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What do you do when you realize you are doing the very thing you don’t want to do? For example, you are distracted on your phone when with your kids, unable to shut down your work brain, saying yes to too many things, yelling at your kids or logging back on at night. How do you get yourself back on track? In this episode I am sharing 8 tools that take 2 minutes or less to help you reset so you can quickly get back on track toward balance and happiness.
Topics in this episode:
8 practical tools to help you reset your mindset and emotions
Why your thoughts and feelings are behind every imbalanced behavior
Getting yourself out of lack or “I’m not good enough”
The importance of saying the thing even when it feels mean and icky
Emotions have specific sensations
Show Notes & References:
Stop falling back into old bad habits of overworking and click here to schedule a breakthrough call: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
What do you do when you realize that you're doing the thing that you're not supposed to be doing? You're working later than you want. You're thinking about work too much. You're saying yes to too many things. You're distracted by your phone. You're doing the things you know that are causing imbalance. What do you do? How do you get yourself back on track? In today's episode, I'm going to give you eight practical tools that you can do in two minutes or less to help you reset and immediately stop doing the thing that you're not supposed to be doing so that you can start prioritizing yourself, your family, and rest. You 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.
Working Moms, I have a very practical episode for you today. Recently, I have had several of my clients come to the end of their coaching term with me. I work with my clients for six months, and we do 18 sessions together. And then at the end of those six months, usually around the last session, it's not uncommon for my clients to start getting a little bit nervous and kind of anxious about not having our regular coaching sessions together. Almost always, I get asked a question during one of our last sessions, how do I keep this coaching work up? And we always come up with a game plan. We talk through all of the various tools that they've learned, all of the progress that they've made, what has been most effective for them, and I create for them a really specific plan to keep their progress going so they don't either fall back or feel like they're stagnant in what they learned.
Oftentimes in this plan, we talk about two very different types of tools. We talk about tools that are going to help them kind of address at the core what is causing imbalance, making them feel overwhelmed and unhappy so that they can really end those cycles and experience less overwhelm and less imbalance and less unhappiness over time.
Now, that's a lot of the work that we do in coaching, but it's impractical for me to say that you're going to end mindsets that you've had for the last 35, 40 years in six months, that work is going to continue on for some time past our coaching engagement together. That's not a problem. I want to make sure that my clients have the tools to keep that work going so that they feel less triggered and less out of balance, more and more and more and more.
Awareness around being in an imbalance cycle.
Now, the second type of tool that we talk about is what to do when they notice in the moment that they're off track. They're doing the people pleasing. Or the perfecting. Or the distinct behaviors that are causing a lot of imbalance for them. Where they stopped prioritizing themselves. Or they're just always prioritizing getting more done and they have a hard time resting when they notice that they're in the middle of doing the thing that they don't want to be doing. How do they get themselves out of that as quickly as possible? Because in coaching, I'm there to help point that out to them. I'm there to show them when they're in the middle of their kind of imbalance cycles and they're being triggered. And so they grow all of this awareness around that.
But, I'm not always going to be there to point out to them when they're in the middle of those patterns and what to do to get themselves out of it. So I want them to have tools to help them when they notice that they're off track in some way, that they're not moving towards their goals, or they're prioritizing the things they don't want to be prioritizing. I want them to have the tools to be able to fix that in the moment.
The reset button.
And there's all sorts of tools that you can use to get yourself back on track, reset yourself, that take two minutes or less. And I want them to be really fast because I want it to be a reset. I want it to be like you just hit the red button that said reset and the little thing popped out on the plug on the wall and then, magically your hair dryer works again, right? That's your reset button. I want it to feel like it's that fast, where you don't need a ton of time to get back on track. You just need something that jolts you back into the right head space and emotional space to move toward the kind of life and to demonstrate the kind of behaviors that prioritize yourself and your family over always working and all of the imbalance and stuff that's going on with that.
I thought this would be such a great podcast to share with you some of these tools, eight in specific that I give my clients so that you too can also learn how to really reset yourself when you find yourself off track. When you recognize that you're doing something or behaving in a certain way that you don't want to be doing and behaving like. What do you do in that moment? How do you get yourself back on track? So I'm going to get really specific as I talk about these tools, but I want you to remember that there could be lots of different reasons why you're off track in the first place and if we were coaching together, we would be talking a whole lot about that. We would be tailoring all of these specific patterns and behaviors that are causing you to feel out of balance and off track and unhappy.
