Follow the show:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Everywhere else
When you think “it’s not working, I’m failing, this shouldn’t be happening…” how does that make you feel? Not good, right? Thinking “it’s not working” sends you into fix-it mode where you start working more in order to prove yourself and feel better about your work. In today’s podcast I’m breaking down three scenarios where the thought “it’s not working” or “something’s wrong” is at the heart of imbalance and share with you exactly what you should be thinking instead.
Topics in this episode:
“It’s not working” is just “I’m failing” in disguise
How imbalance stems from some flavor of the thought “it’s not working”
Not getting through your to-do’s does not mean you’re doing something wrong
Yelling at your kids doesn’t make you a bad mom
When you problem solve at the highest level
Show Notes & References:
Create for yourself a mindset and life that is always working – schedule a time for us to connect about coaching: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
Don’t forget to leave a rating and review to help spread this resource to other working moms!
Enjoying the podcast?
Make sure you don’t miss a single episode! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or where ever you listen to podcasts.
Leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.
Transcript
Intro
Hey working moms. When you're thinking ‘it's not working, I'm failing, this shouldn't be happening', how does that make you feel? Likely not very good. Thinking it's not working and something's gone wrong and you failed - these thoughts are simply not useful to you. Instead of helping you achieve more, reach your goals, and feel really confident in yourself as a working mom, it just makes you feel terrible about yourself and what you've accomplished. In today's podcast, I'm breaking down for you three scenarios where the thought 'it's not working' or 'I'm failing' is holding you back. And I'm going to paint for you a picture of why it's not working and should simply be eradicated from your vocabulary. Buckle up, because this episode is going to be life changing.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Working moms, hello. I want to take a moment at the beginning of this podcast to celebrate because in August we experienced a 20% growth in listenership on this podcast. 20%. That's huge. So many more working moms are getting their hands on this podcast and getting the support that they need because of you, because you are sharing the word. You are reviewing and rating this podcast and it is making a difference.
I have women that reach out via email or messenger that book calls for me and they tell me how impactful this podcast has been for them. And I can't tell you how much that means to me. I started this podcast because I wanted the message that I have for working moms, the message that says that you don't have to choose between work and home, that you can be an amazing mom and have a career that you absolutely love. I want that message to get into the hands of as many working moms as possible. And so I started this podcast with that in mind, and it's so fun to see it continue to grow.
I know I say this a lot. It's still the number one way that you can help get this resource into the hands of even more working moms and help me reach the goal of 1000 downloads of this podcast by the end of the year is by rating and reviewing this podcast right now. It will take you literally 10 seconds to hit the star button to give it a rating, or two minutes to go in and write a review. It's going to go a long way and continuing to get this resource into the hands of other amazing, hardworking working moms that are out there.
What if we stopped believing that things have gone wrong?
This podcast today comes from the seed of a thought that I planted in the soil of my mind and let it grow a little bit. The idea was, what if we stopped believing that things have gone wrong? When something doesn't go the way you want it to, when you get upset and you yell at your kids, when you don't get as many things done as you wanted to on the day when you feel super exhausted, when people are disappointed in you because they're waiting on something from you - I'm going to give you more examples of this, but I just want to paint this picture for you…what if when things aren't exactly what we want them to be? It doesn't mean that something has gone wrong, because that's our usual label of it. When we don't reach the desired outcome, or if something doesn't feel good to us, we label that as being a failure, as if it's not supposed to happen and something has gone wrong.
There's a direct correlation between what you think, what you feel, and what you do.
I just had this profound thought: what if we just never said that to ourselves anymore? What if we eradicated that thought from our head altogether? Not that it's okay to always yell at your kids, or you're supposed to feel good and happy and positive when things like that happen, when you don't get the desired result. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying, what if we didn't see it as a failure or see it as a problem? I want you to think about what it feels like to label something as a failure or a problem or that something's gone wrong. What does it feel like? Doesn't feel good, right? It makes you feel inadequate or incapable, or like you're not a good enough mum, or like you're not good at your job. And when you're feeling those things, what do you do? Remember, there's a direct correlation between what you think, what you feel, and what you do.
