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You don’t have to wait until you are burnt-out or so terribly unhappy to make a change. If you want to change jobs, go after a promotion or change your overworking habits, you can do it right now. In today’s podcast, I offer 5 reasons you should not wait to make a change as well as explain the most likely thing getting in the way of you taking a first step.
Topics in this episode:
Why is change so hard?
How continuing to not make a change makes it harder in the end
What people don’t realize is the biggest obstacle when it comes to change
It’s not selfish to go after your dreams
Happiness and a regret-free life are the results of making a change – do they feel worth it?
Show Notes & References:
Get past the fear and confusion and go after the working mom life you want! Sign up for a free breakthrough call to learn how we will get you to your goals, in coaching: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
Working moms, now is the time. If you want to change jobs, if you want to go after a promotion, if you want to change your work habits, if you want to spend more time with your kids, if you want to travel more, if you want to start a dream business, if you want to move your family to another country and work remotely, now is the time.
Making a change is hard. Your brain does not like change.
And in today's podcast, I'm going to talk about the four emotions that are likely getting in the way of you making a change that you know you want to make.
I'm not going to lie, I get a little passionate about this topic. You're going to hear that in this podcast because I don't want anyone feeling held back in their life.
You deserve a joy filled, ambitious, successful life, and I believe you can have that today. You ready? Let's get to it.
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.
Hello, friends. I don't know about you, but fall has begun, and my schedule has gotten immensely busier, and it has definitely been a moment of needing to reset my expectations and rhythms and make decisions on behalf of my family as a whole.
And so if you are a mom that is making some adjustments this fall and are finding yourself feeling a little bit overwhelmed or over scheduled, just know that I see you.
It’s time to make changes based on what’s most important to you.
And I think this podcast is going to be really helpful for you as you think about your priorities, about making changes based on what's most important to you and really going after your goals to end the year strong this year.
So, today's podcast comes from a conversation that I had with a client just last week, and one of the reasons that this client hired me as her coach was to help her figure out what was next in her career.
She's been in her career for many years now, has been feeling very stagnant. The company has gone through a lot of changes, and she just doesn't have a vision of what she really wants and where she wants to go.
And so that's been one of our goals in coaching, is to not just create a vision of what she wants next, but to really get her into that next job as quickly as possible.
So she's been following my process and has been exploring her different options.
And as we started this particular coaching session, I asked her how she was feeling about the process of looking for another job, because, to be honest, when she started coaching, she was pretty hesitant about it.
She had a lot of resistance to leaving her current position, even though she knew it was not where she wanted to be and what she wanted to do.
Fear surrounding leaving your job.
She had all sorts of fear surrounding leaving and this decision to leave. Hence one of the reasons why she hired me as a coach, because she knew that she probably wasn't going to be able to do it on her own.
So anyway, I asked her how she was feeling about the process of looking for work, and she said she was actually feeling pretty good about it.
And she made a comment that that felt really weird for her to be thinking about changing jobs, because since we had started coaching together, her current position and her current job no longer felt as bad as it did before.
Essentially, over the first three months of our working together, we had gotten her into so much of a better place where she was feeling more balanced and she was feeling more in control of her time and more present.
She wasn't working as much, she wasn't logging in as late as often as she had been before. So things were just feeling really better. And it felt weird for her to be thinking about leaving the job when things were sort of better.
And I could tell you this is so common, particularly for women.
We seem to hold this unconscious belief that unless things are really bad, we shouldn't change them.
Meaning unless you are burned out or at least you're on the verge of burnout.
Unless you are living full of regret, unless you can't sleep at night, unless you're like 50 pounds overweight. Unless you are on the verge of divorce, unless you are being passed up for a promotion maybe the third or the fourth time -
It's like unless you have no other option, then it's okay to make a change.
Deciding to change when things are not at their worst, something about that just feels very wrong to our brains.
And that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about not waiting till things are really bad for you to do what you need to do in order to have the life that you want to have.
There's no perfect time to make a change. You don't have to wait until you are burned out. You don't have to wait until your kids are older. You don't have to wait until it feels like there's no other option.
You can make a change, whether that's to your job, to your schedule, to your commitments, to your priorities, to the way you're spending your money or your time.
You can make any change whenever you want.
At whatever time you want. You don't have to wait, It doesn't have to be really bad.
So today we're going to talk about why you shouldn't wait and I'm going to break this into three parts.
Why you shouldn’t wait to make change.
