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Balance starts with your thoughts. If you want to FEEL balanced, then you need to start thinking thoughts that make you feel that way. In today’s episode I am covering the 3rd step of the 5 Step to Work-Life Balance process: controlling your mind. There are three things you need to know when learning how to interrupt negative thoughts and start cultivating an arsenal of positive ones. This is part 3 of a 5 part series.
Topics in this episode:
How imbalanced thoughts lead to overworking
Why you shouldn’t always believe your first thought
What it takes to cultivate other perspectives
How to get your brain out of default mode
The first kid vs second kid mindset
Show Notes & References:
Create sustainable work-life balance by joining 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)
Step 2: How to make work-life balance easier (part 2) (www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/61)
Don’t forget to leave a rating and review to help spread this resource to other working moms!
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Transcript
Intro
In today's episode, I'm covering step three of the five step process to create work life balance that I have been teaching over the last few weeks. Step three is all about learning how to control your mind. There is a direct correlation between what goes through your brain, the thoughts that you have, the perspectives that you have, then how you feel, and then how you respond. In today's episode, I'm going to be giving you some very detailed examples of how your thoughts either help you or make it hard for you to create a balanced life. And then I will walk you through the three things you must know when you're learning how to control your mind and start thinking balanced thoughts. This is the third episode of a five part series. You ready working moms? 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 hope you are having a fantastic Monday. Real quick, I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you for listening. These past few months, listenership has gone up 30% and this podcast is experiencing so much growth and that is because you have played a really big part in that. I started this podcast just over a year ago and because I knew how busy working moms are with both their paid and their unpaid work. I really wanted to create a podcast with bite size information that could provide daily support so that working moms feel like they can truly love their working mom life, so they can feel like they actually can have it all. They can have the career that they want and the family life that they really have longed for. So thank you for being such a big part of that, thank you for sharing this podcast and thank you for those of you that have reviewed and rated it, all of that has been super helpful in getting the word out to other working moms that really could use your support with this podcast. If you haven't rated it and reviewed it, I encourage you to go do that now, if you consider me your working mom coach, I would love and be honored to have you be spreading the word in that way.
Okay, let's dive in. Let's dive into step three of the five step process to work life balance that I have been teaching over the last couple of weeks, but that I teach inside my paid program, the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. Now the collective is a group coaching program for ambitious working moms that really want to take control of their life. They really want to get into the driver's seat of their life. They want to feel more balanced, more present and ultimately happy. And in the collective, I teach the five steps that I'm going over here in this podcast series. I break it down into 30 bite size lessons that are ten minutes or less so that you have the time every single day to devote to really creating the life that you want. And today we are in the third week of this five week series where I have been breaking down each of the steps for you.
The foundation of work life balance: Knowing who you are, and becoming the best version of you.
Quick review - step one was all about you becoming the best version of you. You knowing who you are, knowing your strengths, believing in yourself and your value that you bring to your company, that you bring to your family, that you bring to the world. It's really about you becoming the confident person that you are capable of becoming. Now, I call this the foundation of work life balance. And that's why it's the first step, because if you don't feel really amazing about you and who you are and how you show up in the world, it’s going to be really hard to create balance because so much of your internal dialogue with yourself is going to be negative. In step one, we flip all of that into the positive. You really dig deep into just who you are and the value that you put out into the world and start really feeling amazing about you again. So that's step one.
Life is a series of trade-offs.
Step two that we covered last week is clarity. Your brain needs to have some direction in life in order to create balance. It has to know exactly what it is you want so you stop thinking that something else might be better. Life is a series of trade offs. There's only 24 hours in a day and you have to choose how you're going to spend that time. And those choices that you are making today, the choices that you're making in your job, the choices you are making with your time and your family, all these things need to feel like they are leading you in the direction that you want to go in a balanced life, things feel intentional. So this step is about creating intentionality around what is important to you, your job and your family, and ultimately your life. So that's what we talked about last week.
The secret to creating sustainable work-life balance.
Now on to step three - this is what we're going to be talking about today. I'm super excited to share this stuff with you today because it really is the secret to creating sustainable work-life balance. This is going to be the main tool you're going to use in order to create a balanced life. Without this tool, you're always going to think that the grass is always greener somewhere else. You're always going to think that maybe changing jobs is going to make things better, or working part time is going to make things better, or if you just had a partner or a husband that would help out around the house more, right? Or when your kids get older and they're more able to take care of themselves, then it's going to get better. I don't let any of my clients believe any of that. Creating a balanced life is 100% in your control, and it always will be and the reason is, because it starts in your mind. I call this step controlling your mind.
