urge to hit the home button on my phone and see if somebody emails me and I will go through the process of getting all the way to the email button, I'll click it and I'll be like, Oh, yeah, I turned off the email. So for me, I struggle to control that urge. But what helps me control that urge is just not even having the email on my phone to begin with. Of course, I could go through the next five steps of going to settings and scrolling down and finding the mail and putting it back on. I could do all of that. But usually, by the time I push the home button, I remember that I've removed the mail from my phone, it's like just to have and I do it by default. It's a good reminder for me, I've decided I'm not checking my email, I don't want my brain to go there. And I can easily not turn on my mail. At that point. It's a several step barrier in order to get there. And so physically turning off your notifications or deciding how to manage your phone, in terms of its location or its sounds, that's going to help you succeed as you begin to unplug.


Alright, working moms. So we know why unplugging is so important to us. We know that it's going to set us up for greater success in our career, we know that it's going to help us be better moms, and be really focused and focus on not just having that successful career, but having that motherhood of success that we really desire as well. We know that it's important. We know why it's so hard for us to do. And now you have a four step process in order to help you actually achieve it.


Every ambitious working mom struggles with unplugging from work.

This is such an important topic, every ambitious working mom I have ever talked to struggles with unplugging. This isn't something that is just abnormal to you. You're not some unicorn that is just the one that's struggling to unplug at the end of the day or on vacation or whatnot. No, of course not. Every ambitious working mom struggles with this. Because we're go-getters, we're doers, we're people pleasers, we have ambitions, we want to get things right, there's a really positive quality to our ambition that has or causes us to struggle to unplug. So this isn't just a you issue. All working moms really struggle with this. And I also know you can overcome it. That you are in control of your brain, the only thing that stands between you and unplugging are your thoughts, and your emotions and your feelings. And so that is why this process really focuses on that at the core, getting your thoughts and your emotions in order, because that's really the heart of learning how to unplug.


And what I want to offer to you is the thought that you don't have to do this alone. It is so much easier to achieve goals when you're doing them with other people. And that's one of the reasons why I created the ambitious and balanced working moms collective. This is a group of ambitious women, high leveled women all looking to grow their careers all being very career-driven, feeling ambitious and wanting to go after big things and wanting to create a motherhood experience where they are very focused and present and where their family always comes first. This is a group of women all looking to go after that goal together. And so if you're somebody that wants to be in an environment with other women, looking to create the same goal if you want to feel motivated and be held accountable to creating this life that you desire, to learning how to unplug, to learn how to be present, to learn how to create that balanced life that you desire. If you want to be in that environment, I encourage you to join us in the ambitious and balanced working moms collective. Now I'm going to put the URL in the show notes but it's www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective you can get all of the information, and join us and literally be on the next call this week.


All right working moms, I can't wait to support you in the next podcast, or if you join us in the collective. Let's get it.

Rebecca Olson