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Living for the weekends is a sign of imbalance. It says that you are not finding enough rest, rejuvenation, and satisfaction in your everyday life. It’s a sign that your brain and body need a much needed “break”. But in a balanced life you are not constantly needing a break because there is a healthy balance between work and rest. In today’s podcast I break down the four reasons you are living for the weekend and explain what you need to do to break the cycle.
Topics in this episode:
Why living for the weekend is a sign of imbalance
Living for the weekend is a sign you are settling in life
The importance of rest and rejuvenation in a work week
The 4 most common mindsets that cause “living for the weekend”
How feeling satisfied and enough ends the need to desperately have that vacation
Show Notes & References:
Schedule a breakthrough call when you’re ready to stop living for the weekends. Click here to schedule your call: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
Living for the weekend is a sign of imbalance. It says that you're not finding enough rest and rejuvenation and satisfaction in your everyday life. It's a sign that your brain and body need a much needed break. In today's podcast, I'm breaking down the four reasons why you likely are living for the weekend and explain what you need to do to get out of that mindset. 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.
Hello, working moms. Happy summer. This podcast is being aired in the middle of July, and that's kind of the heart of summer time. I know it's a time when a lot of us are taking vacations and summer rhythms are in full swing. And it's really the reason why I wanted to do the podcast today, because summertime is a fun time where there's lots of sunshine and fun activities, and we do things outside and we do things that we can't normally do during the rainy or cold season. And I encourage all of my clients to take their vacation time during the year, like, do not stockpile your vacation. Stockpiling vacation or having vacation that is running out because you haven't used it enough - that is a very sure sign that you are experiencing imbalance in your life. Everybody wants a life where they work and they rest. And so vacation is obviously a time of that rest. So we're going to talk a bit more about the importance of rest in this podcast.
Living a life you don’t need a break from.
But I want to talk about something that I often see with women when they're first starting to work with me. It starts when somebody tells me that they are really depending on their vacation in order to find rest or happiness or find balance in their life. Similarly, when I hear a working mom say something like, they're just constantly living for their weekends, they can't wait for their evenings, that's a really big red flag to me that something is off for them. There's an imbalance in their life, because I want you to be enjoying your everyday life so much so that you don't need a break from it. That's not a life you really want to be leading during your work week where you're constantly needing a break from your everyday life. And it's one thing, of course, to be anticipating your weekends or your vacations because you have something fun planned where you're looking forward to it, something that you're excited about, people that you haven't seen in a while. It's another thing when you're thinking about your weekends and your vacation because you need a break away from your everyday life. That's a different anticipation of your vacation and your weekend. And in this podcast, what we're really talking about is that second scenario, not the one where you're just excited to have fun. My family went on a cruise a couple of weeks ago. Like, of course we were anticipating that. We were looking forward to it. There's a lot of joy in thinking about it. But that joy and that anticipation wasn't coming because I needed a release or I needed a relief from my everyday existence, my everyday life and rhythms.
So here's the first thing I want you to know about living for your weekends or living for your vacations. At some point, everybody thinks that everybody has experiences where they are just seeking that break in life. It's completely normal. But the second thing I want you to know about it, you do not have to accept this way of life. Though it is normal to think about it, I don't want it to be your normal way of life. There is a better way of life where you are actually enjoying and resting and living and feeling balanced in your everyday life. That's going to be better for you than needing the vacation on the weekend in order to experience that. I want to give a little disclaimer here; I hear a lot from women that when they are kind of in a perpetual state of living for their vacations or living for their weekends, what they start to think is that maybe something is wrong with their job. Like they're not in the right place, they're not in the right career path, they're not in the right company because their brain is always thinking about the weekend and is always thinking about vacations, that that somehow is a sign that something is wrong in their job. And while it might be true that you do need a change of jobs or you do want to make some kind of shift in your career, this alone is not a sign of that. There needs to be some other factors involved that we certainly work out in coaching that confirms for you whether it's time for you to look for something else or to not look for something else.
Symptoms of an imbalanced life.
