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For many working moms “having it all” feels like an impossible promise where a meaningful career and life as a mom somehow feel balanced. The problem is, most women don’t have an accurate understanding of what “having it all” means and so they are chasing a life that doesn’t exist which ultimately leads to burn out. Today, I am setting the record straight. I am sharing exactly what “having it all” means to our culture, the missing piece of the puzzle that creates a “have it all” kind of life and then offer the first step in making it happen.
Topics in this episode:
Is “having it all” possible or just simply a myth?
What is required to create a “having it all” life?
The importance of knowing the trade-off’s
Why having an inbox at zero or a to-do list checked off doesn’t matter in a “have it all” life
Why you may need to just leave the dishes dirty in the sink
Show Notes:
I can help you decide and create a “have it all” kind of life. Clikc here to learn more about how the coaching process works and to schedule a free call: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/coaching
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Transcript
Intro
Is having it all possible or just simply a myth? It's certainly something that feels promised to us when we're kids, but in reality, it is much harder than it sounds and maybe even wishful thinking.
In today's podcast, I'm getting to the heart of what it means to create a have it all kind of life. There is something that I have found missing that gets in the way of most working moms creating the life that they want, and I dive deep into it in this episode and then I leave you with a simple exercise to get you closer to that having it all kind of life. 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, working moms. How is everybody doing today?
My eight year old daughter and I sat down with a calendar and put everything in it that we are doing between now and basically the end of summer when school starts again for her in the fall, because I have been in the thick of trying to figure out schedules and summer camps and vacations and family coming into town and all the things, and my daughter is very structured and she does a lot better when she can foresee her schedule and anticipate.
And so we sat down with a calendar and we were marking it with all of our commitments and vacations and activities and, oh, my gosh, we have a lot of stuff coming up. We do not have a free weekend until the second weekend of June, essentially. That's craziness to me. That's like seven weeks or something like that, that we are totally packed with things to do.
And as an extrovert and somebody that likes adventure and fun, and I'm really excited about all these wonderful things that we have to do. And, also as someone that values really deep connection and friendship and lingering meals and spontaneous things with my neighbors and community, there's, like, no time for that.
So there's like a mixed bag going on for me in all that we have going on. And I know that for a lot of people, spring is when things really kick it into gear for them and kid activities and vacations and travel. And for people that are kind of in the business corporate world, spring is often a very busy time before the summer. So it feels like a really appropriate time to talk about something that really needs to be better understood - and that is what it means to have it all.
We are fighting for a life of having it all.
Now, if you were looking at me, you would see I just put that in quotes, right? Have it all. It's a term, it's a phrase that we use. And I feel like this is something that we are promised in our culture, particularly in American culture and as women. It is something that we're almost fighting for, wanting to prove to the world that it's possible for us, that a life of having it all is possible.
And I actually would really love to hear from you. I'd love to get an email from you with your thoughts on this. I'm curious if you think that having it all is a myth.
Do you believe having it all is actually possible for you?
Now, I know some people like to skirt around this question by saying having it all is possible, it's just not possible at the same time. And that's not what I'm talking about here - I want to know if you believe that having it all right now is possible for you or for really anyone, or is that promise a myth?
Now, I'm going to be sharing with you my thoughts, of course, in just a bit. But I want to talk about what it means to have it all, because this is where I see a lot of the problem begin for people.
Now, traditionally or kind of in our culture, how we tend to paint this picture of having it all is, at least for women, it means having a meaningful career that pays well. It means having a family that gets prioritized. It means having a healthy, good looking body. It means having enough money for a house for nice vacations or other kind of bigger ticketed items. Having it all means time for yourself. It means time for friends. It means date nights with your spouse. It means plenty of time for your kids. Your house is probably neat and tidy. Are these things possible or is it a myth?