And when you're feeling inadequate and not enough, incapable and feeling like a failure, what you tend to do after that is a whole lot of imbalanced behaviors; working later than you want to, an inability to shut down your work brain, more irritation at your family, prioritizing other people's needs above your own…I’m being very general, and I'm going to get very specific with you because I want to make sure you really see there's this direct correlation. But just generally speaking, I want you to imagine what it would be like if you just never said that to yourself and you never felt all of the icky feelings that come when you think that something's gone wrong and it's not working and that you're failing.
Let's start with a really common example of when we tend to think that something isn't working, something's gone wrong, something has failed. You're not getting through your to do list like you want to. Your to do list is continuing to grow and you continue to not be able to get to the end of them or the list feels way more overwhelming than you think that it should. And you think something's gone wrong, you're not doing a good enough job, you're not getting enough done, you're feeling behind if something's not working here because you're not getting through your to do list and so you feel really inadequate. So what do you do in that example? The most likely thing that you do is you just work more hours in order to get more done. You sacrifice family time, you schedule over any ‘me’ time so that you can accomplish more. You get this sort of like ‘I need to prove myself’ mentality. So you over prepare, you ask too many people their opinions.
Can you see the imbalance behavior that stems from labeling the not getting enough done as a problem or like something's gone wrong?
Looking at it from another perspective.
It's not actually true that it's not working and that something's gone wrong, you've just simply labeled it as that. There's a bunch of other perspectives you could have of the circumstance that you have a really long to-do list with not seemingly enough time to get it done. Another perspective of that could be that the busy season at work and you're not supposed to get through your to-do list. The goal maybe isn't that you get down your to-do list to zero as I like to call it, and instead you will always have a perpetually long to-do list. And what if that just wasn't a problem? It didn't mean that you were behind, it didn't mean that things were working, it didn't mean that you were a failure. It is just that you work in a busy industry or in a busy season and this is the way it is.
Another perspective of it could be that it in fact is all working. If you have a lot of tasks to do, that means you're probably feeling really challenged at work, things are really busy, business is doing really well, people are depending on you, are looking to you for projects because you're doing really well and that's why they're giving them to you. There's going to be a lot of positive reasons why your to-do list is really long. It's not that it's not working, you've just simply labeled it as such and so you feel really bad about it and then all of these imbalance behaviors come from it. But can you see that there actually could be several different ways that you look at the situation?
Let's talk about another really common example: the inability to shut down your work brain. At the end of a work day, you're constantly on your phone, you're constantly available, and the fact that your brain is constantly thinking about work and you really have a hard time shutting it down. We label that as being a problem. It shouldn't be happening, we should be able to manage our work brain. And when you label that as being a problem and you feel like you're failing because you can't be present with your family and you can't shut down your work brain. What do you do? It's probably pretty similar to the last one we talked about, right? You start overindulging in things like Netflix or social media because you can't figure out how to shut down your work brain. You decide to work more instead of spending more time with your partner. At the end of the workday, you indulge in a whole bunch of negative self-talk. You think, Gosh, why do I keep checking my emails? I just wish I could be more present. You think, I'm missing out on my kids activities, I should be with them instead of thinking about work. These are the kinds of things that stem from the fact that you are having a hard time shutting down your work brain at the end of the day. And you've labeled that as being a problem.
What if it wasn’t a problem?
What if it's just a challenge to turn off your brain after you've worked eight or 9 hours during the workday? There's a tough transition that happens there. Not that you can't figure out how to transition, but it maybe just isn't easy and shouldn't be easy. It's going to take some effort in order to do that. And because it takes effort, your brain wants to think that there's a problem there. That if something's not working because it shouldn't be this difficult, you should want to spend time with your family and it should be easy for you to shut down. But what if that just wasn't true?
