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In today’s episode I am sharing the 2nd step to creating a balanced life: clarity. There are 3 things you need to know: where you are headed in your career, what your day-to-day priorities are and exactly what a regret-free looks like to you. Clarity is the roadmap to a balanced life and it will help you start making confident decisions around how to spend your time and energy with ease. This is step two of a 5 step process.
Topics in this episode:
Feeling lost and uncertain in your career, after having kids
The importance of being clear on exactly what you want and why
What to do when you have 10 things that need to get done at once
How clarity eases day-to-day decisions
Why you must feel certain about your career and how
Show Notes & References:
Ready to create sustainable work-life balance? Join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective
Step 1:The first step to creating work-life balance (www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/60)
Does your job need to be fulfilling to create balance? (www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/33)
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Transcript
Intro
In today's episode, I'm sharing the second thing that's required to create a balanced life clarity. If you want to create for yourself a balanced life where success in your career and success in motherhood are inevitable, you have to know exactly what that looks like. You need to know where you're headed in your career, what's most important. When there are two things that are vying for your attention, you have to know what your long term goals are and what it means to live regret free. Clarity is the roadmap to a balanced life. And I will break it all down for you here in this episode. This is step two of a five step process that I am teaching over the course of five weeks. 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.
Hey working moms, I just have to say that this has been so much fun thinking about the process that I teach inside the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective - the five step process that I'm walking you through over these five weeks. Because although this is the foundation of what I teach all of my clients on how to create sustainable work life balance, I'm constantly talking about these things in the process. But what I've done over these last few weeks as I've really sat down and thought about how I could explain each of these steps so simply and so clearly on this podcast. It has brought me so much energy for the work that I do as a coach for Working Moms. Creating for yourself a balanced life does not have to feel like a mystery. It does not have to feel hard.
Balance is a feeling.
Last week I told you that it was important for you to spend some time really thinking about, even writing down specifically what a balanced life would look like for you. If you are feeling balanced, how much would you work? What would your me time look like? How would the end of the workday feel to you? What would you do during that time? How would the interactions with your partner be? How would you look as a mom? You have to start with getting your brain super clear about what this life would look like for you if you are feeling balanced. And my guess is if you did that exercise of really thinking about that, naming that, writing it down, visualizing it - you probably found a little resurgence of energy about it, too. There is an important distinction here that we talked a little bit about last week, and I talk a lot about on this podcast, which is balance is a feeling. It is literally an emotion that we experience in our body. So even though you might want to work less hours and spend maybe more time with your kiddos and have more space in your calendar for you and for working out, and you might want to prioritize your marriage and you want to eat healthy, these are probably some of the things that you saw in your balanced life. The reality is, what it is you really want is you really want to feel good about yourself and your life, no matter how many hours you spend working, and no matter how many hours you spend with your family or whether you get to work out today or not, or whether you have a regular date night with your partner or not, at the core, what it is you really want is to feel balanced no matter your circumstance. There will always be something in life that's not quite right, someone that isn't happy with your decisions. There are only 24 hours in a day and a to do list that is never ending. You will always have to decide how you use that time. There will always be trade offs. And what I teach inside the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom's Collective, it's not to try to get your circumstances just right, It's not to try to create some equilibrium with your time and your energy, what I teach is ownership. Ownership over the way that you feel and what you think about yourself and your life. Because when you're thinking really amazing things about yourself and your life and what you're doing and how you're showing up, that sense of balance is going to flow out of you naturally. And I am all about making things feel easy and natural.
I do want you to know that the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective - that's my group coaching program for Working Moms, where I teach five steps to work life balance. It is always open to you. You could sign up literally right now, today and start taking ownership over your balanced life right now.