So just a little disclaimer here because I know a lot of times we like to read into things way more than we should. And one of the main things I'm going to teach you today is that living for the weekend mentality or that need for a break and the seeking of that vacation, that is more of a symptom of an imbalanced life. It's a sign of an imbalanced life and it can be very useful to you to figure out exactly where it's coming from so you can actually use it as a tool to help you kind of fix the imbalance in your life. Before we keep diving into this, I want to just give a second disclaimer here because I know it can sound a little bit weird to talk about our weekends in this way or our vacations in this way, because of course, we need our weekends, we need our vacation time, we need time away, we need time to spend with just our family when we're not working. We need time to go after personal goals and to live our personal life outside of work. Of course we need vacations, we need our weekends. But that's not exactly what we're talking about here in today's podcast. We're talking about that needing, that desperation for our weekend and our vacation, that break that we are desperate for because we're so exhausted and overwhelmed during our work week that we have to have those weekends in order to gear up for the next week. If that is the kind of life you're living right now, I want to offer to you that it is not the only way of life. Your weekends and your vacations are not meant to rest you up so you can enter back into work with a filled cup, though that likely will happen, that shouldn't be the point of them in and of itself. Your weekends and your vacation should be about experiencing life, experiencing joy, enjoying the time away from your work and having a life outside of work, not so that you gear up so you can go back into work.
Thoughts, feelings and actions.
And I want you to think about this desperation for a vacation or for your weekend as almost like an action. It's something that you do as a result of the way you're thinking and you're feeling about your everyday life. As we talk a lot about on this podcast, your actions, they flow out of the way you feel and your feelings, they flow out of the way you're thinking. That's basic human behavioral psychology. That's what it teaches us, right? We have thoughts, we have feelings based upon those thoughts, and then we respond and we act upon those feelings. So thoughts, feelings and actions. And I want you to think about your brain, thinking about your weekend or thinking about your vacation as an action. It's coming from a place of thinking and a place of feeling. And now, having worked with hundreds of working moms and helping them create balance and talking about this very common mentality that we have a of living for the weekend, I have found there to be four buckets of thoughts or mindsets that inevitably lead to this action of needing to desperately want your weekend or desperately need that vacation.
Not having enough time.
The first one I want to bring up and talk about is this mindset of ‘not enough’. Specifically, not enough time. I can't get enough done, I'm behind, I'm not doing enough. When you're in this place of not enoughness, how does that make you feel? For me, when I'm feeling way behind and there's not enough time and I can't get everything done and I'm super behind, I feel exhausted, I feel super overwhelmed by that. I have way too many things to do and not enough time to do it. And when someone is feeling exhausted and overwhelmed because they're feeling behind because there's not enough time, usually they do one of two things. They are either going to hyperdrive and try to do as many things as possible to make up for the time which of course is going to just cause a bunch of exhaustion or they feel so paralyzed by the fact that there just isn't enough time and too many things to do that they don't do anything. Which of course then makes them feel even more behind because they haven't made a dent in any of the things that they need to get done and things just begin to stockpile. So if this is you, it makes perfect sense why your brain is always looking for that vacation. It's always waiting for that weekend because it's an exhausting place to be in when you're always thinking about being behind and not having enough time and not getting enough done right. Your brain is going to want to break from that at some point, which is going to happen on the weekend when you don't have to think about work, when you aren't sitting at your desk all day looking at your to-do list and feeling completely overwhelmed by it.
Feeling inadequate.
The second mindset or bucket of thought that causes someone to be constantly anticipating their weekend or their vacations is a feeling of being inadequate coming from a mindset of not being good enough. Because when you're feeling inadequate and you're not feeling good enough, when you have that self criticism going on that's constantly beating yourself up and judging yourself and telling yourself that you're wrong or it's always pointing out all of your mistakes, that is an emotionally exhausting place to be. Now, you always feel so bad about yourself that you are always looking to prove yourself right. You're kind of putting yourself in a proving yourself mentality all of the time to try to make up for what you're not good at. It would make sense that your brain, if that's where it's at, is going to be anticipating or wanting that break that comes from a weekend or a vacation so we can stop thinking that you're not good enough all of the time. Your brain is going to want to break from that. It thinks it's doing you a favor by thinking ahead to your vacation or thinking ahead to your weekend so that you could take a break in your brain of all of the self berating that's going on. I want you to just take a moment and imagine what life would be like if you no longer had that hypercritical negative nancy voice in your head all of the time that was berating you during your work week. How much more productive you would be, how much better your communication would be? How much better would you be at prioritizing, how much more balanced would you feel? Because you'd have much more inner peace on your day-to-day basis that you wouldn't feel as exhausted all of the time. And if you weren't feeling exhausted all of the time, then you wouldn't be anticipating the break that's going to come with a weekend or a vacation.
People pleasing.