Tailored plan to get you out of your patterns.
But for the sake of this podcast, you're going to have to kind of adapt some of these tools to your specific situation and what you're doing and the behaviors and things that you're demonstrating that you don't want to be happening. And as always, if you want to have a really specific conversation around your patterns and your habits, that is why I offer a free coaching session now - I call it a breakthrough call. And on that call, we actually start looking at some of these patterns and identifying them on the call so that we can then talk about what we're going to do in coaching and tailor a plan to get you through those patterns to the other side so that you can start really experiencing the balance and the happiness and control that you really want over your life. So if this is all resonating with you and you want a tailored plan that is specific to you, now is the perfect time for us to talk. You can find a link to schedule that call in the show notes.
So, here's how it starts. You notice that you can't shut down your brain while you're trying to focus on your kiddo while they're taking a bath, or you're waking up in the middle of the night thinking about work and all the things that you still have to do. Or you notice that you're logging on and working late and working to 5:15, 5:35, 5:45 when you really want to be getting out the door at 5:00. And you start noticing that you're feeling really overwhelmed at everything that you have to do. And you notice that you're silently quitting, meaning you're not giving it your all. You're not feeling dedicated or committed to your job. You have all this negative self talk going on in your head. And you find yourself yelling or you find yourself irritated at your kids. You're feeling really bad about it. These are all very common, normal behaviors that you might notice as a working mom. And when you notice them, it's in that moment that you have the opportunity to reset.
Instead of saying, I really need to work on this. I need to get better. I'm going to try tomorrow. I'm going to hold to that boundary tomorrow, I promise. Or maybe even just resigning yourself to that behavior, like, you know, it's just the way it is. It's just a really stressful time at work. It's just really hard being a working mom. Instead of doing that - you have an opportunity when you notice that you're in the middle of the behavior that you don't want to be doing, or you're in the middle of the emotions that you don't want to be in - then you have an opportunity to reset by using one of these eight tools that I'm going to be sharing with you that can take less than two minutes, I promise.
Thoughts = feelings.
What's really important for you to understand about these behaviors is that they all stem from a pattern of thought and feeling. When you are thinking, I haven't done enough today. And because you feel behind, you feel very overwhelmed. When you're feeling that way, you tend to prioritize work over your family. You tend to work late, or log back on or stay available on your phone, or not shut down your work brain, right? There is a direct thought to feeling to behavior connection.
Let me give you another example. When you're thinking I'm not good enough - I'm not a good enough manager, or I'm not a good enough mom, or I'm doing it wrong, these are all kind of the same flavors of thought. When you say these things to yourself, you start feeling really inadequate. You start feeling anxious. And when you're feeling inadequate and anxious, you start feeling that you need to prove yourself, to say yes to everyone in every meeting request. You fill your calendar with way too much to do. You engage in a whole lot of negative self talk.
Your imbalanced behaviors all stem from a pattern of thought and feeling.
And in coaching, we spend time, particularly at the beginning of our six months together, really identifying your specific patterns, the exact thoughts that you think and the emotions that you feel that really trigger you to overwork and to not prioritize yourself or your family and feeling paralyzed by the fear of failure, or that sends you into people pleasing or perfecting. We get really clear specifically on your patterns so that you exactly know what you need to do in order to self correct all of these tools that I'm going to share with you today.
Intentional action.
At the core of them is a reset of your thoughts and your emotions, or both. That's the goal, is to get your mind into the right place and your nervous system in your body calmed down so that you can take more intentional action that is in alignment with your priorities and your values.
Using our breath.
All right, are you ready? I'm really excited to share these with you. So the very first tool I want to share is the one that I use all the time. I use it really in conjunction with probably every other tool here that I'm about to give you. It's very simple. It's breath. Deep, deep breathing. Now, prior to coaching, I was not really one that focused much on my breath. I did enjoy yoga, meditation a little bit, and a lot of that has breath in it as well. But it really wasn't until probably five years ago or so that I started to incorporate deep breathing into my daily life as sort of a reset tool.