Last week we covered step one of the five step process to creating sustainable work life balance. And the focus was on you. You believing in yourself, you knowing that you are an amazing human being, that you're an asset to your company, that you're a wonderful mom. I like to think that step one sort of answers the question, who am I? And step two, the one that we're going to talk about today, sort of answers the question, what do I want? I call this step clarity. The goal of this step is to give your brain some direction to tell your brain where it's going and what's most important. And for a lot of women, what it is they want and where they're headed in life, that changes once they become a mom. And it makes sense, right? You worked hard to get to where you are in your career. Right now, there's a lot of focus on moving up, on being successful, on getting promoted. This was a big thing to think about in life before you had kids. But when your baby comes along, all of a sudden you have something else that is equally, if not probably more important. You've never trained your brain to be able to handle both of those goals simultaneously. You don't know how to handle two priorities that feel equally or heavily weighted. Your brain is going to start asking questions like, can I really keep up at this pace? Do I even really want to keep working? Can I be successful at the level I want to be? Do I want to just pull back in my career? Right? Your brain is asking lots and lots and lots of questions. And it's not going to stop asking all of these questions until you spend some time actually finding answers. Now, a lot of women that I speak with tell me that they have only ever planned their life up until this moment, right? They got into a good school. They worked hard at the beginning of their career. They started to move their way up in their career. They found someone special that they wanted to spend the rest of their life with. They got married, they waited a few years, they started having kids, and here we are. Their brain is kind of going now what? What do I do? Where do I go from here? What do I really want? And I see a lot of women shame themselves for not really knowing what's next for them, for feeling a bit lost and confused after motherhood. And I want to take a quick moment to talk about this because I remember when I was pregnant with my first, I had a very clear plan to go back to the job that I was in. I really liked where I couldn't imagine myself being home with my baby all day. And yet after she was born, I couldn't imagine going back to work. Everything I thought I knew about what I wanted in my career, it felt like it shifted almost instantaneously. My desire to be home with her was super strong. And I cried for what felt like endless months when I returned from my maternity. And I know so many women who have that same story. They thought they wanted something before kids. And then that first baby came along, and lots of things change within us and things that they could have never anticipated or planned for.
You are not going to find balance if you don't know what it is.
So if you're someone that's really struggling to make some decisions around what it is you really want in your career, what it is you really want in life, you're feeling very lost. You're feeling very confused. Know that you are not alone. Also know it's not a problem that you're asking yourself some of these fundamental questions. It's just simply a time to answer them. It's time to get clear. I want you to think about your brain right now as being lost. It's trying to help you get from where you are right now to a more balanced life. But it doesn't have a roadmap and it doesn't really even have a clear destination in mind. All it knows is that here, right now, in this unbalanced state, this is not where you want to be. It's saying, I can't keep doing this. I am on my way to burnout. I'm tired, I'm exhausted. I am not showing up as the person I want to be, the mum I want to be. I'm failing at work. So your brain is hopped in a car and it's ready to go somewhere. And it has started driving around because it knows that it can't keep doing this, but because it doesn't have a roadmap and it doesn't have a clear direction or a clear destination for that matter, it's kind of mysteriously just hoping that it's going to arrive somewhere else that is going to make you more happy. That's what's going on in your brain right now. If you haven't done the work to get really clear about what it is you really want and what's most important to you. That is why this step is so important. You are not going to find balance if you don't know what it is and you don't know how to make decisions for it. We have to give your brain a destination and a roadmap. And that is really what this step is all about in this five step process to creating work life balance, clarity around what it is you want. Clarity around why that is the most important thing.
Getting clear on your career direction.
Okay, In the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, in this step, all of the working moms that join and are a part of this program, I help them get clear on three very specific things. The first one I've talked about several times on this podcast, I will link to that in the show notes as well, so that you can listen to a full episode on this particular topic. But you need to be clear on your career direction. You spend more hours working during a five day work week than you spend with your kids. That time that you are working, that time has to feel worth it because I know what happens when things get really busy at work and it's hard to hold on to your boundaries. The most natural place for your brain to go is, ‘I can't do this, I should just quit or I should just go part time’. That's a super common thing for your brain to do. It kind of has an all in or all out kind of approach to problems. And so life starts to get hard as of course it's going to work, and starts to get really busy, of course it's going to and you feel like you're not spending enough time with your kiddos. Your brain is just trying to take the easy way out and it says, oh my gosh, we can't do this, let's just abandon ship. Maybe we should quit. I should just take a break for a while. I should figure out what it is I really want. And I don't want your brain indulging in this. Because when your brain is thinking that the only way out, the only way to create balance and to get find order in life is to quit or to go part time, what your brain is not doing, is it's not spending any time thinking about how you could continue working at your job full time and have a balanced life at the same time, when you're indulging in the thought process of quitting or changing jobs or pulling back in your career because you haven't done the work to really decide if what it is you're doing is exactly what you want to be doing, you haven't decided your career direction. You're not going to do the hard work of figuring out what it's going to take for you to stay and to still have the life that you want to have. A lot of coaching that I give to the working moms that are a part of the collective is it's both. And how do you have both? How do you have the career that you desire at the success level that you desire and still have balance in your life? Let's assume that that's possible. If it's true, how do you do that? How do you get there? What needs to change? What do you need to do? What needs to be different? What conversations do you need to have? We spend time considering that you could have both, instead of spending any time indulging in if it's an either or.