We're going to talk about why you shouldn't wait. We're going to talk about why it's really hard to make a change, and then we're going to talk about the benefits of making the change, particularly when life is not overwhelmingly bad, and then we are going to talk about the benefits of making a change right now.
So quick little side note before we get going. I'm using kind of strong language here, right? Things like burned out or terrible or bad or on the verge of divorce. These things feel kind of extreme on some level.
And many of you, most of you probably aren't in that really, really bad spot. I'm super grateful for that.
So I want you to listen to this podcast through the lens of using words like dissatisfied or not in alignment with either your goals or the values that you have.
Essentially, if you are living in some area of your life feeling dissatisfied or stuck, I don't want you waiting around until things turn bad in order for you to make a change.
I encourage you to think about an area of life, even right now, just like name an area of life where you feel a little bit dissatisfied in and I want you to use that as your example in your mind as we're going through this podcast today.
So let's start with why you shouldn't wait to make a change that you really want to make.
I have five reasons and we're going to walk through all of them.
Dissatisfaction only gets worse.
Number one, the reason you shouldn't wait to make a change when you really want to make a change is because dissatisfaction only gets worse. You're not going to magically wake up tomorrow feeling differently about what you want to change.
So, for example, if you really wish that you spent more time with your kids, that you need to work on your overworking behaviors and not log in so much at the end of the workday or when you're around your family.
If you've been thinking about doing that for some time, you're not going to wake up tomorrow and magically change your behavior or magically feel like you spend enough time with your kids.
In fact, every day that goes by, you continue to deepen your dissatisfaction with the time that you are spending with your kids and it just makes it worse.
If you've been feeling disconnected and dissatisfied in your job for quite some time, you're not going to magically wake up tomorrow with a completely new outlook of that job. You're not going to feel really great about it all of a sudden unless you make a change.
In fact, every day you wake up with the mindset that you're dissatisfied at your job, the more and more you're going to feel dissatisfied until it hits that desperation level.
You don't have to wait for things to be desperate before you make a change.
They say that the best time to find a new job is while you're in an old job. That it's easier actually to get hired when you're in a job than it is when you're not.
And the reason for that is because you don't feel desperate for work when you're still working. You don't feel desperate for the money your brain doesn't offer to you well, this might be your only shot, you better take it.
And this was the exact conversation that I had had with my client last week.
We talked about how her actually feeling better in her current job, in her current situation, how that was actually a big benefit to her job search and trying to figure out what was next because she didn't have all this extreme, negative, desperate thinking going on.
Making decisions from our values.
As she's thinking about making this change, she could think about it more logically. She could think about it from the point of view of her values.
She could get more in touch with what she really wants and why she wants what she wants and what's important to her.
She didn't have to just take the first job that came to her or even apply to the first job that seemed okay, she could be selective.
Dissatisfaction breeds more dissatisfaction.
So that's the first reason dissatisfaction breeds more dissatisfaction the longer you wait to make a change.
The second reason you don't want to wait around to make a change is it's simple physics. A ball in motion stays in motion.
The hardest part of making a change is starting.
But once you start, things get easier. Think about working out or running or even just building in a habit of walking more if you want to be somebody that runs or walks or works out on a regular basis.
The hardest part to creating that habit is starting. Once you get in the habit of walking or running or working out at whatever time you do that, the easier it is to do, the less resistance there is to doing it. The same is true here.
The hardest part about making a change to your career or your time or your priorities is starting.
Even my client from last week commented on how she feels like she's in a rhythm of looking at work and looking at job opportunities. And it feels so much easier and less daunting than it did when she started.
Don’t wait around to get started.
The longer you wait, the longer you live a life where you feel dissatisfied, the longer you wait to make a change, whatever it is, the longer you put off the joy and the regret free life or the job or the marriage or the connection that you want to be in - the longer you wait, the longer the dream gets pushed off.
You only have a certain amount of days to live on this earth. Wouldn't you rather live more of them in a life where you feel deeply satisfied and filled with joy? Of course!
Change feels uncomfortable.
And that leads us to the fourth reason you don't want to wait to make a change in your life. Because no matter what that change is, it’s going to feel uncomfortable.
So let me explain one of the things I like to say to women on their breakthrough call with me if they're struggling to say yes to coaching because of fear of the commitment or fear of the amount of time that is going to take of them, or fear of the money investment or the energy, whatever it is…
I say look - you're dissatisfied right now in your life. You're uncomfortable right now in the life that you're living. Coaching together is going to feel uncomfortable or making this decision right now to invest in yourself with your money and your time is also uncomfortable.