The third bucket of thought or mindset that causes you to start really living for your weekend, it has a lot to do with people-pleasing. It's this mentality like, oh, they really need me, I can't let them down. I don't want them to be disappointed. There's a lot of pressure involved in those thoughts. There's a lot of urgency. I don't want to fail them. Which, if you can imagine being in this constant state, or if you're somebody that considers themselves a people pleaser and is always worried about what somebody else is thinking, is always wanting to make sure that nobody feels bad and everybody has everything they need and that nobody is waiting on you and you don't want anybody to be disappointed in you if you're always trying to control that - there's a lot of wasted energy that's spent in that. And it would make sense that if that was a constant state for you, you are going to need a break from that at some point. You're going to need a space where nobody needs anything from you for a while, because then you don't have to manage that inner voice inside of you telling you that people might be disappointed and people need something and you don't want to fail anybody. And that pressure that we put on ourselves when we're in that state, a weekend or a vacation, we remove that because now nobody needs anything from you, nobody else is working. And so that part of your brain is able to rest. It makes sense that your brain is going to go there if that's a constant state for you.
Not wanting to be at work, or in your job.
And then the last bucket of thought that I want to bring up is the thought, I don't want to be here, this isn't where I want to be. Which of course, when you're saying I don't want to be here, you're going to feel very dissatisfied with where you're at. This was a big one for me before I became a coach. I literally counted down the clock every single day. It was painful to be at that job. I was literally getting into work and just could not wait, not even for the weekend. I couldn't just wait for the end of my work day so I could just go home and do something else because I wasn't happy in that current job doing what I was doing. And it took me a really long time to understand that the counting down to the clock and the feeling of being dissatisfied, that was stemming from not the job itself. But the way I was thinking about that job, I was telling myself that every single day. So of course, every single day, it was really hard to go to work. And I couldn't wait to leave work because I was telling myself in my brain that this wasn't where I wanted to be and this wasn't the job for me and I wanted something else and I wasn't fulfilled. Some line of thinking all around the fact that this isn't where I want to be. I have a lot of clients that come to me with similar thoughts, that they want to change jobs, they want to do something different, but they're just not sure what they want to do. And they don't know what that next career path is for them. And as we spend some time kind of diving into our work together, figuring out where their strengths are, what their priorities are, what they most want in their career, in their life, and we start putting all these pieces together, over half of the time, what my clients realize is that their current job is actually pretty good for them. It fits a lot of the priorities that they have. It fits a lot of their strengths, it fits a lot of their desires. And all of a sudden, all of this drama that they had around if this was the job for them or they didn't want to be here, and the anticipating of their weekends and their vacations, all of that just simply goes away. Because now they wake up every day thinking to themselves, this is exactly what I want to be. And I know why. If it's my strengths, if it's my priorities, if it's my family structure, if it's whatever it is that we discovered, because when you're waking up thinking every single day, this is exactly what I want to be doing in my career, you're not feeling desperate to leave it like I was, and when you're feeling that sense of being desperate to leave somewhere, it makes sense that your brain is going to want to offer to you an anticipation of something that you're going to do later, whether that's a show on Netflix or the weekend, or something you're going to do over the weekend or an upcoming trip, something to look forward to. Because right now, everyday life, you don't have anything to look forward to. You're feeling very dissatisfied. So your brain is trying to help you by thinking ahead to something that might perk you up a little bit and give you a little bit of energy and make you feel excited about something since you're not feeling excited about where you're at today, and you can't live in a perpetual state of being dissatisfied all of the time, that's a very imbalanced place to live if you're constantly feeling dissatisfied. So your brain is just trying to help you out, by helping you to daydream about something else.
Shifting your mindset.
Living for your weekends, living for your vacation - it's something that you do because your brain and your body need a break from a way of thinking, a mindset that's exhausting you. And if you shift the mindset, you're going to stop feeling so desperate for that break. Can you imagine a weekend or a vacation where you're not trying to recuperate enough to get back to work, when you feel rested and balanced enough throughout your work week, where the weekend isn't then about resting up to get back out there again, but instead it's just about living life. It's about having a personal life. It's about having goals. It's about doing things that are fun. It's about making memories and relishing in the life that you've created. That is what I want you to experience on a weekend or on a vacation, not a need so desperately to take a break that all you could do is do nothing around the house or the bare minimum so that you're rested back up again to get back out there. And once you get out of this perpetual state of needing a weekend or a vacation, you're going to start to clue in much faster to when that cycle is happening. You're going to start to gain some perspective about the kinds of things that get you back into that imbalance state.
Understanding your patterns of imbalance.