Deciding career direction really comes from answering four questions:
Do you want to work?
Assuming so, do you want to keep doing what you're doing?
Do you want to remain at your company doing what it is you're doing?
Do you want to stay in the role that you're in now?
The goal of getting clear on your career direction is for you to feel certain that what it is you're doing in your job is exactly what you want to be doing.
I'm not going to lie, there is some deep soul searching with all of these questions. You might not be able to rattle off the answers to these very easily. You might need a guide to help you answer some of these questions. And that is where coaching comes in. In the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, there are teachings and worksheets to help you answer these questions. And you can attend our weekly group coaching calls. You can talk to me directly, get coached by me directly on anything that is feeling challenging or confusing to you. You could post in our private Facebook group every single day and get help and get coached there as well. The goal of getting clear on your career direction is for you to feel certain that what it is you're doing in your job is exactly what you want to be doing, and you need to know why it is that you want to work or not work or whatever it is you want to do. You need to know why because your why is super motivating. You need to connect it to a deeper sense of purpose. It needs to make sense in the bigger picture of what it is you want in your life. It's going to help you feel so much more motivated at work. It's going to lessen guilt. It's going to make balance so much easier when you feel bought in to exactly what it is you're doing in your career and the reasons that you're doing it.
What are your daily priorities?
Now, the second thing that you need to be clear on in order to create work life balance is your daily priorities. Now let me give you an example of why - When you get home from work and between the time you get home and the kids go to sleep, there's probably at least ten things that are pulling you in ten different directions during that time. In other words, there are competing priorities. You need to make dinner. You need to put away the lunches. You need to spend a little quality time with your kids. You need to get teeth brushed and pajamas on. Maybe you need to review homework with older kids. You need to read a book. Your kids want you to play with them. You might have work, emails and texts that are coming in. Your mom might call and want to chat with you for a few seconds. In a very short period of time, there could be a lot of things that are demanding your attention. Now, if you're not clear on which one of those things is most important to you, which one is the top priority? Which one is going to make you feel satisfied, connected, rested, balanced? Whatever it is you want to feel during this time, then you're likely going to end up doing the one that feels the most urgent but it might not be the most important. A phone call from anyone during these sacred few hours, whether that person is your mom or your best friend or somebody that needs something from you, from work or a client or a colleague, probably whatever it is they need is not more important than you being present and feeling fully present with your kid, because that is probably the only time you really do spend with your kid during a workday. Yes, that person may be disappointed or feel put out or have to wait on you. That is okay. And making that decision to not answer the phone or check your email or answer the text, that decision is going to come a lot faster and with a lot more ease and a lot less ickiness. When you decide ahead of time that you're not going to answer the phone, you're not going to answer text, you're going to turn your phone on do not disturb, and you're going to do it and you're going to know why.
Let me give you another example, I had a client that was a veterinarian. She spoke about competing priorities that she experienced in her line of work. Appointments are booked back to back to back, kind of like any doctor. And she said it never felt like there was enough time to really give the animal, and particularly the animal's owner, the attention that they really needed. So there was always this urgency to get through appointments as fast as possible. So people aren't waiting on you, your next appointment isn't waiting on you. And that priority of people not waiting on you because it always feels bad when you have to wait on your doctor when they're running 20 minutes late. That always feels bad. That priority to try to be on time was in direct competition to giving quality care to your patients and to her patients caregivers. We spent time in a session really discussing each of these priorities and which one was really the most important and which one allowed her to be the doctor that she really wanted to be. And that was really what it came down to. We spent more time talking about her as a doctor and the kind of legacy she wanted to leave as a doctor and then coming back to which priority made sense based on that. Ideally, of course, she could have both. And of course, some days you just can base on the appointments and based on the pet that came in. But sometimes she just couldn't. Sometimes there was an urgent matter. Sometimes people had to wait. Sometimes she had to rush through things, and sometimes she just had to choose between getting to her next appointment in a timely manner or giving an animal all of the attention that they needed in that moment.
