Should I join the Collective?

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In today’s podcast I am walking you through what happens inside the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. Over the past several weeks, I’ve taught you the 5 steps to work-life balance and from that series I heard from a number of working moms, asking questions about the The Collective. Today I want to share what happens after you join and all the inside details of the program.

Topics in this episode:

  • What happens when you join The Collective?

  • How does the money back guarantee work?

  • Who is The Collective for?

  • How does group coaching really work?

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

There has been a surge of energy around this podcast during the five part series that I have just recently given over the past five weeks on creating work life balance. If you have not listened to that five part series, I definitely encourage you to go back to download them all and make sure you listen to each one of them. It doesn't have to be in order, though that's a great way to go. One of the things that has come from that series are a bunch of questions specifically around joining The Collective and what that program is all about, because

I spent a lot of time over the last five weeks talking about it as I was going through the five steps that I teach inside of the program. So I wanted to take this episode to really dive deep into what The Collective is. I took all the questions that came in and sort of synthesized them and I want to share with you the details about The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, so for those of you that have been on the fence about joining The Collective for some time now, this episode is specifically for you.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms 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.

 

Can you believe it, working moms, it is summer! My son just graduated from preschool and is going into kindergarten next year and my first grader Lillian is moving up into second grade. There were end of your parties, and teachers' gifts, and graduation ceremonies, and national donut day (that happens on june 2nd if you didn't know), and all these things marked the beginning of summer for us in the Olson family. So I highly encourage you to embrace the summer rhythms that are coming up, allow yourself to take extra time off, or half day friday’s, evening strolls with your family after dinner. Summer should be a time when there is a little less rules and a little more rest. So I encourage you to just take on that mindset and really allow yourself to experience all of summer's goodness.

Now if you listen to this podcast regularly you know that I have spent the last five weeks giving you an overview of the five-step process that I teach inside my paid program, The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, and over the last five weeks there's been some questions around the collective that has come up from women that have been curious about making this investment in the program. And so, I just wanted to take this episode to really answer all of your questions that have come in because I know when one person has a question it means 20 people have the same exact question, and I want you to feel 100% about joining this program.

So let's dive in. Let's just start with a very basic question that comes up which is you know, what is this thing? I talk about The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective all of the time in this podcast, but maybe it's not clear to you exactly what it is. So let's just clear that up. The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, or sometimes I just like to call it The Collective for short because it's a super long name - It is a group coaching program for career-driven moms. Now, the purpose of this program is for you to learn the foundational principles that create work-life balance so that you always feel in control of it.

Your ability to feel balanced has nothing to do with your job.

Now I created this program after having worked with hundreds of working moms guiding them one-on-one through a process of creating work-life balance. I've taught this process to thousands of people in webinars, and trainings, and now tens of thousands of people in this podcast. And over the course of the last five years I've been coaching and teaching on work-life balance, I have found that there are just five steps to creating sustainable work-life balance. I've worked with lawyers, I've worked with doctors, I've worked with veterinarians, I've worked with teachers, I've worked with administrators, I've worked with bankers, and CEOS, entrepreneurs, scientists, computer programmers, data scientists and data analysts. I have worked with women that own and run companies of 5-100 people, I've worked with managers, directors and solo-preneurs. I have had clients that are pregnant about to have their first child all the way to clients that have as many as five children. And what I have found is the same five steps that I teach work for all of them because one of the fundamental principles that I believe and I teach in this program is that your ability to feel balanced has nothing to do with your job and the demands of your job and how many kids you have, or if you have a partner that does stuff around the house or not. Or if you're at the beginning of your career or in the middle of your career, or just changed careers. Or if you manage one person or if you manage 20 people - the only thing that matters when it comes to creating work-life balance is you. You are both the problem and the solution. And I believe that so deeply. Not just because I've seen such a wide variety of women in different types of jobs, positions, and family structures learn how to create balance following this process, but I believe it because it's the most useful thing to believe. Because if your job is the problem, the only solution is to quit. If your husband's the problem, the only solution is to divorce. If your boss or not being in a family friendly company is the problem, the only solution is to go find another job and find another company. All of those things are likely not what you want to do and it feels somewhat powerless if that is the problem. And thus, the solution. In The Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, you take ownership over your happiness and your ability to create it and create balance. I never want you delegating out your happiness to your boss, or your company, or your husband, or your kids' temperament - I want you in control, always. 

