What makes you a great mom?

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If you were to write a resume for yourself as a mom, what would be on it? What would be your strengths, what would be your successes, how would you describe yourself as a worker? In today's episode we’re talking about you as a mom, specifically your beliefs about yourself as a mom. When you take the time to name who you are as a mom and what makes you good, work and mom life stop feeling so at odds with one another. Today, I am going to teach you a framework for thinking about yourself as a mom, called your mom-concept, that focuses on your innate strengths and will help your brain rebuild confidence in yourself as a mom.

Topics in this episode:

  • Why thinking you are a good mom is important to your job

  • A new framework for thinking about yourself called you mom-concept

  • My personal mom-concept

  • One embarrassing parenting-fail that involved throwing my kids shoes out the door

  • How knowing your strengths ends working mom guilt

Show Notes:

  • Want to end negative self-talk and rebuild belief in yourself as a worker? Check out the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective, a program that teaches a simple 5 step process to creating a balanced life. Check it out at: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective.

  • Don’t forget to leave a rating and review to help spread this resource to other working moms!

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Transcript

Hey, working moms excited to be connecting with you today. I want to start out by reading - or having really - a little bit of a celebration. So, I received this email from somebody that I know has been following me for quite some time, has attended some of my workshops, and so forth.

And here's what she had to say. She said,:

'I'm not sure if I thanked you enough for coming into my life and helping me see how important building boundaries are. I've said 'no' to more things in this past month, without any guilt. I'm working on building my confidence in my art and carving out time daily to build a body of work. I've shared more of my ideas and creativity at work, which has been well received. Hopefully, this will lead me to my next promotion, and job opportunity.'

I wanted to share this with you for a couple of reasons.

One, I just simply want to celebrate this particular working mom who I know has been working really hard at putting up strong boundaries and creating work life balance. But two, when we hear other people's successes, other people kind of doing things that we want for ourselves in our life - It's very inspiring.

And so, I'm going to share more and more on this podcast -people's stories, people's successes, I'm going to quote people - because it sends a signal to your brain that says, 'hey, if she can do it, I can do it. ' And I know you can. I know how easy it is to fall into kind of 'compare and despair' when we hear other working moms that seem to have figured things out in a way that we just haven't yet.

But I encourage you as you hear success stories, whether that's, you know, here on this podcast or your friends or other women in your company or whatever, wherever those success stories are - rather than compare, take a moment instead to smile, to celebrate, and use their successes as evidence that it's possible for you too.

Okay, so let's move on with the show. Now, I am a life coach for working moms that want to work, that want to have fulfilling careers. But they also want to have the motherhood experience that they desire - they want both. Now for most women that join my program, the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, which is a program for career driven moms looking to create balance in their life, they join, and the most urgent topic is their job.

They want to find balance in their job.

They want to stop making their job their number one priority. They want to stop overworking. They want to learn how to shut down their brain at the end of a workday so they're not feeling constantly on. They want to figure out what they want to do with their career long term.

But it's almost impossible to have any conversation around what you want to do with your career without also talking about the other thing that's extremely important to you - which is you as a mom and who you are as a mom - because you are a whole person.

You are not just a job. You are not defined by your achievements and your successes.

Your life is not just about your career, you have this whole other side of you that wants to be prioritized more. You are a mom. And when you're not feeling awesome as a mom, you’re likely not going to feel awesome about your work either.

Your brain doesn't really compartmentalize like that as much as we'd like to think that it does, or it could. You could be absolutely killing it at work, doing amazing things, hitting all of your goals, but if your brain is thinking at the same time -I should really be spending more time with my kids, I'm letting them down, they should be getting more enrichment activities with me - if you're thinking those things, you're probably not going to feel really good about all those things that you're achieving in your job.

The first step that I teach my students inside the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective - I teach the first step to balance is that you have to feel really good about yourself.

You have to have what I like to call a positive self-concept.

And that doesn't just include you as an employee or a worker, it includes all aspects of life: you as a mom, you as a partner, you as a friend, you at work. All of the work that we do inside the collective when we talk about you and kind of building up your confidence and your belief in self, we do it from a meta level, looking at all the various aspects of your life so that your brain can really see that you are a whole person. Even if you spent a good portion of the last decade of your life working and being focused on your career, you are still more than that. And so, we spend a lot of time diving into that.

Because you can have the perfect life, but if you don't feel really good about who you are as a person, then your life is not going to feel very good.

