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Hope is a requirement if you’re going to reach your goals as a working mom. When you feel fueled with hope you are able to problem solve, troubleshoot and remain on track toward your goals but when you feel hopeless, you spin in disbelief, impossibility and feel immobilized by challenges. In today’s episode I am sharing two very specific examples of what it looks like to go after your goals when you’re fueled with hope or when you’re not.
Topics in this episode:
Why 4 working moms told me our conversation fueled them with hope and why that matters
Hope is the energy behind your ability to meet your goals
Hopelessness creates catastrophizing and evidence for why your goals are not possible
Hope fuels good problem solving, resiliency and ideation
A personal story about my own struggle with hopelessness as a new mom
Show Notes:
When you fuel your goals with hope and a specific plan, they become inevitable. I can help build your belief and give you a process to meet your goal of becoming a successful working mom at both work and home. Click here to learn more about coaching and schedule a free call: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/coaching
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Transcript
Intro
Hope is the plausible belief in something that has yet to happen. Hope is a requirement if you're going to reach your goals as a working mom. I want you to imagine having a goal of losing 10lbs but having no hope that it's possible. Do you think that person is going to lose weight? Probably not, because hope is the fuel behind which you move toward your goals.
Hope is not to be underestimated
And in today's episode, I'm sharing two very specific examples of what it looks like to go after your goals. When you're fueled with hope or when you're not. Hope is not to be underestimated. If you find yourself spinning trying to figure out how to reach your goals as an ambitious working mom, or if you find yourself not creating a plan towards those goals or not following through with the plans that you have, likely you lack hope. I explain it all right here in today's episode. 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.
Working moms, I've been having a lot of breakthrough calls with some amazing working moms lately. If you don't know, a breakthrough call is essentially a free coaching call that I offer to any working mom that is interested in working with me, interested in getting to know more about what we do in coaching. And I've had several of them over the last few weeks and four in specific last week.
And at the end of all four of those calls, all four of the women said exactly the same thing, and it just really struck me and gave me pause. So much so that I am here writing a podcast on it.
At the end of not only my breakthrough calls, but in a lot of my calls with my clients, I usually end with a very specific question. And that question is, what do you think you are most walking away with from our time today?
It's a really important last question because it gives your brain a moment to sort of sift through all of the thoughts and all of the experiences that it just had in the last 60 minutes or so and kind of select one as being the focal point. It helps synthesize all of the information and kind of turn it into a digestible takeaway.
So I'm on these calls with these amazing women, and at the end of the breakthrough call, I asked them, what are you most walking away with from our time? All four of these women said the same exact thing. They said hope. A few of them even had tears in their eyes as they said it, as if they hadn't experienced that kind of hope in a while.
Hope is powerful.
Now, I don't know about you and what you think in particular about hope, or if you're someone that experiences a lot of hope, but for these women, hope was powerful. It was foundational. It was exactly what they needed in this call.
When women get on a breakthrough call with me, we have this very powerful conversation about their goals, their dreams, their vision, and we really dig into it. We talk about exactly what would be different in their life if they had everything that they wanted in this vision. We talk about how their interactions with their kids would be different, how the dynamic in their marriage would be different. We talk about how their happiness and their job would be different.
Getting clear on our vision and goals.
And then after we get really clear on that vision, we talk about what's getting in the way of them having that life, having that vision kind of be fulfilled. And then I offer to them a step by step plan on how we're going to get them there, kind of where they are today, to where they want to be with this vision that we just discussed, and how we're going to do that in coaching.
Now, for most women, when they get on this call, they have no clue if the life that they dream of living is even possible for them. We live in a culture that tells us that women are better suited to be with our kids more than men. Studies show that we've come a long way in there being equality in our workplace, but not in our home life. We still believe on some level, it's best for women to be home with the children.
The Motherhood Penalty.
We don't have a society that values the next generation, because if they did, the motherhood penalty wouldn't exist. Women would make the same amount as men. Working moms would make the same amount as working dads in that same job. Working moms would make the same amount as women that are not moms in the same role. But because there's a gap between men and women and between moms and non moms, it shows that we don't value what a working mom brings to our culture and that we are, in fact, penalized for being a mom.