But what's going to be different is that the discomfort you're going to feel in coaching is actually going to get you to your goal.
The discomfort you're feeling right now, should you choose to stay in it, has you living the life you have right now.
So which discomfort would you rather live in knowing that there's going to be discomfort either way?
Would you like to repeat the same life that you have today? Or would you like to take the discomfort and actually put that discomfort towards your goals, toward the result that you want in your life?
The last reason I don't want you to wait is because the longer you wait, the more you allow thought errors to deepen. Let me explain.
A thought error is simply a mindset.
Or a perspective or a thought that you have that's holding you back, that's keeping you feeling dissatisfied. That's not allowing you to make the change that you want. That is perpetuating overworking behaviors and have you prioritizing things that you don't want to prioritize.
Those behaviors that you want to change or the circumstances in life that you want to change, those are driven by your thoughts. They're driven by the way you're thinking right now.
That is not serving you.
And the longer you wait to make a change, the more you allow that thought to deepen into your psyche, making it harder to make the change later.
So let me give you an example. I have a client that has an endless amount of things to do. She is sort of in a no win situation at work. She doesn't have the support she needs. The company is going through big changes and layoffs.
And so this client, she came to me in coaching with the thought, I'm never doing enough. I'm always letting someone down. And she was literally telling herself that on a daily basis, somewhat hourly basis even.
And because her brain, her mind was telling her that she's not doing enough. It had her working way later than she wanted to every day. She was missing out on her family time. She was logging back on in like the wee hours of the morning, feeling exhausted when she woke up.
And when she started with me in coaching, we came very quickly to the realization and understanding of how the thought, I'm not doing enough, I'm disappointing everyone. How that thought was at the center of all of her overworking behaviors.
It was having her prioritize work over family. And had she not come to coaching, she would have continued to tell herself that that she was failing everyone, and she would continue to try to do it all for everyone and make everyone happy.
Which would have, for sure, had her quit her job out of the sense of desperation and burnout long before she really wanted to.
But since we started coaching together, we were able to catch that mindset.
We caught the thought error, and she saw that what was going on in her mind and how it was causing her to over prioritize work.
We were able to kind of establish and bring a lot of awareness to that and then begin to actually work on that together in coaching.
So now she logs off of work at, generally speaking, 5:30. At the time that she wants. She doesn't log back on as much in the evenings and the weekends, and she feels a lot more present and confident in her decisions.
She feels more present with her kids. She's likely not going to stay at this company. It's too much of a culture of burnout for her. But she's bought herself time to figure out what's next for her, so she doesn't have to be unemployed while she's looking for that next job.
The longer you wait to make a change, the more you deepen the mindset and perspectives that are causing you to feel dissatisfied.
Do you see what I mean? The longer you wait to make a change, the more you deepen the mindset and the perspectives that are causing you to feel dissatisfied and out of balance making them harder and harder to change.
Okay, so you're probably saying, I get it, Rebecca.
I know I need to make a change.
I know I don't want to be missing out on my kids' lives.
I know that I want to be in a job where I feel satisfied and I'm getting paid what I deserve.
I know I want more time for myself, for my spouse.
I see all the reasons. Why is it so hard?
So let's dive into that. Let me explain.
There are really four reasons, and I'm going to explain these reasons through the lens of the emotional impact, because this is one of the points that I make to my clients a lot.
The only thing getting in the way of you making change…
The only thing that ever really gets in the way of you making a change or going after a goal or following through with your boundary - essentially, the only reason you don't do the thing that you know you should be doing or that you want to do is because of an icky feeling emotion that you don't want to feel.
So that first icky feeling emotion that's getting in the way of you making a change is discomfort.
And I talked about this one earlier, as I was talking about physics. A ball in motion stays in motion. The same thing is true for your brain. Your brain doesn't like change. It doesn't want to think new thoughts. That's hard. It requires effort. It requires time.
Your brain is wired for safety.
For comfort, for ease. And the safest, most comfortable, and easy thing for you to do right now is to just keep doing what you're doing. No matter if it makes you feel terrible, no matter if you don't want to, no matter if it's not actually helping you reach your goals.
For your brain, the best thing for you to ever do is to keep doing the thing that you're doing now, no matter what.
It's uncomfortable to do something new and to think in a new way.
If you want to be someone that truly closes down their computer at 05:00 or 5:30, whatever it is, when 5:15 rolls around, it's easier for your brain to say, oh, no, you didn't get enough done today. You should really be doing more. You told them that you'd get back to them today. They're going to feel really disappointed.