Now, there's probably some of you here that says, yes, this should be possible. It's not like I'm asking for something extraordinary, right? You just want a good career. You want a stable income. You want a family that you have time for, right? And a life that you have time for outside of work. This shouldn't be so hard. And then the other half of you hear this list and it feels completely overwhelming. And for sure, you do not believe that this is possible. Something big out of this list has to be sacrificed. You cannot have a meaningful career because it doesn't pay enough. You can't have the time with your family like you want because you wouldn't be successful at your job if you did.
And to be honest, I have clients in both camps. I have those that come to me knowing that having it all and essentially some form of work life balance is possible for them. They just don't have the tools to manage their imbalanced behaviors and mindsets.
And then I have those that come to me convinced that they have to let go of something, which is usually their job, because you can't let go of your kids and your family, and they desperately need help trying to sort out what to do.
We want the journey of having it all to feel easy.
And here's what I think - a lot of our problems stem from the traditional ways that we think about having it all. There is something missing from this list that I gave you, the list of career and family and workout time and date nights. There's something missing from the way we traditionally think about this, and what is missing is that we want all of these things, and we want it to feel easy.
We want all of these things, and we never want to battle distraction. We want it all, and we want it with ease. That is a more accurate description or definition of what we traditionally view as having it all.
I want to leave work at 5:30pm every day to go home and be with my kids and feel like I'm spending enough time with them and prioritizing them. But I don't want to leave any emails unanswered, because then my brain will be distracted when I'm with my family, and I don't want to have to battle that distraction.
So having it all means having a balanced schedule without anybody needing anything from you at the end of the workday.
Having it all means I get to leave work at 5:30pm and everything is checked off my to do list.
Having it all means getting out the door at 5:30pm without any competing priorities for your time or your energy. Nobody needs anything from you. I've done everything I'm supposed to do for the day, and everyone is happy with me.
You want it all, and you want it to feel easy.
You want to have time to work out, to read a good book, to go out with friends, to have a date night with your spouse, but you want it to feel easy. You don't want to feel any guilt for leaving your kids because you already spend eight plus hours away from them every single day. You want to be able to come home unapologetically without any guilt and go out. You want it all, and you want it to be easy.
You want to clean the house, you want it to be tidy, but you don't want to pay an exorbitant amount for a house cleaner. And you don't want to spend all of that time yourself cleaning. And you don't want to spend the energy or the effort working with your husband or your family to try to figure out how to more equally share the load. They should just do it on their own and be better at it. You don't want to have to work at it. You want it to be easy.
Having it all is probably not a life of working on the weekends or even in the evening. So you want that, but you want your boss to be supportive of it. You don't want your team or your boss or your clients to be sending you things when you're off in the evening or on the weekends. You want them to be respectful of your time so that they don't message you at all hours. And then you feel like you need to answer them. You want it all and you want it to be easy.
Are you following me here?
My question to you was, is having it all a myth? And my answer to you is no.
It's essentially what I've built my business on. I help amazing, ambitious working women just like yourself learn the tools that are required to create a habit of having it all kind of life. But it's not going to be easy.
In fact, having it all requires constraint. Not restraint, which feels somewhat oppressive and forceful, but constraint, thoughtful, intentional decisions where you choose one thing and not another.
Now, I think it's a little ironic that having it all requires constraint because it feels sort of opposite, right? Having it all, just like we talked about, we think should feel really good. It should feel abundant. It should be like having everything. It's a life where you're kind of going all in, right?
Well, constraint feels like you're sort of holding yourself back. It feels sort of constricting, if you will. And, my whole body is kind of like pushing against this invisible barrier, right? That's kind of what constraint feels like. There's like a push and a pull to it where you have to hold yourself back.
Yet I have worked personally with hundreds of working moms, helping them through a process of figuring out how to have it all kind of life and balancing life. And I've done this over the past seven years. And I have taught literally hundreds of thousands of women through trainings and through my podcast here, and through countless conversations that I've had with women about this subject.
Having it all requires constraint.