The doors to The Collective are always open.

Okay so let's talk about exactly… - that's kind of some of the fundamental principles of what The Collective is, and kind of the foundation behind it. But let's talk about what happens when you actually join. So let me just be clear that the doors to this program are always open. There's no start or end time, there's no like common enrollment, so you can literally just go into the website right now and sign up or if you decide you want to save before you join or you want to wait a month or whatever might be happening, the doors are going to be open to you then as well. But as soon as you join, as soon as you go into the website and you hit the join now button and you put in all of your information you are going to get an email right away that is going to give you access to the membership site.

Now the membership site is where I house all of the teachings and the workbooks, past coaching calls and resources for The Collective. And everyone has an individual login, so you get your login details and you could literally jump right into the program, right then and there. There is a module that is called Start here, which kind of breaks down how you can be successful at this program, what to expect, some of the core principles behind the program - you can literally just start there as you're beginning process or you can start jumping around a little bit going from step-to-step, getting more of an overview, or going straight to the things that feel most relevant to you. You know the membership site actually tracks your progress through it, so as you go from lesson to lesson, it will track what you've done and what you haven't done so it's super user friendly.

Okay so let's talk about what content is on the membership site. It is what I like to call a course that breaks down the five steps to creating sustainable work-life balance that I basically taught over these last five weeks. Those five steps are broken down into 30 lessons and each lesson has a video teaching of eight minutes or less and then either a set of reflection questions, or workbooks that you can download. Some of them even have some bonuses of some kind, meditations and things like that. So all of the content is basically found inside that membership site. 

Teaching you the fundamental principles of creating work-life balance.

And just in case you have not listened to the last five episodes and are unfamiliar with the five steps that I teach, let me just briefly go over those because this is the heart of what this program is all about - teaching you the fundamental principles of creating work-life balance so that you can create it no matter your job, or your season of life, or your boss, or whomever.

Naming who you are at your core.

Step one is really separating your human value from what I call the value that you have at work or your accomplished value. The step is really all about naming who you are at the core recognizing that you are more than just your job. You're more than just a mom. You are a human being with an immense amount of value.

Clarity over what's most important to you.

Step two is clarity. Clarity over exactly what it is you want in your life, clarity over what's most important to you on a day-to-day basis, clarity over what it is you want long term and your career. Your brain needs to have some sense of direction on what kind of life you really want in order to steer you towards that kind of life, right? So in this step we name all of those things.

Controlling your mind.

And step three is about learning how to control your mind. Your brain cannot be hyper-negative if you're going to be creating balance you cannot be in this constant state of self-judgment of self-doubt, or worry, or stress and anxiety, you have to be able to

learn how to calm down your brain on demand. You experience your life basically through what's happening in your brain through your thoughts, and in this step we start to break down the sort of mindsets or perspectives or thoughts that you have that either create for you a state of balance, or create for you a state of imbalance. And then I teach you how to move from one to the other - I teach you how to move from an imbalanced mindset state to a balanced state.

Boundaries.

Step four is all about boundaries learning to live proactively and deciding ahead of time how you want to spend your time and energy, and then learning how to stick to those decisions even though people may be disappointed, even though you're going to feel somewhat underprepared for a presentation or something, even though you're not going to be 100% available to your team. We learned how to end all the people-pleasing and perfectionism and hyper doing tendencies as we learn how to create boundaries, and all of that's in step four.

Achieve more in less time.