You can't have a whole lot of internal negative self-talk, and be really hard on yourself on the inside, and experience happiness and balance in your life. And so, what I have found though, is that most women don't take the time to put the same amount of intention into what makes them successful and good as a mom as they do, their careers. We all have resumes that talk about what makes us good at our job, what we've done, what we've accomplished, what makes us good as employees, what makes us employable, what makes us successful. But we don't have resumes that point to what makes us successful as moms.

Now most women I know don't take the time to sit there and consider the kind of mom that they want to be. They don't consider their values as a parent, they don't decide ahead of time, the kind of childhood experience they want to cultivate for their kids, or the kind of motherhood experience that they want to cultivate for themselves.

And the result that I see from not considering these things, and not kind of deciding ahead of time the kind of mom that they want to be and what's most important to them, I see two things. One, they leave their entire motherhood experience up to chance, which kind of means that it may or may not be the kind of motherhood experience that they want for themselves, or for their kids. So, there's this high potential for regret that happens with moms when they don't stop and really consider the kind of mom they are and the kind of mom experience that they want.

And then the second thing that happens is it opens them up to a lot of guilt. Now, as you watch your friends give their kids experiences or interact with them in a certain way, or parent them in a certain way, or do something that's different than you, your brain starts to think, 'Oh, maybe I should be doing that too.' And then we get into the 'compare and despair', and because you haven't told your brain otherwise, you just let your brain kind of go down these rabbit trails of feeling really guilty.

And regret and guilt. - these are two things that really plague so many working moms.

And it can be avoided by really considering what I like to call your 'mom-concept'. Now your mom-concept - let me explain this to you - so my coach Stacy Boehman, she teaches something called your self-concept. Essentially what that is, it's just the concepts or the beliefs that you have about yourself. Kind of think of 'I am' statements.

I am determined.

I am a self-starter.

I am good at my job.

I'm amazing at whatever.

We could have negative self-concepts too, maybe I'm not very good at speaking up. I'm not as connected as I should be. These are parts of our self-concepts too, things that we believe about ourselves that likely are not even at a conscious level. That's your self-concept. Your mom-concept is what you believe about yourself specifically, as a mom. I am patient. I'm a good listener. I'm a tickle-monster, whatever it is that you believe or how you see yourself as a mom, that's your mom-concept.

And of course, how you see yourself as a mom obviously has some crossover into your regular self-concept into how you see yourself generally speaking; but I think it's really worth focusing in on just specifically who you are and what you believe about yourself as a mom, because that tends to be the source of regret and guilt.

Now, there are a couple of reasons why naming your mom-concept is vital for ending the guilt and regret and really unlocking balance for you in your life. And the first is that when you name who you are, as a mom, inevitably, you also are naming who you're not.

And there's something really freeing when you don't have to be everything.

I have a friend who loves to play tag, and hide and go seek and those types of games with her kids at the park. One piece of her self-concept might be, I am a playmate. But this is not me. I am not, nor do I ever want to be my kids’ playmates in this way. Now, not to say I don't love to play with my kids. I do. I play lots of different types of games, but I would never consider myself or like have a self-concept as a mom that says I'm a playmate. That's not who I am or who I even want to be. So, when we get together at the park, and her kids ask her to play tag, and she says yes, and she goes off to play for a little while, I don't feel guilty. Instead, I sit there - probably alone - on a bench and I either watch them play or I read a book, or I do something for me; and I do it without any guilt.

I don't need to compare myself to her and the way she's chosen to interact with her kids. Because I am a different person.

Now, some moms might kind of get wrapped up in feeling bad about that. They should go out and play with their kids. They should want to go play with their kids. They should have the energy to go play with their kids. They're maybe letting their kids down because they don't play with their kids in that way. But I don't have any of that self-talk because it's not a part of my mom-concept. Being a playmate is not a part of that.

And so, when you put some language and kind of define who you are, as a mom, your beliefs about yourself as a mom, it's going to show you who you're not. And that's going to bring about a lot of freedom as well.

The second reason why this is so important is because there is power in naming something and really putting words to it. Think how powerless it feels to say 'I don't know, I don't know how what I'm good at. I don't know what makes me good. I don't know.' It feels like something that's not in your control. Instead, it feels like it has power over you, instead of you having power over it.

And our brain really likes structure, it likes order, it wants things to be known.

