Feeling unmotivated at work?

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Your purpose in life and your job are not one in the same, but they are deeply connected. Your career must feel purposeful if you are going to create a balanced life. In this podcast I will talk about the journey to discover my life’s purpose and how it informed my career decisions. I will breakdown 5 truths about your purpose and discuss what you need to do if your career has lost its motivation.

Topics in this episode:

• Why do women often seek their purpose after having kids?

• How is a lack of motivation and purpose connected?

• What to do if your job doesn’t feel purposeful

• 5 truths about purpose and career

• Your current job must feel purposeful to create work-life balance

• What to do if your job feels unmotivating

Show Notes:

• Join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms 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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Transcript

Intro

Hey working moms I've spent the last week digging into purpose, why I do what I do. Understanding the purpose of why you're doing what you're doing is an important part of creating work life balance, because if what you're doing doesn't feel purposeful and instead it feels unmotivating, that's like half of your awake life spent feeling unmotivated and hard. We spend more time working then we do with our family and not time needs to feel worth it. So in this podcast we're going to talk about the connection between purpose and work. No, your work and your purpose in life are not the same thing, but I'm going to talk about how purpose brings natural motivation and give you some insight into how your purpose is determined. 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! 


I just got back from a trip to Cabo that I took with my mastermind which consists of about 85 coaches, mostly women, all looking to grow their business to make a greater impact in the world.


I had a lot of time to think deeply about the work I do with working moms and why I do what I do. The ‘why’ behind what I am doing and what we are all doing in our life, and in our careers is important to keep at the top of our minds because it energizes us. I walked away from our time with an immense amount of energy for what I do – I help ambitious working moms find balance. I help them love their life. I help them increase confidence in their work and as a mom. Remembering and reflecting and sharing with so many other coaches the work that I do – it was electrifying to get back in touch with. 


When something feels purposeful, you don’t question why you do it.

And here is what I started to think about, when something feels deeply purposeful you rarely think or question why you're doing it. There's no drama about getting up in the morning and getting your family out the door to get yourself to work, there's no guilt, it feels so purposeful and naturally energizing, that you just do it.


It doesn't faze you as much when your toddler won't put on their shoes. Or when your 7-year-old who's very capable of getting dressed won't do it without your help, or why you decide to work a few extra hours to help out a client or a colleague instead of being with your family, you move through these challenging moments with less effort because you know what you're doing matters. You know the career you've chosen and the job you're in is the one you want to be in and because of that you handle the regular ups and downs of life in the job with less stress and more ease. 


That sounds like a balanced life, doesn’t it? A life with less stress and an ability to manage the stress that is there with ease. 


Before I was a life coach I did high-level event management and I started that career working at an event center that hosted events for anywhere between 10 people and 20,000 people. It was the exact job I wanted at that time. I went through about two months of being unemployed before I got that job and I remember reading the job description and breaking down in tears and calling my husband and reading it to him while I was crying because, I had found exactly what I was looking for and I knew that I was the exact right person for it. 


This was in 2009 just after the housing bubble burst, the recession hit, the job market was terrible, unemployment was the highest it had been in like 25 years, and here I am with the perfect job and what turned out to be 550 other applicants that thought it was their perfect job too and applied for it. 


It's like a whole other podcast. I could talk about how I received that job and stood out amongst 550 applicants, but I don't really want to focus on here. The thing is the job wasn’t perfect. The job was about an hour commute each way and my only option was to drive it and I remember easily, three years into the job reflecting on my commute and very consciously thinking “this is totally worth it, I love this job and where I'm at and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.” I almost rarely thought about my 2-hour commute. Most people hate commuting, and I did too eventually which was one of the signs that showed me it was time to leave that job. But for almost four years that commute didn't bother me at all, literally, I spent 0 time thinking about it, because the job felt so purposeful to me. It wasn't the best salary, or benefits, or commute, but it was exactly where I wanted to be.


And when something feels that meaningful to you, that purposeful, our brains tend to naturally skip over the hardship and the challenges and the failures.


When something feels purposeful, it overrides discomfort. 


What I teach my clients is that when the purpose behind something, like the reason you want it, outweighs the discomfort of getting it, you will go after it. 


I've taken jobs that paid less than previous because they felt more purposeful to me, because they were more motivating or because they built my resume in a certain way, whatever the reason they felt more purposeful and that outweighed the discomfort of taking less money.


Moving past discomfort.

Having kids, and the money and the energy in the time that they take, I know for many women that holds them back from having kids earlier, well what happens is not that the discomfort goes away - for sure they are still a lot of money, energy and time, but the reason they want them and the desire to start a family gets stronger and when it does, they are able to move past the discomfort. 



For me starting a business was extremely uncomfortable and a massive pay cut. I held the benefits, we were putting a significant amount of money into my 401K, we had to cut it all off for me to really go after the dream of having a coaching business, which was extremely uncomfortable. Probably couldn't put words to the amount of discomfort that I felt at that time, though if you watch some testimonials on my website from past clients that have started businesses as a result of us working together, you could hear them talk about it too… but ultimately the reason I was able to do that was because there was so much meaning behind starting the coaching business. The reasons I wanted the business and the impact I wanted to make in the world through coaching, was so strong, was so purposeful that it outweighed all of the discomfort of starting the business, stopping our retirement savings, cashing out some long term investments, changing benefits…


When something feels purposeful it overrides discomfort.