And it's really simple. All it takes is a moment for you to close your eyes, if possible. You don't have to do it, you could do this in a meeting or something like that and not close your eyes if you don't feel comfortable doing that, but close your eyes and focus on the rhythms and the sensations of your breath. For me, I notice the air going in and out of my lungs. I notice what it feels like to inhale those sensations. I notice what it feels like to exhale. I kind of watch in my mind my lungs getting big like a balloon and then, like, exhaling and getting small.
Sometimes I imagine that breath coming from almost like the bottom of my toes all the way up into my body. And the reason why this is such an effective resetting tool is it immediately brings you back into the present. Because when you're thinking about your breath and the sensations of breathing, you can't be thinking about work or really anything else. Your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. You're just sitting right here in the moment, in the present, focusing on your body and the sensations of breathing, a very simple practice.
Now, for me, this is starting to become almost second nature. When I notice that I'm experiencing a whole lot of big feelings, or maybe I'm procrastinating on something, or I'm finding myself really irritated at my kids or something like that. I stop, close my eyes, I deeply breathe. I get myself back into the present. So that's number one. That's our first reset tool, breath. And again, I like to use this tool in conjunction with lots of these other tools that I'm going to give you. So just keep that in the back of your mind that breathing and deep breathing and focusing on the sensations of breathing, even if it's just for a few seconds, is a great way to start almost all of these tools I'm about to give you. So that was number one.
Write down 5 reasons why you are enough.
Number two is I want you to think - or write down would actually even be better. I want you to think or write down five reasons that you know that in this moment you are enough. Now, I teach a lot about the concept of enoughness, meaning that you believe that you are enough, that you're good enough, and that you're doing enough. Because at the core of most imbalance behaviors is a lack of one of those mindsets. It's you believing that you're not good enough, that you need to prove yourself, that you haven't done enough, and that you need to achieve more, and that you aren't enough. And so you have to take on more in order to demonstrate your value. At the heart of so much imbalance and imbalance behaviors is one of these three thoughts.
And so this is an intentional two minute practice of directing your brain to why in this moment, you are enough. If it's me doing this exercise, it might sound like this. I know I'm enough because I believe that everyone, including myself, has human value. I don't have to prove myself to anyone in order to be valuable. I don't have to do anything to be valuable. My existence is valuable. That might be the first thing I write out of the five that I'm going to write down. You don't have to give as much explanation to it. It could just be a couple of simple words.
You will know that you will have done this exercise correctly or used this tool correctly if your energy shifts by the end of it. You know when you feel that surge of calmness within you, that strength that wasn't there just a couple of minutes ago? That kind of recenters. You back into what you know to be true about yourself and life.
Affirmations.
The third resetting tool that's going to take you less than two minutes is to repeat a phrase out loud, like 1,020 times. Now, you could pick your own phrase, something that sort of resets your thoughts and your emotions about yourself. It should be super simple. Let me give you some examples. It could be something like, I am amazing. I am enough. I am unique and special. I deserve this job. I am the perfect mom for my kids. I'm exactly where I should be. Any of these thoughts, if you set them over and over and over again, they're going to help reset you. They're very centering and grounding thoughts that brings your brain back into a place of abundance instead of lack. I'm amazing. I'm amazing. I am, amazing. I'm amazing. Oh, there it was. It was that one right there. I felt that little tingle that went down my spine and through my legs. It kind of took maybe six or seven ‘I'm amazing’ for me to get there, and then I would want to continue them on and on and on.
But it was in that one that I felt the shift where I felt like that thought that I'm amazing really went from just like a cerebral idea in my head and it went down into my body. And that's the whole purpose of this. It can kind of feel like you're brainwashing yourself. I have clients that tell me that all the time. They're like, I feel like I'm brainwashing myself. But you're brainwashing yourself with good thoughts. Your brain is hardwired not to think in the positive. It has a bias towards the negative.
In this little two minute practice, what you're doing is you're just resetting your mind back into the positive, thinking about all of the amazing good things that you are and have as an individual. So that's the third tool.
Visualizing a hug.
The fourth resetting tool is to visualize a really big hug. Now you could really visualize anything, but if you're not somebody that has practiced visualization a whole lot, I think a hug is a really simple and effective visualization. And it really is just as it sounds like. Close your eyes. Connect back into that breath again to get you back into the present and then imagine someone giving you a really big embrace where you really see their arms all around you, where you can feel them squeeze your body. Even as I'm saying this out loud, I find myself squeezing my body. Not even in my mind's eye. I'm like finding my arms around me, like, squeezing my body, right? Because when you experience a hug in real life, there's almost this emotional reset that happens with it, right? You feel known, you feel seen, you feel heard. And you're essentially just creating that experience for yourself and your mind when you do this.