I myself have moments where my brain is needing a break when I can see that I'm really anticipating my weekend in a way much more than usual and where I'm thinking about that vacation that's coming up even a couple of months from now, I'm anticipating it in a way that I feel a little bit like clingy towards. I feel very desperate for it. I know when I'm in that state because of course I experienced it. That's what it tells me when I start to clue into that kind of anticipation, that need for a break - what it tells me is that I'm not finding enough rest during my work week. I start to clue into what is going on in my work week right now. What are the thoughts and the mindset that I'm having about my work week right now that is causing me to not be able to rest in a way that I want? That is causing me to need to think ahead to my weekend or my vacation so that I can find that rest. And for me, I know exactly which of those four mindsets is my downfall. It's the one around inadequacy and not feeling good enough 99% of the time. That is the mindset for me that causes all of my imbalance in my life. And I know that because I've done the work to really self identify that and understand when I'm in a place of not feeling enough, how much out of balance it creates for me, I almost don't even need to analyze it. I just know it. And that's the place that I want to get all of my clients to when we start working together, where they understand their patterns of imbalance, so much so that they know exactly what kind of mindset it stems from, and then they have the tools on how to fix it. And I want to share this with you, because sometimes I think we have this false understanding of balance thinking it's this constant state. And I wish I could tell you that life was that consistent or that I am in a perfect state of balance all of the time, because this is exactly what I teach and I coach on. I wish I could tell you that that's true, but it's just not. We're humans, and we have human brains, and we can't control all of our circumstances in life. I can't control whether my kids are compliant today or not. I can't control what my clients do. I can't control if there's another global pandemic. I can't control if my husband is laid off today or tomorrow, whatever it might be. I cannot control everything going on in life. The goal is not to be able to control all of our various circumstances, but instead to be able to control our response to those circumstances as much as possible. There are busy seasons in work, and then there are slow seasons in work. All of us experience that. And I don't want you to have to bear down and grit your teeth and push yourself through every busy season just to try to make it to the other side so you can find some balance. I want you to be able to create for yourself, rest and balance in your everyday life. Whether it's a busy season or a slow season. I don't want you to be waiting ever for the life that you want to be leading. I want you to be living that life today. Whether you're on vacation or you're not on a vacation. Or you're in a busy season or you're in a slow season. Or if your kid is super compliant and happy all of the time. Or if they're in their terrible threes and they're tantruming all of the time and they're an emotional wreck. I don't want you to have to be waiting for the life that you want to be living. I want you to be experiencing that today. And the way you do that is by understanding the mindsets and the kind of things that you do that create imbalance for you, and then learning the tools on how to shift that and living for the weekend or living for a vacation.
Ownership over your balance.
What I want you to really take away from this podcast is understanding that that is a sign of imbalance. When you realize your brain is thinking those things, what I want you to do is to be able to stop and say, okay, something's going on right now. I shouldn't have to be waiting for my weekend or my vacation in order to feel balanced and rested. I can experience that right now. So what's causing that? What are the four mindsets causing that so that you can start to get yourself back on track? Because if you know the problem, you can start creating a solution. If you think the problem is the busy season, the only thing you could ever do is wait for the busy season to be over. If you think the problem is you have a spouse that's not helpful around the house, the only thing you can do is wait for your partner to be more helpful around the house. If you think the problem is that your kid is not compliant and won't listen to you ever, and they need you all of the time and they're exhausting, then all you can do is wait for them to get out of that stage of life. That's not a helpful mindset to have. What we talk about in this podcast is ownership over your balance. It's ownership over the way you are feeling and your happiness in your everyday life. And so understanding that living for the weekend is not something that you have to settle for, that it is in fact, a response from something going on that's imbalanced inside of you. It's an action that's flowing out of a mindset and a feeling state that is causing imbalance for you.
Conclusion.
If you want to discover exactly what it is that causes imbalance for you. The mindset that you have, the set of thoughts, the set of feelings, the actions that you take that cause you to constantly live for the weekend or anticipate that vacation, or to just be in a constant state of unrest, I can help you literally define exactly what that pattern is for you and then give you the tools to help correct it. That is our work in coaching to help really understand and diagnose your own patterns of imbalance and then identify what a pattern of balance might look like and then learn how to get from one to the other. If you want to learn that pattern, if you want to understand and take ownership over the balance in your life, then I want to invite you to schedule a free breakthrough call with me. This is kind of the next step for us in coaching together, where we talk about exactly what's going on in your life, what's causing imbalance. We talk about the kind of life you want to be living, what a real, happy, balanced state would be, and then ultimately talk about how coaching can get you from point A to point B. This is a completely free call where you get a taste of what coaching is really like.
I would love the opportunity to talk to you. You could go to rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to find a time in my calendar for us to connect and stop living for the weekend, I guarantee that you will stop living for the weekend. All right, Working Moms. See you next week.