Now, the goal of getting clear on these priorities, I call these day to day priorities. The goal is to help you make decisions faster on how you spend your time and your energy when there are multiple things that are calling your attention. Now, when you decide ahead of time, you're going to spend a lot less time spinning and what to do. You're going to be making the decision not from a reactive place - which is usually an emotional place, but instead from a proactive place, from a place that is based on your own values because you've thought through them, and you're going to feel so much more confident about your decisions and less icky when other people are affected by them.
What is heads down time?
One of the strategies I teach in step five of this five step work life balance process that we're going to talk about in week five in a couple of weeks, is all about time management and I teach you the importance of scheduling in ‘heads down time’. That's what I like to call it. Heads down time. This is your time in your calendar for you to just do work, for you to check a whole bunch of things off of your list and not to be disturbed. You need to have protected time regularly. It might not be every day, but certainly every week where you are just getting stuff done. I had one client that was constantly scheduling over this time with meetings. She would calendar it in during her week, which was the first step, of course, but inevitably someone would request a meeting from her at that time and tell her it was the only time that they could meet with her, could she really make it work? And there were now two competing priorities. All of a sudden there was the need to get through her to do list and actually do some of her work and answer emails and get back to people. And then there was somebody on her team that needed her. Together we went through a process of talking about which of these priorities really was the most important to her and why. Because the one she seemed to always prioritize was the team member that needed her during a meeting time that needed her to shift all her schedule around so that this meeting could work. She continually was prioritizing that. But the result of doing that or the trade off was that she was never having enough time to get her stuff done during the week. And because she never had enough time to get her stuff done during the week, she was either working later or logging back on more regularly or sometimes even working on the weekend to get just some uninterrupted time. In reality, what she was trading off wasn't just her heads down time, but she was trading off time with her family. Because inevitably that is in fact what she had to trade off. In the end, she had to trade off time with her family. So we had to get really clear in her brain what her priorities were and why. So that in the moment when those things popped up, she wouldn't be making an emotional decision, but she would be making a decision based on the perspective of her bigger priorities, her bigger goals, and what it is she really needed to accomplish. And why really, what you're doing in this step is you're deciding ahead of time what it is you want to do when you feel pulled in lots of different directions. Because I guarantee there are regular, sometimes daily occurrences of competing priorities that your brain gets exhausted trying to figure out when they happen. And you can decide you can solve for that ahead of time. It's going to save you energy. It's going to save you time. It's going to save you. Overwhelmed, it's going to save you.
Deciding ahead of time how to handle a situation.
Stress today was a perfect example for me. I talk a lot about my son and his inability to get dressed in the morning because this is just a regular fight in my family. It's a regular occurrence. I've tried many different ways of handling it, but inevitably there are still days where this is a big struggle and today was no exception. He didn't want to get dressed. He ran away from me. He opened up a book and started to read. Finally I got around to grabbing his clothes coming out to him, and then he started to tell me how he didn't want to go to school. It's the cycle that happens all of the time. And so I had a priority of trying to get out the door on time, to get my daughter to school on time. And in these moments, I have a priority of not yelling at my kids. I want to be connected to him. I want to take some space to kind of talk to him about what he's feeling because these are the kinds of things he tells me a lot. And so I can anticipate that we're probably going to have this fight on a pretty regular basis. Not fight, but we're going to have the fight of priorities. We're going to have competing priorities, or I'm going to have competing priorities on a pretty regular basis. With this, I can decide ahead of time how I'm going to handle this, and usually we're not running as late as we were running today, which is why I think it was a bit more frantic. But I have decided many things that I'm going to do in these instances. For example, I have decided that I'm only going to ask him to get dressed once. If he doesn't do it, then I decide that it's on me to help him. So I wait until I am ready and calm and in a moment where I can take the time to go get his clothes and go over to where he is at, I don't make him come into the room. That's something I've decided ahead of time. I go to him. I let him hold on to his book or his blanket or whatever it is he wants while we get dressed. If he is running around, then I tell him that I'm going to count to five. And at five I'm not going to help him get dressed anymore, and he's going to have to do it on his own. And I start counting. I've decided ahead of time how I'm going to handle each of these scenarios so that when it happens, I don't have to try to figure out how I'm going to handle this moment. Instead, I've thought about it based on how I really want my morning to go. I've made some decisions, and then I follow through with it. Now, today there was some outlying exceptions to it. There were some things that were unanticipated, and so I got a little flustered. But now I can start to problem solve for that, too. I can decide when I'm really running that late, for whatever reason, what really is the most important thing to me. It might just be that I pick them up and I put them in the car with his pajamas on. That's okay. I would just rather decide that ahead of time so that in the moment I'm not feeling so overwhelmed and exhausted.