The reason why this tool works is because when we get off track, our most common response to that is judgment and shame. Self judgment and self shame. We're telling ourselves we shouldn't be doing this, and we feel really bad. And there's just, like, heap upon heap of guilt and shame that we throw on ourselves. But, when we're giving ourselves a big hug, we're essentially saying, hey, it's okay. You're okay. You're a human being. We can get back on track. There's this little push of confidence that comes with that. And a visualization practice like that is very centering and allows you to just take a moment to acknowledge where you're at so that as you move forward, you can take more intentional action.
Practicing gratitude.
Okay, the fifth two minute tool is gratitude. Gratitude feels so good. It feels really good to think about all of the great things that you have in your life. It feels good to remind your brain of all of the things that are going well and all of the things that you've done and you created in your life. And that's all you're doing. By taking two minutes to be grateful, you're intentionally redirecting your brain off of what's not going well and you're redirecting it to things that are going good and right. All you need to do is just take a piece of paper or speak out loud as many things as you can think of in two minutes. Things that you feel grateful for. Things that bring you joy. Things that you have in your life. Things that you've done in your life. Things that you're experiencing in your life right now. The people in your life, the person that you are, and the things you're grateful for within you. You could think about this in so many different ways, but it's just taking two minutes to reset your mindset from lack to abundance.
Writing down exactly how you feel.
The 6th tool that I think is one of the most powerful ones that you could ever learn to cultivate is to write down the exact thoughts and feelings that you are experiencing right now. I don't want you to sugarcoat them. I want them to be exact. Doesn't matter how mean they are, how outlandish they are, or how much you know that they're not true. If you're thinking about them, then they're having a negative effect on your body, and you need to get them out. You need to clear them away.
To be honest, this is one of my go to's when I'm feeling really upset at my kids, right? I go into another room where I go into the bathroom while I'm peeing or something like that, and I just say out loud, like, oh, my kids are terrible. I wish they wouldn't behave in this way. I don't like them right now. I wish I could be alone. All of these terrible things about them, and I can get kind of meaner than that. I just don't feel so vulnerable to say some of the mean things that come out about my kids. We all have these thoughts about our children.
Lessen the power these false thoughts have over us.
We all have these thoughts about other people in our life or something that went wrong or bad. We all have these terrible thoughts. We know that they're not true, but the fact that they're going through our head means they're having an effect on how we feel and we need to clear it out. We need to lessen the power these false thoughts have over us. And by writing them down, writing your actual thoughts and feelings down, word for word, no matter how icky or how terrible they are, you're basically stripping away their power and seeing them for what they are. And for most of us, as long as you don't get into judgment about it, you can look at these words and say, I'm thinking some really terrible things. It's going to immediately shift your energy as you kind of speak the truth of the moment, of whatever it is you're thinking and feeling, so that you can move on from it.
Awareness of what we are feeling.
The 7th tool is to close your eyes and bring your attention to the emotions that you're experiencing at this moment. This is extremely effective if you find yourself in a really big emotion, like overwhelm or anger or disappointment or inadequacy. All you need to do is stop, close your eyes, name the emotion that you're feeling right now, and notice all of their sensations that come along with that emotion. Now, this took some practice for me, but once I learned how to do it, it was an emotional game changer.
Emotions have lots of different sensations to them.
If I'm totally honest with you, I didn't even know that emotions felt a specific way until one of my fellow coaches in my Mastermind told me that. And I remember looking at her and saying, what? What are you talking about? And then she had to describe it to me. And then I walked away from that conversation, really curious about what the heck she meant, and I started to notice it myself. Every different emotion comes with a different set of sensations. Some tingle. Some feel like air. Some feel heavy. Some feel dark. Some feel like a color, like red or black. Some feel wispy. Some feel sharp or stabby. All these different emotions have lots of different sensations to them. And what you're doing in these two minutes is taking almost an inventory of what this emotional experience is like inside of you.