Maybe you work in a really demanding job that encompasses a lot of who you are, that's really meaningful to you. Maybe you really enjoy your work and so you enjoy being with your family too, but you also enjoy your work and it's just a tough transition to go from one to the other. If you don't think of it as being a problem, then likely you could solve for that transition in a different way versus labeling it as something's not working, something's wrong with my job, my priorities are off. And then you start thinking that something's wrong with you and that maybe you enjoy working more than being a mom. And then you feel guilty about that and you think that you should want to be with your kids more and you should. All of these different things, right? You get into a bunch of shoulds all because you've labeled the fact that it's challenging to turn off your work brain as being a problem and that something's gone wrong.
But let's talk about another example, like actual failures at work when you are corrected by your boss, or when you don't land that client, or when you botch a presentation, or when you miss a deadline. These are actual things that happen in your job that you don't really want to happen. And when they do, you like to label them as being wrong. And like, there's this feeling like you're not good enough, that you're incapable in some way. And when you're feeling that way at work, what do you do? Probably you overcompensate. You go into people-pleasing. You start working more hours. You don't delegate as much because you don't want to put any more work on anybody else's plate. You spend time on the weekends over preparing. You spend a lot of time probably beating yourself up, telling yourself that, you know, this should have happened. You feel like an imposter, right? Like at any given moment, somebody might just find out that you're really not that good and that you in this job is just simply not working out.
What if these thoughts you have about yourself weren't true?
But, what if that just simply wasn't true? That just because you had some kind of undesirable result at work, you didn't land the client, the presentation didn't go so well, or whatever it may be, that doesn't mean that it's not working or that you're not good enough or that you have failed in some way. What if that just wasn't true? What if the expectation that 100% of the time you're going to make every single ‘correct decision’ and get to every single desired result every time you put effort out into the world, that's an unrealistic expectation.
We make decisions all of the time. Some of the times they work in our favor, and some of the times they don't. That's life. We don't have to label the times that they don't as being, oh, my gosh, something isn't working. I'm doing something wrong. I'm an imposter. I'm a failure. We don't have to label it as that. Instead, we could just simply say, oh, well, that's life. Let me learn from it. Let me grow so that I can do better next time. A very different mindset.
Notice all of the imbalanced behavior that stems from these thoughts.
Now, these are just examples that I see pretty regularly from working moms and some of my own, for sure. And I encourage you to self identify for you which one of these or maybe there's another one where you're constantly labeling yourself as being a failure, that something isn't working, that you're not good enough, that you're not living up to expectations. And then notice all of the imbalance behavior that stems from that, all of the overworking that you're doing, all of the extra energy that you're expelling, because something's not working and you're trying to fix it.
Thinking you’re a failure is actually holding you back instead of helping you be better.
Now, you may be saying, Rebecca, I really shouldn't be yelling at my kids, and I really should be landing more of those clients and not botching my presentations. I really do need to get more done. Your brain wants to argue with me and be like, hold on a second now. Totally for sure. You probably want to learn how to yell less at your children and get less angry. For sure you want to figure out how you can achieve more and less time and be more productive. And for sure, you want to figure out how to increase sales at your job or get more clients or be more efficient with what you do. I'm not saying that you don't want to improve or you don't want things to be different. I'm just saying thinking that it's not working, I'm failing. That isn't a mindset that's going to help you figure out how to improve. It's actually holding you back because it's causing a whole lot of emotions like inadequacy and feeling incapable. And you're never going to problem solve in a really efficient and effective way when you're feeling inadequate and incapable. You're not going to figure out how to be less angry with your kids when you're feeling not enough as a parent. You're never going to figure out how to land more clients or be more efficient in your job. When you're feeling like you're failing.
When does your best problem-solving happen?
Take a moment and just think about this. When does your best problem solving happen? In what space are your ideas and your thoughts and your willingness to try new things at its best? Is it when you feel like you're failing and it's not working and things aren't going well and you've labeled it that? Or is it when you feel amazing and confident? When you're thinking, I'm so good at this. This is exactly what I should be doing. I'm amazing at my job, I'm such a great mom, my company is lucky to have me. I'm the perfect mom for my kids.
These mindsets need to be eradicated from your mind.
