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There are 6 common mistakes that create stress and overwhelm for working moms during the holiday season. During this mini-series I will cover each mistake and teach you how to correct it. In today’s episode I dive into mistake #1: not having a clear definition of success this holiday season. How do you want the holidays to feel? What do you want to focus on? What would make you feel like the holidays were a success? Your brain is craving this level of clarity and in today’s episode I walk you through a quick exercise to help you define exactly what you want out of this holiday season.

Topics in this episode:

Your brain craves direction this holiday season
What do you want to do (and what do you NOT want to do) this holiday season?
The importance of feeling success ahead of time
Cultivating a mindset that will create success this holiday season

Show Notes & References:

Need clarity in life, not just this holiday season? Click here to learn more about coaching and to schedule a free call: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com
Want ongoing support as a working mom? Sign up for the free 19-day audio series: How to be a present and connected mom. Each day you will receive an email with a downloadable audio of 5 minutes or less that will teach you a tool or strategy for being more present and in the moment. Click here to sign up and receive the first audio: https://www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/be-present-optin

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Transcript

Intro

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, working moms. I'm excited to bring you a series of podcasts to really help you create a calm and present and memorable holiday.

There's a lot of extra stress and planning and thinking I know happens for all of us over the holidays, and I want to be able to provide you a little extra help and support so that you could truly soak up all of the joy of this season.

So here's what I'm going to do. This is something I have never done before, but I think it's the perfect time to evolve this podcast to make it super relevant and useful to you, at least as much as I possibly can.

So here's how it's going to work. I'm going to be bringing you six mini podcasts. Each one will be no more than ten minutes, twelve at the most.

They're going to drop every Monday as usual, and then Wednesdays as well over the next three weeks. And here's what we're going to talk about.

In each of these mini episodes, I'm going to focus on the top six mistakes that I see working moms make as they enter and plan for and experience the holiday season that creates a really stressful and overwhelming and disconnected holiday for them.

So, six mistakes, and each episode is going to talk about that mistake and how you can correct it.

It's time to get started. I'm really excited. We're just going to dive in because, as I said, we're trying to make these short.

Not defining success.

So mistake number one that I see working moms make that sort of contribute to this really stressful and overwhelming holiday season is not having a clear definition of success for the holiday season. That's the first mistake we're going to talk about.

And the reason why this is a mistake is because if you don't have a destination in mind, like if you don't really know what a successful holiday season looks like, you're not going to be able to achieve it, or achieving it will sort of feel more like a fluke and a little less in your control.

We like to say this a lot - I just want the holidays to be less stressful, less busy, more calm. I don't want all the fighting, all the overwhelm and that sounds nice, but it's just too general.

That would be sort of like saying, I want to go on a vacation, and I want there to be water, and I want it to be pretty, and I don't want to feel like I'm go, go, going. That type of vacation could happen almost anywhere, right? It could be near a lake. It could be near the ocean. It could be a river. It could be near your house. It could be across the country. Heck, it could be in, like, a whole different country, right?

There's no specificity to it, so you have no clarity on where you're going to go.

We want your brain to have a very clear picture of exactly what you want the holidays to look like this year and how you want them to feel.

It's sort of like setting a goal, and the goal in this case is the experience you want through the holidays.

And so I want to walk you through this exercise that I do with my clients to help you create a vision of what you want the holidays to look like, because what we're talking about is an experience of the holidays, and that can sort of be challenging to break down.

Visualizing success.

So I use this exercise when I'm helping my clients visualize success in maybe a really hard conversation that they have coming up or a big meeting that they're leading or some kind of presentation that they're giving or something like a vacation or a work trip.

I think this exercise really works for these types of goals where success is more about sort of a feeling or an experience of some kind, not this kind of measurable, numerical, very linear goal.

So here's what I want you to do.

I want you to imagine it's January 2. The holidays are officially over. And I want you to take a moment to really let your brain go to that date or whatever date. The holidays are really over for you, and you're kind of back into the swing of things.