It's easier for your brain to think those thoughts and to have you stay late to finish your to do list or answer all those emails. It's much more uncomfortable.
It's much harder for your brain to say, it's okay for them to be disappointed.
My life's not about my job. I deserve to be home with my kids at the time that I want today.
It takes time to build new habits
It's so much harder to say those words simply because you don't say them to yourself very often. And it takes time to build new habits. And until it becomes a habit, it often feels very uncomfortable.
The second reason why it's really hard to make a change even when you want to, or really, the second emotion that gets in the way is fear.
What if the change doesn't fix things?
What if the new job isn't any better?
What if I don't get any more time with my kids?
What if I'm still feeling dissatisfied and not happy even if I go down to part time?
What if - that's a thought that brings a lot of fear, doesn't it?
The problem is, your brain's not wrong. You'll never know. As hard as you try, you will never be able to see into your future to know that the change that you want to make is going to work out 100% in the end.
But here's what I want to offer to you. You actually don't want to know. What you really want is to be okay whether it works out or not.
I would rather you focus your attention on becoming the person that can simply just quit their new job if it's not working out for them or can make the next change that needs to happen in order for you to be more satisfied in your life rather than be the person that gets every single decision right.
You're never going to get everything right.
Because the reality is you're never going to get everything right. Every decision you make is not going to pan out in the way that you want. And I don't want you believing that you need every decision to pan out exactly the way you want in order for you to be happy and satisfied and present.
I want you to feel so in control of you, so confident in your decision making that you can and will be willing to make any decision you need in order to have the life that you want.
Now, I know that that fear is strong and it's a really uncomfortable emotion.
But you can be afraid and still decide to make a change.
One of the things I like to tell women that are thinking about working with me and coaching is you're probably not going to feel 100% about your decision to coach with me.
There's just too much unknown and the investment is a lot I think you could feel 80% confident or even 90%, but likely your brain is still going to have some fear, particularly fear of the unknown.
Change and fear go hand in hand.
And that's okay. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means that change always has fear. They go hand in hand.
The third reason or the third emotion that gets in the way of you making the change that you want right now is unworthiness.
I'm going to be honest, this is one of my goals in life. This is one of my passions. It's such a big part of why I have the coaching business that I have. I want to help you eradicate that deep down core feeling of unworthiness that so many women experience.
Yes, you can make a change just because you want to.
You're worthy of that. You're deserving of that. You're deserving of happiness, of joy, of freedom, of abundance, of the title that you want and the pay that you want and the life that you want. You're deserving of it.
You get to choose your life.
Yes, you just get to choose. You're a human being with a choice just like any other human being out there. You get to choose your life.
I'm on a soapbox now, right? You don't have to let anyone tell you what to do. Not your partner, not your mom, not your friends, not that mom friend that seems to have it all together.
No one gets to decide your life but you. And people are allowed to disagree or even be disappointed in your choices. You're still worthy and deserving, of deciding to do with your life whatever it is you want to do.
I'm just curious, would you tell your son or daughter to play it safe in life, to not go after the big job or the change in life out of fear or wanting to please others?
Sometimes this comes up on breakthrough calls with women as we start talking about making an investment in themselves.
I ask them if they would invest $8,000 in the future of their child, or would they advise their kids as they got older, to spend that kind of money on something that would help them reach their goals and make them happy.
Not all the time, but most of the time for most women, the answer is yes. We would advise our kids to do whatever it takes to have a happy life.
We believe that they're deserving of happy lives, and yet we don't have that same thought, that same mindset for ourself.
You are worthy of whatever it is you want in life.
Now, the last reason or the last emotion that makes it really difficult to go after the life that you want is selfishness.
It quite literally feels selfish to go after the life that you want, likely because other people are affected by it like your spouse or your kids. Most likely your decision to potentially change jobs, change your schedule, change what you prioritize it likely has an effect on your family.
And that feels bad. It feels selfish.
And what I like to tell women all of the time is that your happiness has a massive effect on everyone else around you.
Yes, your kids may not get as much time with you if you decide that you're going to work out regularly at a time that you would often spend with them, for example.
But you being happy in your body and ending all of that negative self talk that you have of your body image or your weight, that has a massive effect on them.
They see a mom going after a healthy life.
They see their mom going after goals.
They see their mom doing things that feels uncomfortable in prioritizing herself. They see their mom talking about themselves in a much more positive way.
It has such a wonderful positive effect on your kids, you being happy.
