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Nobody promised ease in life. Nobody said being a working mom, a parent, a partner, finding work-life balance, getting a fulfilling job or putting up boundaries would be easy. So what would happen if you dropped that expectation and moved into radical acceptance that things are meant to be hard? In today’s podcast, I’m sharing how when you stop fighting the “hard” in life, you open up to problem solve differently so you reach your goals faster and with more ease.
Topics in this episode:
Why we think things should be easier?
How does problem solving challenges get easier when you accept that things are hard?
Why you shouldn’t fear allowing yourself to be angry, disappointed, sad or frustrated
How self-judgement creates extra “hardship” when you are trying to reach your goals
Show Notes & References:
Ready to experience radical acceptance of yourself and life’s “hard” circumstances? I will help you to learn how to accept and create more effective plans/processes for reaching your goals and having a happy and fulfilling working mom life.
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Transcript
Intro
What would happen if you stopped believing things weren't supposed to be hard?
Nobody promised ease in your life.
Nobody said being a working mom, a parent, a partner, finding work life balance, getting a new job, putting up boundaries, nobody said these things would be easy.
And when you drop that mindset, when you move into radical acceptance that things are hard, you open yourself up to problem solve and to reach your goals fast, faster, and with more ease.
In today's podcast, I'm challenging you to drop the mindset. This shouldn't be so hard. And I'll explain exactly what happens when you learn to radically accept yourself and your difficult circumstances. 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, my friends. I'm coming to you today with a heart that aches. There are several things happening in this world and some of the lives of my close friends and family that are just hard. I'm not sure how many of you are experiencing that right now.
Like me, I have friends that are just having some really difficult times in their marriage. Some are even going through separation. I have friends that are very sick. One almost just died from COVID like a month ago. Another one caught a rare bacterial form of pneumonia, and the various medicines are not working and she's getting worse.
In the world, my heart is aching and heavy for the conflict in Israel. I know several people that are in Israel right now. Some of them live there. Some of them just happen to be there as these attacks have begun. But the stories from these attacks have been heartbreaking. It's been atrocious to look at, and my heart is heavy.
If I turn my attention towards some of my clients and what they're going through right now, I have a few that are completely checked out of their job. But because of the economy and the way it is and the job market, there just isn't a right opportunity. And the waiting process of figuring out their next job, that's just really hard.
I have another client whose company is likely going to go under, and she's helping lead them through this very difficult time. But people are losing their jobs literally every day, and it's a part of her job to sit with them and to deliver that news. That's hard.
I have a client that's trying for a second child, wondering if it's going to happen for them, and that's a really hard experience. I've been there myself.
I have a client that's working through some challenges with their deep feeling kiddo. And boy, do I know what that experience is like. Because I have a deep feeling, kiddo, and that is hard.
I have another client that had to hop on a last minute flight with her whole family to deal with her aging parents because none of her family live near them anymore. And that is just a hard situation to watch and to be the provider, the sole caregiver of your aging parents.
There is a lot of hard going on in people's lives and in the world. And my eyes just fill with tears as I write this episode because my heart just feels so heavy.
I literally just want to put on me yoga pants, curl up with a warm cup of tea in a blanket, and watch Mindless TV to cope. Yes, that is sometimes what I do.
The misconceptions of the word ‘hard’.
So today, I want to talk about this word. I want to talk about the word hard because this word gets thrown about a lot, and there are a lot of misconceptions around the concept of things being hard.
And that has a real impact on you, how you're handling life right now, and if you're able to feel balanced when things are hard.
So here's what I want to start with today: we are not promised ease in our life.
Now, don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean life can't be easier, but we're not promised that it will be. And I think this is a really important starting point to talking about the idea of things being hard, because I see a lot of people out there reacting to life as if it should be easier, as if whatever hardship is happening to them right now should not be.
It sounds a lot like this:
This shouldn't be so hard.
Why can't I figure this out?
I should be further ahead.
This shouldn't be happening.
Why can't I figure this out?
I should be able to get more done.
All of these thoughts are essentially saying that whatever's happening right now, it shouldn't be.
There is a judgment that comes when we think about things being hard as if they never should be hard.
My daughter, she's nine. She lives in this mindset. I have a feeling most kids do, but for sure, I have experienced it with my daughter. She does not like to do things that feel hard for her.
For example, she joined a swim team because she loves to swim. She is like a fish in the water. But halfway through training season, she just wanted to quit because it was hard.