What I know is that having it all requires constraint. It requires you choosing some things and not choosing others, even when it's hard.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a session with a client who was deconstructing this idea of having it all. Sort of the same conversation we're having here today. And she realized that having it all meant having time for all the things that we've talked about here. And it meant leaving work every day with everything feeling buttoned up, client charts taken care of and updated emails down to zero, a to-do list that's cleared and checked off.
It meant before going out or before any time of fun, either for just herself or with her family, it meant that all the dishes were done and all the laundry was folded and the house didn't need anything from her.
Defining what having it all means to you.
And as we took the time to really define for her what having it all really meant, let me tell you, always having the dishes clean, always having the laundry folded, never having anybody need anything from her via email. Those things were not on the list. They weren't really what was important to her in a having it all kind of life. In fact, they were the things that she had to trade off in order to have everything that she actually wanted for me.
If I talked more personally about this, part of my definition of having it all is having a successful and thriving coaching business. But I work from home and my house is under 1000sqm, have two young kiddos, six and eight years old. You can imagine that my house gets very cluttered, very easy. There really isn't anywhere to hide a mess. And so one of the things I realized that I had to trade off was having a very orderly and tidy house because that got in the way of me being able to be productive and run a successful business.
And so, to be honest, I had to flat out decide I was never going to do the dishes. I cannot begin to tell you how difficult this was for me in the beginning. I have a type A personality. I'm an enneagram one, which means I'm a perfectionist. I like things to be orderly and structured and clear.
Trade off’s you make when living a life of having it all.
But you know what? In order for everything to be orderly and structured and clean and clear, it took away from my ability to run my business and be present with my family.
And look, I know I'm going to get to the end of my life and I'm not going to remember a clean and orderly house when my kids were five and eight. I'm going to remember the spontaneous walks, the T ball game we had as a family in the backyard one day.
I'm going to remember the lives that I've changed and the women that I've worked with through my business.
I'm going to remember connecting with my husband and going out for dinner with the family.
So the house is, more often than not, way messier than I ever imagined it would be. And it certainly is way messier than it ever was before I had kids. I leave every breakfast dish from my kids and myself, and I leave all of my lunch dishes and all of the dishes that I created in making their lunches. I leave all of it out on the counter completely unwashed because it's not a part of a life of having it all for me. And I would rather spend my time and energy and mental space focusing on the things that matter to me.
I had another client that realized that in her sort of default definition of having it all was always being on time. And I could totally relate to that. And again, she didn't know this until we really started to talk about it, but her brain really thought that always being on time was an important part of having it all and having a life that she wanted.
But in order to always be on time for everything, she realized that she was sacrificing connection time with her kids because oftentimes being on time was, at an expense of them.
She's got two young kids, like two and four. And if you have kids at that age, or really kids at any age, you know that it takes like ten times longer to get out the door. So she was always rushing them, she was always pushing them out and she could feel her kids stress and her stress as she was trying to get them out the door and be on time every single day for school.
And I know she's not the only one. Some of you out there right now feel totally called out because you get it, right? And when she decided to let go of the idea of being on time as a part of a life, of having it all, what she found was these are really special moments with her kids that she never realized were there.
Moments where she got to help them put on their shoes while looking them in the eye and telling them how much she loves them and telling them that they're going to figure out how to do this one day. She was missing moments where she could just let her kids have really big feelings about going to school and not squash them, where she could teach her kids that being frustrated or upset or a little anxious about going to school is totally okay, that she relates to it, that she gets to it.
She was essentially missing out on being the connected mom that she wanted to be in exchange for being on time. This was how my client had to constrain her life in order to truly have it all in the way that she defined it.
Intentionally deciding not to do something.
Now, when I think about the word constraint in this context, what I mean is to intentionally decide not to do something or not prioritize something for the prioritization of something else.
Having it all is not about ease. It's not a life where every box is checked and every opportunity that is available to you or possible to you is actually done. Instead, it is a life of constraint where the priorities that really matter to you, the experiences that you don't want to compromise on, are prioritized above all others.