Most of us spend a lot of time and energy pushing away emotions, avoiding emotions when they're happening, particularly the icky ones, because they don't feel really good. Oftentimes it doesn't feel good to have that heaviness or that stabbing sensation in your body. And so we avoid it or we push it away. And in this little two minute practice, you're doing completely the opposite. You're taking the emotion and you're letting it be. You're giving it presence, you're acknowledging it. And when you do that, it's going to have way less power over you. So this tool in particular is probably the best one if you need an emotional reset in the moment, big feelings that you need to let go and move on from.
Write down what makes you unique or special or amazing.
And then the last tool, the 8th tool, is to write down what makes you unique or special or amazing. I want you to think of all of the things that you're especially good at, the things that make you really good at your job, that makes you a really great mom, that makes you feel like a really good friend or a good spouse. One of the earlier tools that I gave to you was to say a phrase like this over and over and over again, like, I am amazing, I am unique, I am special. Something along those lines. And in this tool, what you're doing is you're giving reasoning behind it. You're giving the explanation for why that is true about you.
Remember, your brain is really good at finding all of your faults and all of the things that you don't do well, and that you need to work on and where you need to grow and has a much harder time remembering what makes you special and what makes you good. And most people get it backwards. They think if they do something special and amazing, if they nail a project or a presentation, or they land that big client, or they get promoted, or they handle a particularly intense meltdown with their kids with grace and ease, if they do those things, then they're amazing and special. When really it's the opposite. When you're feeling amazing and special and unique, then you start doing amazing and special and unique things. When you're feeling inadequate and not good enough and like you're failing, you have a much harder time doing really wonderful, amazing things. So with this tool, you're moving your mindset out of that I'm not good enough, into a place where you feel special and unique and good. It does not matter how busy you are or how stressful you are. You have two minutes to do a reset.
Most of my clients when they come to me, they think that this work is going to take a lot of time. It's going to take all this time for them to undo all of their imbalanced behaviors and to learn how to not be a people pleaser or perfectionist, because they've been that way all of their life to kind of get back into this place where they feel really good about themselves and confident and clear around what they want or to make a big change in their career. It's like going to take all this time, and when we think it's going to take all of this time, the likelihood that you're going to start that journey is probably really small. But what I tell my clients is, yes, we work together for six months because I want to make sure that you have crystal clarity and awareness over the patterns that really aren't serving you. And I want to teach you all of the tools you need to know in order to get to the goal that you have for yourself of balance and happiness and a career that you love. And we need to give ourselves some time to implement.
I want to be there with you on the journey as you implement these tools so I can help troubleshoot with you, so I can help keep you accountable and keep you on track. That's why we work together for six months, but you're going to start feeling better within the first month. That's what I tell my clients immediately after our first session, second session, third session. You're going to start to feel a shift as you learn how to reset yourself on a daily basis. And when you start thinking about yourself differently and when you start feeling differently about yourself and start feeling really positive and amazing, you're going to start to see your life very differently. You're going to start doing some things differently in your life. You're going to start prioritizing things differently in your life. I can help you if you're stuck, if you need support and resetting yourself in your life schedule that free breakthrough call so we could talk about your specific patterns that are causing you to feel out of balance and stuck, so we can come up with a tailor plan for how to get you feeling clear and confident and into that balance state with coaching.
Conclusion
All right, working moms, I hope that this has been a really helpful, useful, practical episode for you today. If you ever have any podcast topics, I would love to hear from you. You can message me on Instagram or LinkedIn or send me an email. I will put my email address in the show notes. I would love to hear from you. I'm always taking suggestions from my listeners on exactly what I could do to help best support them. So working moms, there's no excuse. You have two minutes to reset yourself, and now you know eight tools in which to do that. I want you to have a great week and let's get to it.
Thanks for listening to this week's episode. If you want a little extra support as a working mom, I invite you to download my free training, the Secret to Ending Your workday at 5pm. In this free training, I teach you how to shut down your computer and your work brain at exactly the time you want, without all those feelings of guilt and like you need to log back on. By the end of this training, you will know exactly what you need to think and do in order to fully engage with your family, even after a long workday. To sign up for the training, you can go to www.ambitiousandbalancedcollective.com/end-work-at-5pm If you didn't catch all that, don't worry. Check the show notes for a direct link. All right, working moms, let’s get to it.