Step five is really learning how to think differently about your time so that it always feels like enough and you learn how to achieve more in less time. As soon as you join, you get access to all of this content on-demand. You can listen to it like it was a podcast, kind of listening to it in the background, you can watch it while you're nursing your baby at night, you can rewatch the steps as many times as you want over and over and over again because you get access to all of this for life. This is a lifetime access program, meaning that you pay once and you'll always have access to the five steps and all of its content that I develop in the future. This is the only program that you will need. It's the only process that you need in order to create and maintain balance in your life. So that means that if you change jobs or you get promoted or you expand your family or you move across the country, heck, if another pandemic hits - knock on wood you won't need to go out and look for something else, or someone else to support you because it's all right here and I'm here for you. I've had clients that go back through the material back through the process multiple times and every time they do they get something from it. They get clear on who they are, they get clear on what it is they want, they feel more and more in control of creating balance every time. 

Investing in The Collective.

So you have on-demand access to the five-step process in the membership site and you have access to all of that for life, and I have a 30 day money-back guarantee on this. I've watched client after client make huge strides in just one month as they follow this process, and I guarantee you will too, or I'll give you your money back. It's a risk-free investment. I know for me, one of the biggest hesitations I have when I make an investment in something - whether that's anti-wrinkle cream or hiring a coach, the question that my brain wrestles with is ‘will this work for me’? And by offering a money-back guarantee, I just want to remove that question from the equation. Yes I know that if you commit to following these five steps you will learn how to create and sustain work-life balance in your life or I will give you your money back. And that investment is $2,000 or six monthly payments of $400. Of course if you're ready to put everything that you're learning here in this podcast into practice you're ready to join. There is a link to the collective in the show notes and you could just go to the website and read through all the details, click on one of those join now buttons and simply join right now. But there are two other very important aspects of this program that I want to share with you.

I know how challenging reading a self-development book is or just even going through a course on your own, right? There's always these questions around ‘how do you apply this material to your life?’ And if you're anything like me, sometimes I just really want somebody to tell me what to do. It's easier if I can talk to them and they say ‘do this’ right? Do this, don't do this, work on this for the next week, think about this for the next week - You know, somebody that's literally handing me an assignment and saying this is going to make a difference if you do this. And even though we are all ambitious working moms, we still have our own challenges, our own specific circumstances that we have to work through in order to create balance. And I want to make sure that you are getting the individualized support that you need in this program.

Weekly coaching calls.

So as a part of the collective, in addition to the five-step process and access to all of that material within the membership site you also get a weekly group coaching call. So once a week for 60 minutes anyone that's a part of the collective can hop on a zoom call with me and others in the program to get individualized coaching on creating balance in their life. Now, I know some of you are probably feeling a little nervous about joining a group coaching program. Maybe that's been some of the hesitation because you feel maybe you'd do better one-on-one or it feels too impersonal. But let me just share with you, some of the most recent topics that have come up in these collective group coaching calls - because my guess is you're going to be able to relate to them or maybe even all of them, it's kind of the power of being in a group program when someone brings up a topic because you also are an ambitious working mom just like them and likely you're going to relate. So even though you might not be getting individually coached every single call, virtually every topic that's brought up is something that you can connect with, something you can learn and grow from and take away. 