And when things feel kind of unknown or uncertain, our brain starts to freak out and kind of goes into survival mode. Survival mode, in this case might start to look like your brain starting to tell you that you should be really good at everything. You should always be patient, and you should never yell, you should always be your kid's best friend, you should definitely be their playmate, you should be their main caretaker, you should be their confidant, you should be their comforter, you should always take lots of adventures with your kids. You should give your kids a wide range of experience. I don't know about you, but if my brain was constantly offering to me that I should be all of these things - I well up with a whole bunch of anxiety, because there's just so much expectations on who I'm supposed to be as a parent.

A lot of that overwhelm goes away when you truly start to name and lean into your strengths and be okay with the things that you're not good at.

So, when you push yourself to name - to put actual language to your mom-concept and who you are, as a mom - it's going to feel very powerful, it's going to kind of innately grow some confidence within you and kind of strip away a lot of that overwhelm and that guilt.

So, let's talk about some of the guidelines, if you will, or guideposts to creating your own mom-concept - naming and writing down your own mom-concept. Number one, I want you to start with what you're naturally good at as a mom. Now our brains are wired to see what we're not good at, to basically just tell us that we kind of suck all the time.

At a basic level, this is kind of our brain's survival mechanism.

It's our brain's way of helping ensure that we are constantly evolving and getting better and so that we always stay relevant, and we always stay alive, essentially. So, if you sit down with a piece of blank paper or a blank screen, and you start to just ask yourself, ‘who am I as a mom, what makes me good/', and you just stare at the page for 10 minutes - this is totally normal. You're not practiced in thinking about yourself in this positive way.

So, you're going to need to push through that uncomfortable silence to just start writing some things down. It's okay if it feels simple, or it feels basic, it probably will. Because oftentimes the things that we're really good at are the things that come naturally to us. And just because they come naturally, we don't want to discount them.

So just start with the basics:

What are you really good at?

What do you think you're nailing as a mom?

What moments do you love being a mom in?

What things do you find you do better than your partner or other moms that you know around you?

These are just some questions to get your list started. Your list could be five things long, it could be 20 things long, there really isn't a right or wrong to your mom-concept. It can be ever evolving, you can add to it, you can subtract from it.

The second thing that I want you to know as you sit down to write this is that you can also cultivate parts of your mom-concept.

You know, after you've made a list of the things that you're naturally good at as a mom, I want you to take a few minutes and think about how you want to grow, how you want to improve. No, you are not allowed to sit in self judgment or self-pity or feel bad as you write this because everyone has growth areas.

So once you have a list of a few things, I want you to add just no more than three things to your mom-concept list. And you can call these your growth areas. These are the characteristics as a mom that you want to cultivate, that you want to deepen. And the only way you can really work at growing these parts of you is to first name them - to put some intention behind it - which is why it's an important part of the process is naming things that you want to grow at.

It's almost like goal setting.

So let me give you an example of a growth area for myself in my self-concept. For me, one of the things that I'm working on in my self-concept is that I give myself space to calm down. It's kind of like in the same way that I might put one of my kids into a timeout of some sort to give them space to calm down; I myself need to do that for me. Because I have a tendency to snap.

Now, let me be clear, I'm actually a very, very patient, mom, being patient is actually on my own mom-concept. But I don't tend to notice when I'm reaching my breaking point - after 30 minutes after 45 minutes after an hour, or however long that goes by, which is sometimes how long some of these tantrums are things that go by with my kids - I don't notice that I'm internally I'm getting really worked up. And then I hit a breaking point and I kind of snap.

So, I'm going to give you an example of this. My son who will be five in a few months, he recently was refusing to put his shoes on, which are like, they fit him perfectly. They're very easy to put on, you velcro them. It's not that hard. And for whatever reason - this had been going on for a while where he wasn't putting his shoes on. And for whatever reason in this day, I couldn't help him. Or maybe I just didn't want to help him. I don't know, I don't remember why. I also was being a little stubborn and not helping him with the shoes. But for whatever reason I wasn't. And he was getting frustrated and throwing himself all over the floor.

And I snapped, and I took his shoes, and I threw them out the door. I cringe as I even say that, yes, I just said that to the public, to the world out there - I threw my son shoes out the door. I snapped.

Now, if I told you the rest of the story, it really only took me like 20 seconds to walk away, take a big deep breath, walk back very calmly, because I kind of like gotten my anger out by throwing the shoes. So, I was able to walk out the door very calmly, go pick them up, come back in, give him a really big hug. Tell him how I was feeling, apologize for throwing his shoes, let him have a moment to tell me how he was feeling. Let him get all of his emotions out, help him with issues. Finally get out the door.