Many, many studies have been done in behavioral psychology around the connection between your thoughts and your feelings and your actions. And we know that there is a direct correlation between the way you think about something, how you feel about it, and then how you respond to it. And that is at the heart of what I am teaching you in this step in learning how to control your mind. Let me give you an example: If you're a mom of at least two kids 100%, you know exactly what I am about to say, because you have gone through the same mindset shift as well from kid number one to kid number two. When you're a first time mum and your newborn baby is crying uncontrollably and you start thinking, oh my gosh, she shouldn't be crying. I don't know what to do, I must be doing this wrong. 100% I was there with my first one when she was a baby. I know so many of you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. How do these thoughts make you feel? For me, I felt completely inadequate and overwhelmed. These were the moments of extreme frustration, and lots of tears. I felt so inadequate as a mom, so under prepared. And because I was feeling that I started telling myself things like I was failing my child right. I'm doing this wrong. And because I was feeling so inadequate and overwhelmed, my response was to frantically try to figure out how to stop her crying because if I could stop her crying, then none of that would be true. I would, in fact, be okay as a mom. I'd be adequate. I would kind of be able to prove myself. I just needed to frantically try to get her to stop. I would breastfeed her, I would give her a bottle, I would change the diaper, I would change the clothes, I would swaddle her, I'd unswaddle her, I'd put her on my bare skin, I would take a walk with her, I'd put her in the car - I would do whatever I could do in order to try to get her to stop and I wasn't doing these things in a real calm and intentional way, I was doing them super frantically. Simultaneously I'm texting every mom that I know and I'm reading every possible article, trying to figure out how to get her to stop crying. So that's me as a new mom coming from this thought, she shouldn't be crying. I'm doing something wrong. I don't know how to do this. A few months go by, and now I've experienced these crying episodes a lot more. She starts to cry uncontrollably just like she did before, the circumstance really is no different but this time my thoughts have changed, and I think, oh, this is totally normal. I know she's going to stop eventually. I can figure this out, but because I was thinking these things I felt confident, I felt calm. And because I was feeling confident and calm - yes, I probably still did a myriad of things to try to help soothe her, but it wasn't in this frantic way, I was very intentional, I was very loving to her. I didn't need anybody else to tell me what to do. So I probably wasn't texting everybody or trying to look up a bunch of things. I would just try this, and then I would try this and I would try this and I was so much more caring and loving and thoughtful in my approach. Can you see the difference here? The circumstances are exactly the same, my newborn baby is crying uncontrollably but the only thing that was different is the way I was thinking about it and the way I was thinking about my child uncontrollably crying. It either made me feel really equipped and confident as a mom and then I responded to those feelings by either the way I was thinking about my child crying uncontrollably either made me feel really equipped and confident as a mom or it didn't. And then I responded to those feelings by either taking all of this frantic action in order to try to get her to stop, or by being very calm and systematic in the way I was troubleshooting her crying. There is a very direct correlation between what you are thinking in these moments, how it makes you feel, and what you do as a response to that.
It's all about a matter of perspective.
I'm going to give you another example, because this is really, really important for you to see the connection between all of these three things. And then we're going to talk about how to apply it in a balanced life. So let's talk about another example, this time in your work life.
Your boss messages you and says, hey, I really need you to get to that assignment by 5pm today. Now, there's a couple of different perspectives here, they said, I really need you to get to that assignment by 5pm today. So you could be thinking, oh my gosh, I've completely failed her, I suck as an employee, I really should have gotten to that earlier. And because you're thinking these things, you feel shame, you feel panic, you feel guilty. And because you're feeling those things, you probably have a really hard time clearly thinking about exactly what it is you need to do to be producing your best work. You feel like you probably need some validation so you sent it over to a colleague first to get their opinion. You're kind of spinning in this negative self-talk about you. Same words: Hey, I really need you to get that to me by 5pm today. And you could be thinking instead, Oh, I'm really glad she reminded me of that. And then you feel calm, you feel supported, and because of that, you get right to it. You confidently push aside anything that you had planned to work on during that time in order to get it done and turn it in at the highest level possible by the time she requested. There's a big difference here, all of it stemming from the way you think about your boss's request to you. You either think that you're a failure because they had to remind you, or you're grateful that they reminded you, and then you get right to it. It's all about a matter of perspective.
You can learn how to actually control thoughts.