I did a whole podcast on the motherhood Penalty, and I will link to that in the show notes because there's so much research that shows that we have a long way to go as a society for women to be equal to men in both the workplace and in their home life and to be equal to just other women that aren't moms.
I just got off the phone with a client of mine a little bit ago who just had her annual review, and she told me that the review went fine, except that her boss told her, seemingly in these very specific words, he told her that she's doing really well. Essentially as well as she could be for being a mom. And that the only reason why she was not rated higher in her annual review was because she was a mom and because she had priorities outside of her job. Wow. You better believe I was all over that as we were talking, and she told me that she stood up for herself, and he sort of backtracked.
Women have a whole lot of reasons to have lost hope.
But the point is, women have a whole lot of reasons to have lost hope. To not believe that their dream of success in their career and the motherhood experience that they want is possible for them. Because we still have a society and a culture that is embedded within it that we have to choose.
At the heart of hope is belief.
Hope essentially, is reasonable belief in something that has yet to happen. It's the emotion that surfaces when you believe that things will turn out the way that you want. You can't have hope without belief and the likelihood that you will reach your goals. Any goal without belief, without hope, is virtually none.
Think about that for a moment. If you want to lose 10lbs and you have no hope, you have no belief that that is going to happen, it would have to be luck in order for it to happen. What's the likelihood of you going after a dream, starting that dream business, becoming a consultant and setting your own hours? What's the likelihood that that dream is going to take place? If you don't have any hope, if you don't believe that that's possible and that you'll be successful at it, it would be crazy, right? That's not going to happen.
Hope - a plausible belief in your goals and the life that you want is a requirement if you are going to make it happen. Otherwise, you're just leaving it up to chance.
And I think that's what struck me in these conversations last week with these women. All four of them said that they were walking away with hope with a plausible belief. That the vision that they had just shared with me of working less hours, of feeling more calm, of making confident decisions, of feeling happy, of advocating for themselves, of being present and actually shutting down work from their brain. For some of them, there was, like this secret dream of leaving their job and doing something that they've always dreamed about doing. This vision, by the end of our call, felt possible, possibility, hope.
Hope is the starting point to making your goals and your dreams happen.
But I really want you to understand why. I want you to really see the difference between someone that is filled with hope, that is filled with plausible belief in their goals, versus someone that's not. And I'm going to give you two examples.
The first one I'm choosing because it's simple. I know it's something that all mothers can relate to, and it's actually my own personal experience. And that is, our children sleeping.
When my daughter Lillian was born, she was a decent sleeper, but it was a huge struggle to get her to go back to sleep in the middle of the night. I would get up, I would nurse her and then sometimes be up with her for two, three, four hours as she cried and generally was just awake in the middle of the night.
“I lived in this state of hopelessness…”
Now, I know everyone struggles when they're sleep deprived, but let me just tell you, I am a terrible human being when I lack sleep. Tears abound, irritation is high, yelling is common. I have meltdowns when I am overly tired, as I know so many other people do. So with my first, I was in a terrible state of sleep deprivation and it was affecting everything. Being a first time mom, I really didn't know what to do. Probably more than anything, I just lived in this state of hopelessness. I quite seriously did not know if I would ever sleep through the night again.
I did not know if there was something majorly wrong with my daughter, who I know I'm catastrophizing this, but that's kind of what tends to happen when someone lacks belief or lacks hope. I quite literally did not know if she would ever become someone that would sleep in the middle of the night. I would make up stories in my head about her sleep problems and how unique they must be. I would victimize myself and her because I lacked hope and belief that anything could be different. I would simply wake up each day and do absolutely everything the same way. And you know what resulted from that? Everything remains the same.
Because that's what happens with someone that lacks hope. They don't problem solve how to fix it. They assume it's unfixable, and so they do nothing. And whenever I had these moments, like these glimpses, really, of hope, I would buy a book or I would read a blog or I would talk to a friend. I would have these glimmers of hope where I thought there just must be another way. And I would research the heck out of it for just this moment, because that's what someone does when they have hope. They troubleshoot. They problem solve about how to get to their goal.