She wasn't the best one on the team. It didn't come naturally for her to kind of be in that competitive environment. And she didn't want to put any more effort into getting better.
She wanted it to feel easy, and it didn't. And so she wanted to quit. I remember one almost entire practice. We sat outside because she was having a tantrum about having to go to practice. She didn't want to go to practice. It was too hard for her. And so she was just completely melting down outside of the pool.
We sat there. I told her we weren't going to go, that we were just going to sit there. And her choice was to either sit here or she could go in and actually practice. Her choice.
And so she basically sat outside for three quarters of the practice until she realized that I was serious and we really were not going to go home. We were going to literally sit here in front of the pool and wait until practice was over. And it was at that point she finally decided to go in and finish practice.
Our brain is wired to chase ease.
But this same mentality, this idea that we don't want to do hard, that is a human experience. Our brain is wired to chase ease. Our brain is wired for comfort and things that are comfortable are things that are easy.
Our brain's job is survival, which means it doesn't want to do things that are new. It doesn't want to do things that are hard. It just wants to keep doing things in the same way with the same mindset every single day. Because that's the easiest, most comfortable thing to do.
Creating habits is hard.
That's why creating habits are so hard and it takes so much energy for us, because our brain is literally resisting creating a new habit because it's hard.
So it makes sense why there's almost this unspoken expectation, like life philosophy, on some level, that things should be easier. It makes sense why we avoid things that are hard and difficult for us.
But this life philosophy, I don't think it's serving you.
Life is supposed to be hard. No one ever said it would be easy.
I want you to think for just a moment about how you would handle life differently if you believed that life was never meant to be easy.
Being a working mom, it's not meant to be easy.
Going after a job that you love, where you feel fulfilled and you find balance, that's not supposed to be easy.
Handling a tantruming toddler and staying calm, that's not supposed to be easy.
Saying no to someone and protecting the time with your family even though they're the most important thing to you, that's not supposed to be easy.
When you believe this, what changes for you now?
I could tell you, for me, the first thing that feels so different to me is I drop all of the judgment. It's amazing to me how judgment gets in the way of so many of the things that we want. It's like a little extra wall or a hurdle that we have to overcome that oftentimes we don't want to overcome. And so we don't.
This is one of the reasons why I hate when people say being a working mom is hard, because it's often said with this tone or this expectation that it shouldn't be or that they weren't expecting it to be. And that false expectation is just like Oozing with judgment.
And then of course, your brain starts looking around at all of these other working moms that seem to be having it more together than you.
False expectations around how hard something is going to be perpetuate a cycle of self judgment.
And then your brain is struggling, going, why isn't it so hard for them? What am I doing wrong? This shouldn't be so hard. False expectation around how hard something is going to be perpetuates a cycle of self judgment, which only makes things harder.
When you believe that things in life or situations in life are just going to be hard, you problem solve differently for how to handle them. Think about that.
I recently wrote a chapter of a book. I was asked to be a contributing author to a coaching toolkit book to help coaches coach on work life balance.
And so I'm writing this very short chapter explaining my process for coaching and teaching on work life balance. And I thought it was going to be super easy, right? I talk about this stuff all day long.
I talk about it obviously here on the podcast. I talk about it with my coaches every day. I talk about it with my clients every day. I know my process. I know what I teach. This is going to be easy so I thought
I scheduled out a few different blocks in my calendar for both writing and, editing. I scheduled a time to create an outline for the book so I was clear on what I was going to say when I sat down to write. I had the structure.
But let me tell you, writing these 2700 words, that's not a lot of words, by the way, but writing these 2700 words was one of the hardest things I have done in a very long time.
I would sit in front of the screen. I would stare blankly at it. My perfectionist brain took over as I was writing. I would try to get every little sentence exactly right.
I would read, I would reread, I would reread sentences again, just to try to get the flow going. I distracted myself with emails and social media.
In the end, it probably took me at least three times longer, maybe more than what I expected to write this silly chapter of a book. I was so frustrated by the end, and now I'm starting to think about my book.
And I don't think I've ever said this publicly, but I'm in the middle of conceptualizing a book, potentially even writing it in the coming year. And it'll probably be a very similar topic that talks about work life balance, teaching my method, my process for doing that.
Expectations.
But now I have an expectation that this is going to be difficult. I don't expect this to be an easy task whenever I sit down to do it. So my mindset is different because I know it will be hard.