I want you to give yourself 30 seconds to a minute to close your eyes, take a really deep breath, and let yourself imagine being past the holidays. But as you look back and reflect over how the holidays went, they went so well. They went exactly the way you had hoped they would go.

Take 30, 60 seconds and let your brain go there. While you're visualizing, or as you continue to visualize how your holidays have gone well, I want your brain to sort of wander or reflect or visualize.

We're kind of saying all the same thing there with more specificity of what you looked like during the holiday season, how you carried yourself. I want you to see how you interacted with various family members, maybe even the most challenging family members.

I want you to visualize how you handled the kids and the various demands. I want you to visualize your family meals, preparing for those meals. Visualize all of it going exactly the way that you want. I'd give yourself a good three to five minutes of really thinking, visualizing, breathing, and taking in all of those good feelings as they come along with it as well.

And then once you've visualized, the next thing to do is to open your eyes and get out a paper and a pen and write down what you saw.

Focus on the things that you did and did not do.

And I want you to really focus on two things. I want you to focus on the things that you did and the things that you did not do during the holiday season.

For me, as I was preparing for this podcast and walking myself through this visualization, thinking about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, what I saw was laughter.

And I saw times of playing games with my kids. I saw shared cooking experiences, not just like me in the kitchen, but multiple people in the kitchen.

There was something else I noticed as well, and that was that I was not in the kitchen all day, every day. There was kind of a mixture of the cooking and the tasks and the playing and the resting.

I saw myself being patient and calm. I saw some other holiday activities going on. At the same time. I saw some holiday lights and getting our Christmas tree, because we do that right after Thanksgiving. And I saw some crafts and I saw just so much joy and fun holiday laughter as well.

So I want you to write all of that down and notice how there's two parts to it. You're writing down what you see and what you don't see, the absence of things as well.

So for me, I told you I did not see myself like in the kitchen all day, every day, cooking.

I also did not see myself picking up my house endlessly, every single day.
I didn't see myself cleaning all day.
I didn't see my kitchen flawless because I have the tiniest of kitchens. So for sure my kitchen is going to be an absolute disaster. So I didn't imagine myself doing dishes all day, every day.

I saw myself kind of having this mixture of doing the things and having time for fun. So focusing on the things that you did and the things maybe you didn't do, that's the first thing I want you to focus on.

Focus on the feeling.

And then the second thing I want you to write down is how you felt or how you observed yourself feeling.

For me, there was this calmness, and I saw connectedness I looked very present with the people around me, and I also felt myself feeling playful and sort of free.

I want you to really notice the feelings and get as specific as you can. And the last thing I want you to write down, there's kind of a third thing, but this is sort of challenging because it's not something you can actually observe in the visualization.

So this might be the challenging part for everyone, and it's kind of a pop quiz. You should maybe know what I'm going to say next if you listen to this podcast regularly.

I had you write down actions.

I had you write down feelings.

So what's the last thing you're going to write down? You're going to write down your thoughts.

Yes, of course. You can't see exactly what you're thinking in the visualization, so now you're just hypothesizing. You're kind of observing the actions that you had and the way you seemed to be feeling and then thinking about what was your mindset, what was allowing you to have that emotional experience and take those actions and do those things or not to do those things.

So for me, what do I have to imagine myself thinking in order to really feel calm and connected and present and playful, whatever those emotions are?

And then what would then be driving that mindset where I'm not always in the kitchen and I'm not always cleaning all the dishes, but I'm having some spontaneous game times and they're scheduled in holiday time of activities and getting the tree and things like that.

So what do I imagine myself having to think about in order to feel and do those things?

So here's what came up for me as I thought about this:

I'd be thinking, I know what I want.
I'd be thinking, I deserve what I want.
I'd be thinking, I could figure this out.
I'd be thinking, I feel so clear on what's important here.
I'd be thinking, I get to decide I'm in control.
I'd be thinking, I know what's the most important thing here.
I'd be thinking, I'm so loved.
I'd be thinking, I'm creating the exact life that I want.