But really, I was mostly living in this place of hopelessness most of the time. And so I would attempt to fix the problem. I would attempt to swaddle her or hold her differently, or let her cry or feed in a different way. And then it wouldn't work out. It would fail, right? She would still be up in the middle of the night for lengthy periods of time. And then my brain would make that mean that this truly was hopeless. She was a lost cause. I was a lost cause. This was always going to be this way.
Someone that lacks hope, they use failure as an evidence for how their goal is impossible.
Now, I just want to juxtapose that to my second child. First, let me just tell you that my amazing and wonderful daughter is in fact, now eight and a half, and she does know how to sleep through the night. She is a wonderful, amazing little human being that gets plenty of sleep. She's a champion sleeper now, if you will.
But my son, I never felt hopelessness about his sleep, probably because I saw what happened with my first. I saw how much of a terrible sleeper she was. I watched her figure out how to sleep as she got a little bit older, as she just grew just a little bit, and things ebbed and flowed, and I changed a little bit and so forth. I watched that happen.
And so I assumed that when my son was born and he was struggling with sleep in the middle of the night, he would grow out of it, that we would figure out how to get him to sleep through the night. And because I remained hopeful, whenever my son struggled to get back to sleep in the middle of the night, I would just calmly, with more rational thinking, I would try things. I would swaddle him. I would feed him. I would hold him. I would burp him. I would do all of the things that a mom would do to try to help their kid get back to sleep.
“I stopped catastrophizing and learned from failure instead.”
And when something didn't work, I didn't catastrophize it and make it mean that it was going to be impossible, that he was never going to sleep. I just learned from it. I said, well, that didn't work. I must try something different. I would assume that at some point we would figure out how to get him to sleep through the night, that he and I would figure it out eventually because I had hope. That is what hope does.
So let me break this down for you because I really want to make sure you are hearing what I'm saying in this example.
Someone with hope, because they assume the goal is possible or even probable, they problem solve at a much deeper level.
They research, they try things. They learn from their failures. And they never make failure mean that their goal is impossible. Someone with hope does a whole lot less spinning. They simply believe in themselves and their ability to reach their goals. It's almost like they carry around this identity that says, I can figure this out.
People with hope create plans.
Someone with hope creates a plan for how to potentially meet their goals because they know that if they just wake up tomorrow and do exactly the same thing that they did today, nothing's going to change. So they have to do something different. They have to decide what they're going to do in order to reach their goals.
People with hope make decisions.
Someone with hope makes decisions, sometimes hard ones, and sometimes without really knowing if their plan will succeed or fail. They just simply make the decision and learn from it and move forward.
Now let's juxtapose that against someone that lacks hope, just like I did, believing that my daughter was never going to learn how to sleep through the night. Someone that lacks hope spirals likely daily. They question themselves all of the time not trusting that anything they're doing is right.
Someone without hope, like in my situation, catastrophizes, they take one failure and assume that it means they will always fail.
Hope is the energy or the driver behind a whole lot of action.
Someone without hope doesn't create a plan. A plan almost never even crosses their mind because they don't even believe that the goal is possible to begin with. So why plan hope? it's not just a belief. Hope is the energy or the driver behind a whole lot of action. And I want to offer to you one more example of someone that is fueled by hope and someone that's not just to help you really create this picture of how important hope is and really what it does for you in attaining your goals.
Let's talk about someone that has the goal of not just changing jobs, but changing industries as well. Like, they don't just want to go to another company and do exactly the same thing. And they don't want to leave their experience behind either. They want to just pivot into something new.
Someone that is a ten out of ten in belief and hope that this job pivot is going to happen for them. What do they do? They research possible pivots. They network. They adjust their LinkedIn and their resume to show a different flavor of their job experience. They look at job postings with an open mind, not disregarding anything just because they don't have the experience or just maybe because the benefits aren't quite right. They evaluate their job searching. They think, okay, what's working here? What's giving me traction, what's not?
They're even willing to invest money in making it happen. Hiring a resume writer, hiring a coach to help them dig down deep into what they want and where their value lies. And when they hit dead ends or get nowhere in an application process, they just move on and they keep searching.