So, for example, last week on our call one of our newest members was speaking up about this expectation that her boss has or really her company has which really her entire industry has on attending networking events. She is in the finance area and networking events is just sort of still how you get a lot of business. And so there's this expectation that she should be going to a bunch of networking events every single month. But she has a couple of kids that are small at home and she's okay with doing maybe one or two every month but really no more than that. So when I started asking her about why she feels like she can't say no and why she feels guilty about it, she said it's because her boss puts a little bit of a guilt trip on her, telling her that she should be at these events. She doesn't want them to see her as being uncommitted or not being a hard worker because she doesn't attend these events like everybody else does. And I asked her if she felt like attending these events actually made her a harder worker? Did that actually mean that attending these events makes her better at her job? Did she really believe that? And she said no it doesn't, attending these events doesn't really make her better at the job. It doesn't really indicate anything about her work ethic at all ultimately and that ultimately, what she's just had to do is be more strategic on how she brings business in and how she networks. And so she tends to take people out for lunch and coffee and do some of these other things during her workday that just doesn't take up her evening and weekend hours. I asked her if she ever told her boss that? Has she ever mentioned to her boss how often she's doing these lunches and coffees? And she said well maybe a little bit, and I said so your boss is sort of hounding you to attend networking events but in reality you've just problem solved how to do networking in a different way and still bring in business. But he doesn't really know that because you haven't shared that with him. And so, we went on to talk about expectations for her job and for her role and the kind of expectation she has on herself that she sort of adopted from everybody else. And ultimately as we continued to have this conversation around what was really expected of her and what made her good at her job and what it looked like to truly network and bring in business and what it looked like to be amazing at what she did - in a lot of ways she was already doing those things. But because it didn't fit into the mould of how everybody else was doing it, she felt a whole lot of guilt and shame and she wasn't really advocating for herself in the way that she could. One of the things that she took away from this bit of coaching was that when she believed 100% that she was fulfilling her work duties and was meeting expectations, that she would then advocate for herself in a completely different way and she would show up more powerfully and she would do things more confidently. It was in believing that she was in fact not as good and that she was doing something wrong by not attending these events that was ultimately what was bringing her so much guilt, shame and frustration in that process.

So I don't know about you but my guess is there are certainly times that you struggle with meeting expectations that are seemingly outside of what the boundaries that you want to place in your life. Am I right? Yes, of course. Because you're a working mom that is looking to prioritize their family and put a boundary, so everyone can relate to what it's like to be in an environment that other people are doing things and you're doing things a little bit differently because you're a mom, because other things are important to you and then dealing with the emotion that's coming up because of it.

I had another client in the collective that recently got coached on one of these group coaching calls and she was telling me about how her brain is constantly thinking about the next job. Like she's always trying to set herself up for the next job and she's wondering what that might be and when it would be time to leave. And she kind of feels all this dissatisfaction with what she's doing now and she feels kind of inadequate now because she's constantly feeling like she needs to be doing more and setting herself up more. She's not as present or focused with her time and her energy at work. And so we took some time to simply answer the question, is it time for you to leave? Her brain was offering to her, ‘maybe you need to be setting yourself up for the next thing you should be thinking about the next thing’, and we just called her brain on it, like hey is that true? And the answer was pretty easy for her - It was no. She was able to articulate why and then when we started coming up with a plan for how to wrangle in her brain whenever it wanted to wander and think about what was next. And we came up with the criteria for when she should decide to start thinking about what's next. And a lot of that work is what I teach inside step three of this process of controlling your mind.

Other topics that have come up recently have been; navigating challenges with your partner that doesn't do as much as you do around the house, or how to define a good manager or a good leader if that’s not being 100% available to them all of the time and saying yes to everything they need. Or how to protect your workouts in the middle of a workday so that you don't let other people's schedule meetings over them or that you don't schedule meetings over your own workout time. Or just how to say no to more meetings - generally that comes up for so many women in the collective that are on leadership roles and are just death by meeting ultimately in their schedule.

Do any of these topics feel relevant to you? Of course they do because you are an ambitious working mom and every ambitious working mom deals with similar kinds of situations that you deal with. So no matter what your job is, no matter if you get coached or not, the weekly group coaching call is going to be a place where you either speak up yourself and get coached on something specific, or you listen to somebody else get coached on something that's highly relevant to you. So weekly group coaching is available to you where we can literally have a conversation every single week about what it's going to take for you to create work-life balance. And then along with that, there's also the five-step process you get in the membership site and you get access to both of those things for life. So that's access to the process, that's access to weekly group coaching all of that for life.

Working mom community.