And even as I say these things to you, I feel so grounded just hearing myself say them. I feel this sense of calmness, this sense of clarity and control.

Putting words to what success this holiday season looks like for you.

And that's the point for this entire exercise. There's really two things that you're doing. You're putting words to what success this holiday season looks like for you. We're making that crystal clear. So there's no guessing, there's no hoping, there's no leaving it up to chance. You're actually putting words to it, and you're deciding what a successful holiday season looks like.

And then two, the second point is that you are feeling all of the good feelings that come when you hit your goal. You're feeling those feelings ahead of time, before the holidays have even happened, before there's even been an opportunity for success or failure.

In this way, you're conjuring up all of the good feelings just by visualizing and thinking about yourself being successful this holiday season.

Clear mind.

So now what you're doing is your mind is clear and your body is clear as well. By letting yourself imagine your holidays being successful ahead of time, you're getting your body familiar with all of the good feelings that are going to come, which is going to help create some natural motivation and a feeling of attainability of this successful holiday goal.

So mistake number one that so many working moms make is they don't get clear on what success in the holiday season looks like.

This whole practice might take you 15 to 20 minutes, and I promise you're going to increase the probability of you actually creating the experience of this holiday season.

The holidays do not need to feel overwhelming.

If you do this, the holidays do not need to feel overwhelming and stressful. They can actually be a snapshot of what you want your whole life to look like and feel like.

Because getting clear on what success looks like, it's not just something you want to do during the holiday season. It's a really important aspect of creating a successful and ambitious life.

Knowing the destination, knowing what success for you as an ambitious working mom looks like.

Your brain is craving that level of clarity. It wants to know, am I doing this right? Am I on the right path? Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing what's best for my kids, for my family, for me?

If you've been asking these questions, if these are like the flavor of questions you've been trying to sort out for yourself for some time now, coaching is a process where I will walk you through answering each and every one of them.

Because an ambitious and balanced working mom life is not a confusing life. It's not a life that you feel stuck in or it feels ambiguous to you.

I want you to experience crystal clarity with where you are right now in the direction that you are taking. Your career, your family, your life. I want it to feel unquestionable.

The coaching process.

We do that in coaching by creating what I like to call your compass. We put words to the deeper parts of who you are, naming your purpose. We name your identity and we name your values.

And then we put all those words together and we say, hey, what is this saying about my life? What is it saying about what I want in my life? What is this saying about where I'm headed in life?

And then you start to make some decisions about how you want to prioritize your life. How do you want to create balance? Where do you want to take your career?

You start making all of those decisions from this place of feeling very certain and right about who you are and what's most important to you.

Do you want to stop guessing if you're on the right path?

If you want to stop guessing if you're doing the right thing, now is the time before the end of the year to start the coaching process.

Of course, we'll take off a little bit of time over the holidays, but what you're going to have is a framework not only for you to end this year well, but how to head into the next one with a really solid plan for how to create that ambitious and balanced life that you want.

To learn more about coaching and to schedule a free breakthrough call where we can discuss the logistics of coaching and make sure we're a good fit, you can simply go to my website at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com to learn a lot more and to book a call.

All right, working moms, I will talk to you in just a couple of days as we talk about the next mistake that working moms make that tend to create a lot of stress and overwhelm this holiday season.

Until then, let's get to it.

Hey there. Just a quick word of encouragement to not give up.

There is still time before the end of the year to invest in yourself and your goal of becoming an ambitious and balanced working mom.

Your brain probably thinks it could just wait till the new year to start afresh. But I want to let you in on a little secret, something that I've observed in only my best clients that get the fastest results with me in coaching.

Here it is. You ready?

They don't wait.

Now is always the time to take a step towards your goals and it starts with scheduling a free breakthrough call with me. This is an opportunity for us to decide if we're a good fit and to discuss your personalized coaching plan for 2024.

To learn more about coaching and to book your free call, simply go to my website www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com thanks for listening and let's get to it.