And what that requires is trade offs. It requires prioritization, which means doing one thing and not doing something else. And you're actually really good at this already. There isn't a moment in your day where you are not trading off something for something else.
Most of the time, your trade offs are not thought of on a conscious level. For example, in order for you to be listening to this podcast right now, you're trading something off. Maybe you're listening during work, and so you're trading off having a completely focused mind on checking off your to dos. Or maybe you're listening to this in the car with your kids and you're trading off time that you could be having a conversation with them. Or maybe you're listening to this alone in your car and you're just trading off listening to another podcast or calling a friend or listening to some music in order to be able to listen to this podcast.
You are always choosing something and not choosing something else. That's trading off, that's prioritization.
And what I want for you and the work I do in coaching with all my clients is to bring those trade offs, to bring those choices to a very conscious level so you can decide if you want to continue to make those trade offs. If the trade offs that you're making are the ones that actually feel worth it to you, are they the ones that you want for your life?
That is a life of having it all. A life where everything you decide to do, however you decide to spend the precious minutes of your day and your life, that it is chosen, that it is decided on a very conscious and intentional level, it feels purposeful to you and desired.
So here's where I want you to start. I want you to make a list of what having it all really means to you and I want it to be specific. It's not just time with your family, it's 20 minutes of uninterrupted focused time with your kids every night at the end of a workday. It's reading to them before they go to bed and being available to them for impromptu conversation during that time.
You need to decide what having it all truly means to you and be specific.
It's not just date nights or time with your spouse. It is connected conversation. It is regular intimacy. It's conversations that don't just deal with the logistics of our kids' lives. You need to decide what having it all truly means to you and be specific.
And then I want you to think of what having it all does not mean. Essentially, what are you going to have to trade off in order to make that life you want happen. You might have to trade off being 100% available to your team. You're probably going to have to trade off getting back to people always in a very responsive way. You're going to have to trade off dirty dishes in the sink. You're going to have to trade off always being on time. You're going to have to trade off saying yes to every meeting request. You're going to have to trade off your clients and your coworkers feeling 100% supported by you all of the time.
What are you going to have to trade off?
Make that list of the things that having it all really means to you in a lot of specificity and then think about essentially what are you going to have to trade off to make that life happen. What does having it all not mean?
The goal is to bring all of this to consciousness so that you can actually begin the process of prioritizing the things that actually matter to you and letting go of the things that don't.
And I know I say this every week, and it's because I really mean it - I can help. I know for so many women that they are spinning all of the plates in their life. They're just trying to keep all of them going without breaking.
They're trying to be a present mom, a connected wife, an advocate for their team, a fearless leader in their company. They're trying to be the executive planner for their household. They're trying to be the cleaner. They're trying to be the one that is helping their kids make good decisions, and it's leading them to burnout.
You don't need a sabbatical in order to figure out how to manage your life.
You don't need to wait until your next big vacation to get rest.
You don't need to count down the minutes to your weekend in order to find joy in what you do.
Creating a life you don’t need a break from.
That is what we do in coaching. We create a life that you don't want a break from or need a break from. We create a life that feels clear, it feels intentional, where you know the things that are most important to you and exactly what you need to do and how you need to do it in order to make it happen.
The coaching journey starts by booking a free breakthrough call. This is a chance for us to connect and talk about what's really going on in your life. Talk about what you want your priorities to be and what's getting in the way of you making them a priority, and then to discuss all the logistics of how we're going to move forward together in coaching.
As always, there's a link in the show notes where you can learn more about coaching and book that call. But very simply, you can go to my website at, www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com for more information.
Having it all is possible.
Yes, having it all is possible. It's not a myth, but it is going to require discomfort. It's going to require you to prioritize some things and not others. I'm not going to lie, having it all is not easy. It will require effort and it will always feel worth it.
All right, working moms. Can't wait to talk to you next week, and until then, let's get to it.