The last piece I want to tell you about is a community aspect. Because I remember being a working mom just after my daughter was born, now almost eight years ago and just feeling very lonely. I had a lot of mom friends in my life, but a lot of them were stay-at-home moms or they worked part time or they were just kind of disengaged from their career altogether and it was just so hard to relate. I really cared and still do care a lot about having a meaningful career. I want to make money. I want to have an impact in this world through my career. And it was hard for me to find a community of moms that were like minded that wanted the same thing, that really wanted to stay successful in their career and feel fulfilled in a career while still having a family. So as a part of the ambitious and balanced working moms collective there is a private facebook community. As soon as you join you get an email with information on how to join this community and there's a few things that we really focus on to build that community: number one we celebrate with everyone there wins and how they're progressing and creating work-life balance. It's also a place for daily coaching so you don't have to wait between weekly calls to ask me a question and to get coached on something. If something's coming up you can make a quick post and I'll get back to you right away.

It takes a village to be a great mom.

And then lastly, it's a place for you to just simply share in the challenges of being a working mom. To share without feeling shame or guilt or worry about what other people think because we all understand what it's like to go after a successful career and still want to be a great mom at the same time. They say it takes a village to raise kids, and I think it takes a village to be a great mom. We need people around us that love us, that support us, that understand us, that push us, and remind us of what's possible. 

So a quick recap. When you join the ambitious and balanced working moms collective you have access to a five-step work-life balance process that comes in the form of a membership site. Then you have access to our weekly group coaching calls for personalized coaching. There is a private facebook community where you can ask for coaching daily and get support that you need from other working moms and feel known and seen, and all of that comes with a money-back guarantee. At an investment of $2,000 or six payments of 

$400.

You're investing in not just a program but in creating a life of balance.

So I want to offer to you as you make a decision on joining the ambitious and balanced working moms collective, because you're not just investing in a program - just like when you buy a car, you're not just getting a car, you're getting something that's going to transport you from Point A to Point B. You are purchasing something that you know your kids are going to be safe in. You’re investing in family road trips that are going to take you potentially all over the country. You're investing in memories. You're investing in so much more than just a car. And when you join the ambitious and balanced working moms collective, you're investing in not just a program but in creating a life of balance. And what does that actually mean? It's a life where you wake up feeling rested and aren't just reaching for your phone trying to constantly work. You're investing in a life where you feel confident about what you do, where you advocate for yourself, where you speak up and your ideas are heard - which likely means you get promoted faster or make money faster. You're investing in creating everyday memories with your family, where you get home from work and you're not so exhausted every single day. So you have the energy to build legos, or go on a sunset walk, or play in water, or do clay or something like that on a regular basis with your kids. If that's something that you want, you are investing in having a life that feels like a life outside of work, where you see friends, where you have hobbies, where you read books, where it's not just a rinse and repeat life. Get up to the same things, crash in bed, maybe watch netflix, maybe see your husband. Which is another thing you're investing in, your relationship with your spouse. Because my guess is, in a balanced life, your marriage is prioritized and so you're investing in the longevity of your relationship because you're taking the time to be together. You're prioritizing date nights instead of constantly working or being on your phone. Your investment of creating balance is so much more than just a program. It's the life that you want to lead. It's a regret free life as a working mom. And the big question that I often ask people as they are considering joining the collective is, is that worth it? Is $2000 or six monthly payments of $400 for that knowing that that's possible for you? Is that worth it? Why or why not. For some of you the answer might be no. And that's okay. I would challenge you to ask yourself why is it not worth it? Why are your dreams and your happiness and you feeling balanced not worth it to you at that price? And if your answer is yes, then now is the time. This is a risk free investment where you get coaching for life, where you learn a foundational process that's going to teach you to create work-life balance no matter your season, no matter your job. 

Working moms I am here for you. The doors are always open to the collective but there is no better time than to start right now. Your future, your balanced life can literally start today. 

Rebecca Olson