What I like to tell my clients is there's always a hundred different ways you can think about something. Some of those ways of thinking about it either make you feel really good and some of those ways of thinking about it make you feel really bad. And so as we apply this into creating a balanced life, we all have unbalanced behaviors - we work later than we want, we check email incessantly, or we're always available for calls, for texts. We scroll a lot. We're not present. We're not prioritizing our self and our needs, or our health. These are all very common imbalance behaviors that tend to show up for working moms and your work in order to create a balanced life is going to have to be to unearth the thoughts that are causing those actions. Because if you can do that, if you can get to the heart of what it is you are thinking and feeling that it is in fact causing you to work past 5pm or keep your phone on all the time, or causing you to deprioritize your health and working out and rest and friends, if you can get to the bottom of that, you can start to counter those imbalance thoughts with new ones. You can learn how to actually control thoughts that are at the heart of those imbalance behaviors and learn how to cultivate new ones, new perspectives, and new mindsets that are going to create for you a much more balanced life.
Ultimately, your thoughts are just your thoughts.
There are three core principles that I teach my clients when it comes to learning how to control their mind and create a balanced mindset. The first is that thoughts are just thoughts. They're not truth, just because you think something doesn't make it true. I know that you have experienced a time when you've gotten really upset over something that one of your colleagues said or did, and it was extremely offensive and you got yourself all worked up and emotional about it, and then more information about that situation came in and maybe you talk to that colleague directly and then all of a sudden you have a different perspective, and it changes the way you feel and are responding to that situation. Just as I said before, there are 100 different ways that you can look at the same exact situation, 100 different perspectives that you can have. Some of those thoughts are going to make you feel really good about the work that you're doing and how you're showing up as a mom, thus, you'll take balanced action because of that, because you will have the ability to really shut down your brain and close down work and hold your boundaries and prioritize yourself. And then some of those thoughts are going to make you feel really terrible about yourself and where you're feeling behind and you're not feeling good enough and you feel like you should be doing more and that you're failing. And those types of thoughts are going to cause you to work late to prioritize tasks instead of your family. But ultimately, your thoughts are just your thoughts. You get to decide what thoughts are going to cause you to feel balanced. So you take balance action and you get to decide the thoughts that you're going to believe that lead to imbalance. This truly is the beginning of creating a balanced life for you to recognize that there is always another perspective that you can have about something, that the first perspective you have isn't necessarily the right one or the most useful one, as I like to say.
What I like to tell my clients is that you can't always help your first thought, but you can always choose your second thought. I love to hear from my clients when this really clicks for them where they really start to see and believe that their thoughts are just thoughts and that they have some choice in what it is they decide to think. It usually shows up when they come to the call and they're describing to me something that happened in their week. And they're like, yeah, I saw myself going down this spiral of thinking that I was totally behind and that I didn't do anything that I wanted to today and that I was swimming in my to do's. And then I saw that and I was like, or I did everything I was supposed to today. It was a blaze of fire in my office, and I served every single person that walked into my door, that was exactly what I was supposed to be doing today, even though I didn't get to anything on my to do list. And I just changed the way I thought about it. And it's like, yes, it's a big celebration where you could see that in the moment. You can actually pivot the way you're thinking about anything at any given time because thoughts are just thoughts. You are the one that gives them weight. They are just words going through your head.
Your brain operates in default mode.
And that really leads us to the second point that I want to make about controlling your mind, which is that your brain likes to think the most practiced thought always. Your brain operates in default mode most of the time, it kind of has to. Imagine if your brain really tried to consciously hold every single thought that went through your brain every single time that it thought that. We think about 600 thoughts a day, and most of them are on repeat from the day before. It's like 90 or 95% of our thoughts are exactly the same thoughts that we had yesterday, the same perspectives that we had yesterday. I like to think about it like sitting in a chair. You don't think about sitting in a chair when you go up to a chair, you just do it. Your body just knows how to do it, it's a habit. It's something that you've practiced so you don't have to put any conscious thought into it. And the same thing happens with the way we think about things and our thoughts. It sees the length of your to-do list, you get an email from your boss, you see a meeting request come in, right? And your brain just responds to those things on default, it doesn't think about it. Now, the response that you're having to those things, it might not be very useful to you. It might be causing a whole lot of imbalance, and it probably needs to be checked. But the most important thing for you to see is that your brain is thinking that thought simply because you've practiced it over and over again. You have a choice of 20 other things you can think about on your to-do list if you want to think about them.
So as we talk about creating balance in your life, what's going to be important for you to understand is that you are going to have to start practicing new thoughts. You're going to have to start practicing thoughts that make you feel good and produce balanced actions. You're going to have to practice those just as much as you practice the old default thoughts that are on there. You have to practice them even more, so that they become the more default thought for you, and become the dominant thought instead of the old way of thinking that you once had. Okay, so your thoughts are just thoughts. They're not actually true. You get to decide. And your brain likes to think the most practiced thoughts, which doesn't necessarily mean they're the most useful ones to you because they're not necessarily producing balance. But that's kind of what your brain does.
You get to decide your thoughts and feelings.