When you spend time deciding ahead of time what's most important to you and why it's important to you, the next time it happens again, you're going to have a game plan for how to handle it. You'll decide what to do with more confidence and certainty. You're not going to feel as bad when one of those things isn't getting your attention. So it's going to feel less icky. And you're going to free up some headspace because you're not making as many in the moment decisions and feeling so uncertain about them right? Or you're not feeling so worried about what other people are going to think. So that is deciding your day to day priorities. It's the second piece of getting clear.
Getting clear on your long term goals.
The last thing that you need to get clear on is your long term goals, or what I like to call your life dreams. Now, before you feel completely overwhelmed by the idea of getting clear on this, let me just say that I don't think you really have to have your life planned out. Right? That's totally impossible. We don't need to exactly know the end goal of your career. We don't need to know where you're going to retire. We don't need to know some of these things like that. That's completely impossible for us to know some of those things. But like I was talking about before, when I was telling you about career direction, your brain still sort of needs to know some idea of an end destination. If you want to send your kids to private school or if you want to pay for college. If those are big priorities for you, that's probably going to dictate some of your day to day choices. There have been countless studies done of people when they get to the end of their life and they are interviewed and they're asked questions. And the most common thing that is said by people nearing death is that they wish they wouldn't have worked so much. They wish they would have prioritized friendships and relationships and family, instead of success and money. Now I like to use the phrase regret free when I talk to working moms because the fear of regret is overwhelming. The way that you don't regret is by making very conscious decisions with reasons that you love. What I want you to avoid here is living a sort of rinse and repeat life, getting up every day and just doing the things that you've always done simply because you've always done them. I think regular evaluation of what's working and what's not working and what's most important to you, what it's going to take for you to create a regret free life, a life that feels balanced because you know deep down that what you're doing is in alignment with what it is you want. Your career choices, your day to day choices, your long term choices, all of them need to match the life that you want to lead. And you're not going to be able to do that unless you get clear on them, get clear on what it is you really want in the long term, in the short term, out of your career. This step of the five step process is the map that is leading you to a regret free life where you are making constant and consistent decisions that are in alignment with what it is you truly want. I just love the idea of living a regret free life. That is what it is all about, of knowing deep down that where you're at right now is exactly where you want to be. It is creating for you the life that you want to lead, where you're going to get to the end of your life, and you're going to look back and you're not going to regret anything that you chose to do. You're not going to regret your career. You're not going to regret your successes. You're not going to regret choices that you made with your kids because you made them from a place of consciousness and clarity based on what's most important to you, based on your values. That is what it is all about.
Outro
Working moms, I hope you have a fabulous week, and I'll see you next week when we cover step three of the five Steps to Work Life Balance Process. Let's get to it.
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're interested in being guided through the five step process that I'm teaching here on the podcast, where each of the steps are broken down into many lessons that are each ten minutes or less so they fit easily into your day. Where you are in community with other amazing career driven moms, learning to balance the demands of their job and their life as a mom, where you have the opportunity to coach with me personally to ensure that the process and steps are tailored to you and your unique circumstances. Then join me in the Ambitious and balanced Working Moms Collective. The Collective is a group coaching program that is designed specifically for ambitious working moms. The doors are always open, and as soon as you sign up, you will get instant access into the five step process. So you can start right away. You can get more information and sign up at www.rebeccolsoncoaching.com.