When you're having those types of confident thoughts and feeling really good about yourself as a human being and as a worker and as a mom, that is when you problem solve the best. That's when your ideas and your thoughts and your willingness to experiment and try new things and get better, that's when that happens. It's not overworking and thinking something's gone wrong. I'm failing - these mindsets, they need to be eradicated from your mind because they're just not useful to you and helping you reach the next level of your goals.
The Protocol.
In coaching with my clients, I often make protocols - when this happens, then you do this. We come up with a three to five step process for them to go through. When something happens that triggers them in some way, when they are trying to get out the door from work at 5pm and they feel really overwhelmed because they didn't get enough done, we come up with a protocol for exactly when that happens, what are you going to do? Or when they get home and they find themselves so overwhelmed with all of the things that they have to do at home as a mom and their kids need their attention and the dinner needs to be made and laundry needs to be done and so forth, and you start to feel overwhelmed, we come up with a protocol for that. Like, when this happens, then you do this. And the reason we do that is because what we want to do is normalize in your brain, that when these events happen, overwhelm happens, failure happens. Not getting through your to do list every day happens. Your brain having a hard time shutting down at the end of a work day. Like, that just happens. These things are normal. It doesn't mean that something's gone wrong. It's not working. You're not good enough. We don't need to label it in that way.
“This isn't a problem, I'm not failing.”
And that's often one of the very first things in my three to five step protocols that I come up with my clients, is there's almost always a step where you normalize it. Like, hey, this is happening again, yes. There's my brain thinking I should get more done today than I actually did. I'm starting to get really irritated at my kids. They're triggering me in X, Y, or Z. This is pretty normal. This is what happens, and we normalize it from a place of nothing's gone wrong. This isn't a problem. I'm not failing. It's just a typical event that I get to decide how I want to respond. And then oftentimes later on in the steps of the protocol…and just to be clear, these protocols, three to five steps, they could happen in a matter of two minutes. You can go through all five steps in two minutes. They don't take a super long period of time, but they almost always involve normalizing. And then they almost always also involve resetting your mindset, where you remind your brain how amazing you actually are, how valuable you are to your company, how incredible of a parent you are to your kids. It's reminding your brain that it is, in fact, working and that you are highly valuable and you're not failing, that your company needs you, that your family needs you, that it's all working, that you are creating for yourself the life that you want to lead. I love that thought, and it's a thought that I help practice with my clients all of the time. I'm exactly where I should be. I'm creating the life that I want.
Cultivating positive beliefs about yourself.
This is our starting point in coaching. Cultivating a set of beliefs that you can have about yourself that makes you feel really good about who you are, how you show up in the world every day so that it gets easier and easier to redirect your brain when it thinks it's not working, I'm behind, I should be doing more, I'm not good enough, I'm failing. Your brain is going to go there. That isn't the problem. It's that you need to have the tools in order to redirect it so that it not only happens less and less, but you're not living in this land of failure as often as you do now.
Conclusion
So I'd love to share more with you about the process of coaching and exactly how we get you to that place of really feeling amazing about yourself and what it is you do and how you're showing up. If you're ready to take your working mom life to the next level and to achieve more and less time and feel like you have a specific direction in your career and that you are advocating for yourself at a new level and you feel like you're coming home every day as the mom that you want to be - If you're ready for that, then let's find a time to connect. I've opened up my calendar to talk to even more working moms out there. I've opened up my one-on-one coaching practice to take in ten more clients, and I would love for you to be one of them. You can go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to find the time on my calendar for us to connect. All right, working moms, have a great week, and let's get to it.
Outro
Hey, before you go, I want to take a moment and tell you about an opportunity to speak with me directly. If you've been listening to this podcast and still feel like you need help balancing a fulfilling career with motherhood, then I encourage you to schedule a free breakthrough call. On this call, we will get crystal clear on exactly what it is you want out of your career and how you want to balance that with motherhood. And then we'll craft the next steps for you to start moving toward a more calm and fulfilling working mom life. Head over to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to apply for this free call till next week. And working moms. Let's get to it.