And already I've started to think about how I'm going to go about it differently because of that, because I'm not assuming ease any longer.
So, for example, already I've started to think about this. I've decided that instead of sitting at my computer, I think I'm going to dictate the book on my phone or on the computer somehow. Probably on my phone, actually, which is exactly the way I write this podcast.
And either I will then edit it later, or I'll hire an editor to do that for me. I will also need to invest in some distraction free apps that's going to help me focus and keep me off social media when my brain is going to want to wander.
To do that, I also need to be very clear about what I want to accomplish in each of my sittings as I write. I am planning this in, like, a completely different way because I know that it's going to be hard.
Problem solving differently.
I'm problem solving differently, and I know my brain is going to get distracted, and I know that it's going to be fatigued, and I know my perfectionist brain is going to want to take over, and it's going to be hard to push through that.
And I didn't plan for any of that the first time around. I just expected it to be easy. And then I was really surprised when it wasn't. And then I sat in self judgment and anger and frustration because it wasn't.
So I'm not going to do any of that this time. Notice how different I'm problem solving.
Nobody said it would be easy.
I'm planning, I'm prepping how my mentality is different because I am already in acceptance of the idea that this is going to be hard. Nobody said it would be easy.
I'm a part of several circles of coaches, these are my peers that are coaches. And over the weekend, I was reading a post from one of these coaches that lives in Israel, and they're literally scared for their life right now. They're hearing bombs and gunshots, and they're living in bomb shelters in their basements.
And this coach was asking for advice from other coaches on how to calm herself down. She was overwhelmed. Her nervous system was going completely haywire, and she just couldn't figure out how to calm herself.
She had an expectation, a thought that she should be able to remain calm during this time and that it shouldn't be this hard with all of these tools that she has as a coach, to remain calm and collected and calm down her nervous system.
Moving from resistance to acceptance.
And this coach in Israel, as I was reading her interaction with the other coaches that were giving her advice, there was probably a hundred comments on this thread, but I watched her interact with them as she moved from resistance to acceptance.
There was no stopping her nervous system from freaking out right now. And you could just feel her energy change as she moved into acceptance of that.
She stopped trying to fix the craziness of what was going on in her body and her mind, and instead she turned to how to care for herself when her body and her mind were being triggered and were going crazy.
She moved into this place of learning how to love herself at this deep radical level, even when her body and her mind were completely freaking out.
Radical acceptance.
I love this term, radical. And then I want to add another really important term after that acceptance. Radical acceptance. I love this term because it feels like the opposite expectation from things being hard. It's like two ends of the spectrum.
On the left you have this isn't supposed to be hard. And then on the right, you have radical acceptance of the hardship.
To have radical acceptance is to not judge yourself or anyone for that matter, for your human response to life when it's taking longer to get a job that you wanted.
Radical acceptance looks like not having a bunch of negative self talk about it and trusting that it's going to happen when it's meant to happen.
When your kiddo gets sick and you have to juggle being home with your kid and working at the same time for a few days. And then of course, as a result of that, you get sick, which causes you to have to either take more time off or kind of juggle being sick and working at the same time.
Radical acceptance looks like being angry at the situation. It looks like being mad. It sucks to get sick, right? It looks like remembering that we're all human and we get sick.
It looks like telling your boss exactly what you need right now in order to get better.
It looks like taking time off to go to the doctor if you need to.
It looks like not logging back on to get more things done when you need to be resting.
It looks like trusting that you will accomplish what needs to get accomplished or other people will pick up the slack or they won't, and it will all be okay.
Radical acceptance looks like a lot of trust, a lot of self love and compassion, a lot of not trying to fix and to do more.
One thing I want you to notice about radical acceptance, which is a very different mindset than living in this shouldn't be hard. I want you to notice how one tends to lean in instead of lean out.
When you're sick and you have radical acceptance of yourself in the midst of being sick, you lean into getting better instead of pushing yourself through it.
As I prepare to write a book and I have radical acceptance of how difficult it will be for me, I lean into that difficulty and I plan for how I'm going to handle it and how I'm going to take care of myself in the midst of it.
Instead of feeling immobilized and scared and pushing off writing the book when my kid is having a really bad day or even a bad week, and there is tantrum after tantrum after tantrum, and there's conflict. And it feels really hard. And I accept that it feels hard, that parenting is hard and that it's hard to remain calm in the midst of it. I lean in.