And then the last thing I want you to know about when we're talking about creating a controlled mind is that your brain is always on your side. It's always looking for evidence for the things that you think. So what I mean by that is that if you only have time to prepare halfway for a presentation, probably the first thing that your brain is going to offer to you is it's going to say, oh my gosh, I am not prepared for this. I cannot do this. I am going to suck. Your brain is not naturally going to counter that. Those are going to be the first thoughts that pop into your head. And if you let your brain go unchecked in that moment, what is it going to start doing? It's going to go, ‘oh my gosh, you remember the last time you were only halfway prepared? Remember how that went? It was really not very good, and you just looked awful in front of your boss and you should really be more prepared.’ Your brain is going to offer to you more thoughts and more evidence for how it's true that being halfway prepared is not good and how you're inadequate because of it. Your brain offers to you this first negative thought that makes you feel bad and then it doesn't recognize what it's doing, so instead it just continues to offer to you evidence for how it's true if you leave it unchecked, if you leave it uninterrupted. And that's what we're doing here in this step and what I teach inside The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, is how to interrupt those patterns of thought to see them as thoughts and recognize that you get to actually decide what it means that you're 50% prepared today. You can decide that you're still a badass and an asset to your company and you've got the other 50% down, and that's all you need. You could decide that, if you can see the cycle starting and interrupt it. And that's what I like to talk with my clients about, we're interrupting patterns of thought so that you can start teaching your brain to start thinking something different.
This step is all about finding those thoughts that create imbalance and learning how to interrupt them or redirect them to thoughts that make you feel balanced.
In order to create a balanced life, you have to find thoughts that make you feel calm, in control, enough, adequate, balanced, so that you can take action from a place of feeling calm and controlled and enough and adequate and balanced. This step is all about finding those thoughts that create imbalance and learning how to interrupt them or redirect them to thoughts that make you feel balanced. Because there is a direct correlation between what you think and how you feel and then how you respond. So if you want to start taking different action, balanced action, if you want to start leaving work at 5pm every single day and putting down your phone and turning off your work brain, and being unavailable, and prioritizing workouts, and finding a hobby, and scheduling time to go on a date with your spouse, or go out with your friends. If you want to start to say no to projects that are not life giving to you, if you want to start being a stronger authority in your job and in your role, you want to start speaking up. If you want to start doing things differently in your life, if you want to start taking balanced action, you're going to have to start thinking thoughts that lead you there. Because believe me, you're not going to be taking balanced action when you're feeling terrible about yourself and thinking that you're not doing enough, thinking that you're behind, thinking that you're not good enough, that and you could have done it better, that you should have been more prepared, thinking that you're not a team player or feeling like you're not good enough at this job, or you're really the last on the list of this team, when you're feeling overwhelmed and anxious and guilty and inadequate - balance is going to have a hard time coming your way if that's where you're dominantly at. The secret lies in your brain, and it's your job to control it.
In the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, I actually walk you through the process of identifying the thoughts that lead you to imbalanced action and then give you lots of tools and resources and steps to support you in finding the thoughts that lead to balanced action. And then it doesn't stop there, because just because you know what you're supposed to be thinking doesn't mean you're actually going to think it right, because your brain thinks the most practiced thought and probably these new thoughts that are going to help you feel better about yourself and help you take balanced action, those are going to be new thoughts, you're going to have to practice those a lot. And so, what I do is I help you learn how to redirect your brain. I help you find that perspective and give you the mindset tools in order to shift your brain, both in the short term when you see it happening in the moment, and then in the long term so that your brain just stops offering to you these unhelpful, unbalanced thoughts.
In a balanced life, your external life and your internal life, they match.
The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective is your place to learn how to manage your brain. It's your place to learn how to not have such a negative mindset in order to control all of the things going on inside of you. In a balanced life, your external life and your internal life, they match, they come together as one. And that's why so much of our time spent in the collective so far and the steps that we've talked about in one, two, and three, this has all been internal. This is you feeling better about you. This is you getting clear on what it is you want and finding clarity. This is you learning how to interrupt patterns of thought that are not useful to you. This is you addressing all of the stuff going on inside of you. And over the next couple of weeks in steps four and five, this is when we start turning things to the external, when we start talking about boundaries, when we start talking about how you're spending your time and shifting the way you're spending your time so that it's more in alignment with the things that you want so we're going to start talking about the external here in the next couple of weeks but it's been so important to get all of these internal things in order so that boundaries become so much easier when you're feeling really good about you, when you're feeling amazing as an employee, when you know that you're a wonderful, amazing, connected and present working mom then boundaries are going to come so much easier.
Outro
Alright, working moms, I will put the link to join the collective in the show notes. I can't wait to see you inside. Let's get to it.