So that was the way it all resolved. But after I had this moment of snapping, and I am learning how to be much more in touch with when I need to calm down; and being a mom that can walk away and give myself some space before I get to that point.

So, it's a part of my mom-concept that I am working at cultivating.

It is getting less and less and less because I am focusing more and more on wanting to be intentional about that and giving myself space, even if we're running late, even if we're trying to get out the door. Whatever it is, it is always better for me to approach my kids in a calm manner, than work myself up into this moment where I will snap and maybe throw some shoes.

So, this leads then into the third guidepost I want to give you as you're writing out your self-concept - is that it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to sound great. I know how to give myself space. That's a part of my self-concept that I'm cultivating. It kind of sounds a little clunky. It's not an 'I am' statement. It's just sort of this belief that I have about myself, or that I'm cultivating about myself.

So, it doesn't really matter how you phrase any of these statements or whatever word you use or if you use 'I am' statements or not. You don't want to overthink it. Just write whatever comes out of you.

I know how to...

I'm good at...

When my son does this, I respond like this.

Don't get stuck in the words just write however you want to write it however many you want to write it, I don't want to give you too many parameters, because really your mom-concept is just a fluid document on how you see yourself and your strengths as a mom at this moment.

So, I want to give you a little bit of an example of this so that you can kind of understand what this list might look like. And so here is my current mom-concept. Remember, this can change whenever you want to change it, you can add to it, you can subtract to it, I've made lists like this, over and over and over again for days on end. I haven't made one in a while. But as I sat here to do this podcast, I sat here for a few minutes, I wrote out this list. So, there's fluidity to all of this.

But here is my current mom-concept:

I am extremely patient.

I am intentional.

I create experiences,

I value everyone's opinions and emotions.

Modeling is of utmost importance to me,

I have great compassion,

I do real talk.

I'm honest.

When I take care of me, I take care of my kid., I gently push.

And then my growth statements are: I know how to take space. And I thoughtfully respond.

This is my living document right now; this is the list of how I see myself. And when I look at this list, I think of how great a mom I am. I think about how I'm doing so many things well with my kids when I look at this list. It doesn't mean that I'm ignoring the parts of me that need to grow as a mom, or that need to deepen as a mom. I'm not ignoring those things. I'm just simply focusing my brain on the things that I know that I'm doing well, and the person I am and how I'm showing up as a mom that I'm really, really proud of.

Now it is your turn to write your mom-concept - to create for yourself a regret-free kind of guilt-free working mom life by naming your strengths, owning who you are as a mom, and letting go of the rest.

Remember, this is a really big part of creating work life balance, because life is not all about work.

It's about life as well life outside of work. And obviously, probably the biggest life outside of work right now is you as a mom. And so, knowing who you are, where your strengths are - almost like you're writing a resume for yourself - and what makes you successful. as a mom, that's the goal here is for your brain to see your successes and name your successes and feel a lot of pride in who you are as a mom.

Here was what one of my clients had to say about doing this work, I wanted to close with this.

She said 'I am proud of naming and defining my mom values. It helps me to show up better as a mom and be more intentional about how I prioritize, make tradeoffs and show up for my kids.'

Yes, I love this. This is what I want for you - to feel amazing about the tradeoffs that you make every single day.

And to feel like you are showing up as your best self, not just for your job or for your work, but for your kids and your home life as well.

So, if you're feeling like you're completely defined by work and your career, and you're ready to recenter yourself, you have not spent a whole lot of time cultivating or even thinking about yourself as a mom. And this is the kind of work that you want to do. You want to redefine who you are, what it is that you want, why you want it.

I invite you to join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective.

In step one ,of the five steps, to work life balance process that I teach, I walk you through a series of exercises, to not just know who you are, but to like who you are, so that you could show up as a mom, a worker, a partner and a friend and a person that you want to be. I'll put the link in the show notes. And I look forward to seeing you there. Okay working moms. Let's get to it.

I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you're looking to create a life where your career and your home life never feel at odds where you're working less but achieving at the same level. A life without regret for you know you are doing exactly what you want to be doing. Then join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. This is a group of ambitious working moms who believe that work life balance is possible for them and are committed to creating it. The program includes 30 short videos and workbooks that teach you how to create the building blocks of a balanced life as well as weekly group coaching and in-depth support within a private working moms’ community. Oh, and did I mention that when you join the community you get lifetime access. That means you have access to coaching and material to help support your balanced life in every season. You can find out more information and sign up for the collective on my website at www.RebeccaOlsonCoaching.com/collective

Rebecca Olson