And I truly believe that the energy of the home is found in the mom. I mean, not always, but oftentimes. How you feel, how you walk in the door after work, either lifts up the mood of the family or it brings everyone down.
Now, that probably feels pretty unfair. But the family unit, the emotion of the family unit seems to be intertwined with the mom. Her energy is so important.
When you feel happy, you give permission for everyone else in the family to feel happy and to delight in life as well. You give permission to your kids to spend money on themselves in the future, to hire themselves a coach or a personal trainer or a therapist, or whatever they need in order to show up as a human being in the way that they want to show up as a human being.
You normalize for themselves getting help. You give them permission to be and to go after themselves and their life in the way that they want. And it likely is going to feel really selfish.
We might not be able to change that right away, but just because it's selfish or feels selfish doesn't mean it's wrong, doesn't mean that it's actually selfish.
It Doesn’t mean that you shouldn't make the change. Just means that there's some discomfort here, that it feels a little self centered. That's okay.
Okay, so we've talked about why you should make whatever change you want to make right now and why there's no better time than today. We've talked about the emotions that get in the way of doing that.
And now let's just take a moment and talk about the results of making the change. What's on the other side of the fear and the discomfort and the selfishness of making change now?
he most common answer would simply just be happiness or joy, right? And that's 100% true.
I want to read to you a note that I just received from one of my clients as she was evaluating our coaching together. So she's finished her six months with me and she wrote this in her evaluation, she said;
“Wow, joy has been such a big part of this journey.
I thought repressing my negative emotions would help me be more joyful. But now I realize I had to go through them, even some of the ones in the past that I hadn't fully processed. It was a dramatic experience and it was the change I needed. I needed permission, and let's be honest to be called out, I needed to feel these things that I had pushed down.
I now fully see joy does not just mean happy all of the time. There's actually a realness, a rawness to true joy. It's knowing that sadness exists and holding the tension between them.
With this truth, I can feel true soul deep joy.”
Isn't that beautiful? Yes. This is what we want on the other side of change. To be able to feel, to experience real raw, true, deep joy. That's one thing.
On the other side of this journey, I think another huge result is control.
Control of your time, control of your priorities, control of your energy.
Right now, if you're stuck and are feeling really dissatisfied, it sort of feels like life is just happening to you, right? It feels like you're in the backseat just when life is just heading on down, like you're in the backseat and somebody else is driving the car, you're just kind of going wherever the car goes.
When you decide, I'm going to make a change, I'm going to go after the life that I want, the goals that I want, no matter what that. Is when you start to feel in control.
You start to feel like you own your life, like you're in the driver's seat.
That doesn't mean that you're going to control every little circumstance and everything's going to be perfect, but you're going to feel like the decision maker and the leader of your life.
You're also going to live a life without regret.
A lot of working moms worry about this. They worry about regretting prioritizing their career. They worry that they're going to regret the time that they spend away from their kids.
They worry that they're going to regret maybe not taking the bigger leap in their career because they had worried about how it was going to impact their family. They worry about regretting their decisions.
And let me just tell you, if you are worrying about regretting your decisions, likely it's because you already, at least on some level, regret whatever decision you've made.
There's already a piece of you that knows something is not in alignment. And you're going to look back at this time and feel a little bit sad or disappointed with the decisions that you made.
Go after the life you want to live.
When you make a decision now, today, to go after the life that you want, to make the change that you want, you know that you're living life exactly the way you want, which means there's not going to be regret.
Friends, you can live a regret free life.
On this podcast what I promote is a both and life.
A life where you have both a career that you love and a home life where you feel satisfied, present and connected.
You can decide today to have a both and life. You can decide today that you are deserving of the life that you want no matter what.
Don't wait to create your dream life, It's available to you right now.
If you need help, someone to guide you through the process, because maybe the fear feels too strong or the discomfort feels too real, or the confusion is just blocking you from figuring out what to do and how to do it…
That is where I come in.
As your coach, I will help you feel confident in yourself, clear on exactly what it is you want. And I will equip you with a tool belt full of tools to help you and all of your swirly thoughts and all of the overworking behavior and how to overcome the inertia of just getting started.
You can reach out to me. You can book that free breakthrough call where you will speak with me directly about what coaching looks like and we'll make a decision on whether this is truly the right next step for you. If coaching is going to get you exactly where you want to go.
You an go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to find a time on my schedule to speak directly to me. As always, I will have that in the show notes for you as well.
Working moms, It's a both and life. It's a regret free life. There is no time but now to go after that life, I can help if you need it. Thank you for being here. I believe in you. And until next week, let's get to it.