They assume they will figure out that next job. They stay strong in what they know. Their strengths are what they know their value is to their company or to any company. Even when they face 20 no's, 30 no's, it doesn't waver.
Can you see this person? It's hard not to believe that this person, that this person with hope and plausible belief is not going to eventually meet their goal, is it? You're just sort of on their side. You're rooting for them, watching them, rooting for them when they fall down and get back up again when they fail and when they don't get that job interview or when they don't get that job. We're rooting for them because we know that eventually they're going to meet their goal.
Now let's talk about a person that has the same goal as a career pivot, but they lack hope. Or maybe their hope just kind of wavers in and out a little bit. Their journey probably looks a lot more like this.
When you lack hope…
They think about how they want their life to be different and how unhappy they are in their current position and role, but they don't do anything about it. They sort of poke around on LinkedIn and they update their resume. But when they’re invited for coffee dates or networking seem to sort of come up dry, they make that mean that this pivot is probably not possible for them or it's just going to be really, really hard.
They may apply for a couple of jobs that seem interesting, but they don't make it past the application process and they sort of spin and how they just don't have enough experience. They don't know how they're going to get these jobs and how this career pivot is going to work for them.
Rather than staying open to possibilities, this person starts their job search based on their current experience and is unable to get past jobs where they lack some of the key responsibilities that are indicated in the job postings.
They close themselves off to conversations that might lead them into a company where maybe the first job isn't right for them, but maybe the second or the third one is.
Their brain is so focused on how they're not qualified for things. Instead of pushing themselves to think about how they are, you feel the difference. Can you feel their hopelessness?
Hope is the starting point.
How successful do you think this person is going to be in reaching their goal of pivoting jobs? Which one is going to get there first? Hope is the starting point. It's the fuel. It's the energy behind which you go after your goals. Hope is no small thing. It's the gust of wind across an ember that then grows and grows and grows. Hope is what I want for you. Hope is what's necessary for you to have the life that you want.
On my breakthrough calls with women, sometimes I ask them on a scale from one to 10 - 10 being you're 100% in belief and one being that you're not in belief at all, where would you put yourself in believing that your dream is possible for you?
And if their belief is low, I ask them what they think the possibility is of ever reaching their goal with their belief at just a two, a three, or a four or even a five. And their answer is always, it's probably not going to happen.
Confidence in yourself and your ability to reach your goals is an essential part of the process.
And then I explained to them how the very first step in coaching that we would be working on together is the need to believe not just in their goals, but that they are someone that can meet those goals. Confidence in themselves and their ability to reach their goals is an essential part of the process.
And then those that might be a little bit higher on the belief scale, we talk about why they feel stuck. And almost always what they tell me is they feel like they lack the process. They know it's possible for them, they see other people achieving their goals and they just feel stuck on how to move from point A to point B. And then I share with them that coaching is that process that they're looking for.
I share with them exactly how I am going to help them reach their goals. We talk about the three to five steps that it's going to take for them to get to where they are right now, to where they want to be so their brain can see the process that is required for them to move forward to reach their goals.
Where are you at in the belief scale?
And so I want to leave you with that today. Where are you at in the belief scale? One being you don't believe at all and ten being you believe 100%, where would you put yourself in reaching your goals?
I would say if you're like a six or seven even or below, this is your starting point to build your belief that what you want is 100% possible for you. It's not just plausible, it's probable to fuel your brain with these types of thoughts that your life is possible. The process, the problem solving, the willingness to try and fail, all those things that are required for you to go after big goals in your life, those things are going to happen when you believe.
Schedule a free breakthrough call.
And if you need help believing or you need help in creating a process for yourself to get to your goals, just like these amazing women I have spoken with recently that have walked away with hope. The first step is to schedule a free breakthrough call with me. We're going to do exactly the same thing that I talked about here in this call. We're going to talk about a vision that you have for your life. We're going to get super clear on that. We're going to talk about what's getting in the way of you achieving that. I'm going to walk you through exactly what we'll do in coaching and exactly how we're getting you there together.
To book that call, you can go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book. As always, there is a link to that in the show notes.
Working moms, believe that your goals are possible. It's the first step, and the most vital step in guaranteeing your goals happen.
Have a great week working moms, and let's get to it.