This is why I help all of my clients name their purpose in life. Now just to be clear, purpose and career are not one in the same thing, your job is not your purpose in life, just like being a mom is not your purpose in life either. Understanding why you do what you do, and why you are who you are - to really know this, to know this deep down in your bones, is extremely motivating. This is probably the single thing I can point to that changed everything for me that moved me from my past career in event management and into coaching. It was understanding on a deep-down human level why I was put here on this earth which is just another way of saying – naming and understanding my purpose. 


Discovering your purpose.

Naming it, which by the way I did from reading a book doing all of the exercises in the book, months of journaling, deep prayer, seeking wisdom from mentors, I hadn't discovered coaching yet otherwise I probably most certainly would have hired a coach to help me with this, so I had to do it the good old fashioned way, which was mostly on my own. So what I discovered again was not that coaching was my purpose, what I discovered was that I was meant to help people not settle in life. That was my purpose. I could give you countless examples of how I saw that play out from the time I was young. Pushing, encouraging, holding space for people in my life to reach their dreams. It's what I had always done. And when I saw that, when I named it, that opened the door for me to say,  “how do I want to take this deeper in my career?” I was already doing some of that in my career, with my colleagues mostly, but how could I take it to the next level? That was the question I asked myself that eventually led me down the path of hiring a coach and becoming a coach.


Now, for many of my clients they're not looking for a new career, they know that they're in the right career or they just simply don't want to change careers, but they simply want to find more motivation like they once had to do their work and to do it well.


Purpose plays a big role in this. Sometimes we have to go through a process of rekindling our energy around something. Because what I see a lot of people do is they get unmotivated in their job and they make that mean that they must not be in the right job anymore and it's time to change things up and do something different, which is possible but not necessary. 


What I have noticed is that feeling unmotivated simply means you’ve forgotten, or maybe you never knew, the reason why you're doing what you’re doing, in the first place. 


So if we're talking about your job and you are feeling unmotivated in your job, every day the alarm goes off and you wake up to remember that you have to go to work that day and your heart sinks and your thoughts immediately go to your daughter and how you have to drop them off at daycare, and there is just the sluggishness of getting out the door and the tinge of guilt for leaving your kid - likely you didn't experience any of this, when you felt motivated to go to work and the job felt very purposeful to you. 


Unmotivation and a loss of purpose tend to go hand and hand. 


This is the moment that work-life balance starts to feel very challenging. When you spend 8 to 9 hours a day at a job that feels unmotivating and lacks purpose it is very hard to feel balanced because half of your awake life feels meaningless and hard.


Your job needs to feel purposeful.

No, I don't believe you have to be in your dream job or in your dream career or even love your job to create balance in your life, but I do believe your job - whatever that job is for this moment - needs to feel purposeful. It needs to feel like you're supposed to be here, like you're choosing to be here, like the reasons for being here are ones that you love. 


This is actually one of the lessons in The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective because it is one of the big reasons women struggle with balance. They don’t feel motivated in their career and because they don’t feel motivated they don’t show up and do their best work, and it has a whole snowball effect, so I actually walk you through a chart that I've created that helps you get clear on what you need to do with your career in order to start feeling motivated again. 


And then for those that do in fact need to change careers altogether, I walk you through several exercises and lessons to help you determine the next step in your career and then of course you can get coached on that by me and my team, so there is a lot of support in figuring this out because it is such a big part of work-life balance. 


Ok, so let me recap a bit of what we have talked about here: 


  1. Purpose is a natural motivator 

  2. When something feels purposeful, it overrides discomfort

  3. Your purpose in life and your career are not the same 

  4. Your current job must feel purposeful in order to create work-life balance 


So here is the last point I want to make, you decide your purpose. I know a lot of women that come to me really want to answer this question around their purpose in life and it feels like this really big question that tends to surface after we become moms. 


And for all of the reasons we've talked about here, it makes sense why so many women start to reflect on their purpose after they have kids – essentially, we don't want to waste our time - having kids tends to be a jolt – a wake up call –  It’s like our brains clue into the idea that “life is short!!!” And we don’t want to waste time in a job or a career or doing things that don’t feel purposeful. 


Purpose is an inward journey.

But purpose isn’t really something to be discovered. It’s not like one path that’s out there that you have to go find and you either find it or you don’t. I have a very specific process I walk you through in the Collective but what’s most important to recognize is, purpose is an inward journey. You make something purposeful by how you think about it. You make your job purposeful by how you think about it. You decide your career is impactful. 


I help you get some language around it and break it down but at some point you just get to decide what your purpose is. Just like I decided my purpose was to help people never settle in life. I simply decided that based on digging around internally and looking at my natural tendencies and motivations and connecting all the dots. I didn't go out there to find it, I went in here to find it.


If work or life is feeling unmotivating or it’s lacking purpose, now is the time to join the Collective. Not only will you get the resources to help you decide what your purpose is and to rekindle a passion for work, you will get me week after week, coaching you and supporting you through the process as well as an amazing group of other ambitious working moms offering guidance to help you do the same. 


I will put a link in the show notes to how you can join! Until then, let’s get to it.

Rebecca Olson