I think about, how can I love him better? How can I show up as a sturdy parent for him instead of leaning out and just hoping that the tantrums will go away and trying to get them to bed as soon as possible so I could just finally have a quiet moment to myself.
When there's a crisis going on in the world and your heart feels heavy, for your friends, or for the world, or for a people group, or for a minority, or for somebody that's sick, or for a friend that's going through a hard time, when your heart feels heavy, radical acceptance looks like leaning in.
It looks like saying, I don't know what to say right now. This looks really hard, and I have no idea what you're going through. If there's something I can do, please let me know.
It looks like being willing to look ignorant or to say something wrong or to offend someone.
Leaning out looks like staying silent and ignoring the thing that's weighing on you and just pushing through it and saying, oh, well, I don't know what to do. And so you do nothing.
No one promised ease in life.
I have a client that has been out there looking for jobs for, like, the last six months or so since we've been working together. And she's interviewed. She's even been offered some jobs. She's turned those down. It wasn't the right job, and she really wants to wait for the right job to come around.
But to be honest, things have sort of gotten worse for her and the job market. Jobs have kind of dried up and opportunities have dried up. So she would come to our, session saying, I don't know what to do. How do I make this go faster? How do I speed up the process?
But notice these questions. How at the heart of them is this kind of sense of judgment for how quickly or really how slowly the job search is going? It's like she's saying, it shouldn't be going this slowly. It shouldn't be this hard.
Find a new perspective.
And in our last coaching session, I challenged her to find a new perspective. I asked her, how is this exactly where you should be?
Now, let me tell you, she didn't like that question because she doesn't want to be where she's at right now. She's very unhappy in her job, and she desperately wants to get out of it. But I challenged her to radical acceptance of the situation, and I pushed her to answer.
And we were able to come up with a lot of good reasons for why she's exactly where she should be. In this job search process. And once she was able to find a new perspective and get herself out of self judgment and be in acceptance, she was able to open herself up to problem solve.
And we were able to more effectively evaluate what was going well and what was not going well in the job search process and ultimately identified two action steps to help her more effectively move towards finding the next job.
And she was able to walk away not only with a plan that she felt really good about, but a sense of confidence that this is all going to work out.
One of the things I think women worry about in the acceptance of things being hard is that they worry that it will sort of send them into this negative spiral or this negative black hole of some kind.
Like, if you just give in to your anger, then you're going to be angry forever. If you give into the frustration of your tantruming kid, you're just going to turn into a bad mom and be frustrated at your kids forever.
If you give into the sadness of what's happening in this world, you will dwindle away into depression and find yourself eating a whole pack of Oreos on the couch. Right?
I want to be clear. I have worked with hundreds of working moms personally helping them process their emotions, helping them end their self judgment cycles, helping them develop a mindset of radical acceptance of themselves and their circumstance and their responses to their circumstances. And never once has this happened.
Never once has someone dwindled away into the emotional oblivion because they allowed themselves to feel feelings are meant to be felt.
Allowing yourself to feel.
I talk about that a lot here in the podcast. And when you allow yourself to feel them, when you allow yourself to feel the hardness of something, when you allow yourself to feel sadness or the disappointment or the frustration or the heaviness, you actually come to the other side of that emotion a lot faster. 100% of the time you do.
No one said that life would be easy.
In fact, I don't know one person that would ever say that their life is easy. It's time for a new belief. It's time to radically accept the hardness of life, to lean into it and not away from it, to problem solve through it instead of judge yourself for it.
It's okay for things to be hard.
We don't need to fix that.
We need to accept that.
If you need help radically accepting yourself and the hard challenges of your life, that's where I come in.
No, you're not going to sit and dwell in the hardship, but you are going to learn how to stop judging yourself for it so that you can create a more effective plan to get yourself out of it, to move yourself through it.
If you haven't yet signed up for your free breakthrough call, now is the time.
This is a chance for you and I to get on a zoom call where we will talk about exactly what it is you want in your life, what's getting in the way of you having whatever it is you want, and how we're going to get you to that goal, to that vision in coaching.
Embrace the hardship of life.
I can't wait to talk to you, and I just want to challenge you this week to embrace the hardship of life and to notice what happens when you stop judging the hard, when you stop trying to fix the hard, and you move into a radical acceptance of it.
All right, working moms, I can't wait to talk to you next week. Let's get to it.
