Follow the show:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Everywhere else
Last week I challenged my client, Lindsay, to do something luxurious. Something that felt a little excessive (maybe even a little irresponsible). As a high achiever, her brain was stuck in trying to make the most of her time and I wanted her to focus less on productivity and more on doing things that simply felt good. She accepted my challenge and in today’s episode I am offering the same challenge to you. You deserve to live a life of luxury, a life of great comfort! I will give you several ideas that Lindsay and I came up with and share more about what this challenge is and how irresponsibility, guilt and a lack of worthiness are getting in the way, and then what to do about them.
Topics in this episode:
What is the luxury challenge?
Lindsay’s story from breakthrough call to mid-day naps and baths
Luxury and lots of money are not connected
It is not irresponsible to be luxurious
3 feelings that get in the way of living a luxurious life
Show Notes & References:
End your “not enough” thinking and create for yourself a life that feels luxurious without changing jobs or making more money by signing up for a free breakthrough call where you will walk away with an “ah-ha” and an opportunity to coach with me: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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
Enjoying the podcast?
Make sure you don’t miss a single episode! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or where ever you listen to podcasts.
Leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.
Transcript
Intro
This week on the podcast, I'm challenging you to commit to doing something luxurious for yourself, something that feels a little excessive, maybe even a little irresponsible.
This challenge came from a conversation I had with a client last week in her session, where her brain was a little confused and overwhelmed with what to do with some of her extra time and energy she had had since we started coaching together.
And rather than have her fill that time with all of the things that she hasn't been able to get to over the last several months or even years, I challenged her to fill some of her time with things that felt luxurious.
And, in today's episode, I'm offering that same challenge to you.
You deserve to live a life of luxury.
And no, luxury and money do not go hand in hand - I will dive deep into that in this episode, too.
You deserve to live a life of great comfort.
I'll share more about the challenge and how irresponsibility, guilt, and a lack of worthiness get in the way and help you even overcome them. 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. I had a really fun coaching session with one of my clients last week, and it's prompting me to write this podcast.
This is going to be such a fun episode.
It just really brings a big smile to my face just as I'm starting to talk about it. So I hope that you can receive some of that really fun energy from me and take that in and really walk away with something special in this episode today.
So let me tell you what was going on with this client and about our coaching session.
Her name was Lindsay, and as you know, with all of my clients, our conversations around coaching always start with a breakthrough call.
This is a 60 Minutes call where we talk about what it is you really want, how we're going to get you there in coaching, and ultimately, we come to a decision on whether coaching together really feels like the right next step for you.
Now, I call this a breakthrough call for a reason. I quite literally want you to have an AHA moment, a breakthrough on the call. And I remember Lindsay's breakthrough call very specifically.
Lindsay’s story.
She's an attorney and has been at her company for quite some time, but she was super unhappy and feeling really overworked. And she'd been offered a position at a different company, which she had accepted.
She was coming to coaching because she did not want to repeat her same bad habits that had contributed to her feeling super burned out in her last job.
Lindsay knew that some of her burnout, some of her overworking, some of her unhappiness was her employer and the job itself. And she knew some of it was her.
And it felt like this was the moment where she really wanted to dive into her own habits and her own behaviors and make sure that her kids were prioritized over her work.
She didn't want to work 40 hours anymore in this new job.
She didn't want her mind to be constantly consumed with work in this new job.
She didn't want to feel like she was letting everyone down if she didn't get back to them right away in this new job.
And that is why she was coming to this breakthrough call and considering coaching with me.
However, she had not yet told her current employer when she was leaving. She hadn't put in her resignation yet at the time of this breakthrough call. And this is where the breakthrough happened for her.
What she really wanted was to take several weeks off between the jobs. I want to say it was like three weeks. She wanted to rest. She wanted her kids to go to school and for her to have her own time.
She wanted time for herself. She wanted to read books, she wanted to relax.
But her achieving brain kept telling her that she couldn't do that. She needed to get started on the right foot. She needed to show her dedication to the new company.
She didn't want them to feel upset or put out or disappointed that she would be delaying her start date. Even though she really wanted to take several weeks off. She was kind of resigning to the idea that she was just going to make it one.
Now, we haven't even started coaching together yet, right? This is just her breakthrough call.
Commit to the vision of the life that you want.
But I believe that our coaching relationship is established in this very first call. That's why it's such an important call to have. It's where you really commit to the vision of the life that you want and the goals that you have as we're talking about them.
And oftentimes on this call, I coach you on those goals before we've even begun the coaching process.
What is stopping you from achieving your goals?
We talk about what's getting in the way of you achieving those goals right now. That's a big part of this breakthrough call. And I call you out on the behavior that is not in alignment with what that goal is.
So she's coming to coaching or she's coming to this breakthrough call thinking about coaching because she doesn't want to make her work the priority anymore.
Not that she doesn't want work to be important and she doesn't want to do good work and she doesn't want to be successful - she just doesn't want work to consume her in the way that it has in the past.
And here, right here on this call was an opportunity to do just that, to prioritize herself instead of work, to prioritize rest and leisure and fun and connection with her kids instead of work. And yet she wasn't going to do it until I wouldn't let her.
I showed her that the same mindset that was driving her to over prioritize work and constantly feel consumed by work was the same mindset that was making this decision right now on how much time off she would take between jobs.
And I asked her if that was the mindset that she thought should be making this decision. Clearly, the answer was no.
And ultimately, our time in coaching would be to establish a new mindset, a new way of thinking and feeling that would have her prioritizing her family and her life outside of work.
But this was her first opportunity to make a decision in a new way with new priorities and a new mindset.
And she felt so uncomfortable because this was where the rubber hits the road. She thought she had six months to work on it. I was suggesting to her I was giving her the opportunity to jumpstart it right then and there. And it felt so deeply uncomfortable to her that she almost felt paralyzed by it.
As a little side note here, one of the questions that I get from women a lot that are interested in coaching with me is how long does it take them to start feeling something different, to start meeting their goals?
And the answer is really that it's different for everyone. It depends on the person, it depends on the goals, it depends on the situation. It depends on how self aware you are.
Going after our goals even when it feels uncomfortable.
But what I guarantee is the faster you're willing to move towards your goals, even when it feels uncomfortable and hard, the faster you're going to get there 100%.
It's going to feel uncomfortable to think differently, to operate differently, to prioritize differently, whether that decision is today or it's a decision you're making in three months or it's a decision you're making from six months from now.
In coaching, I'm going to help give you lots of tools to lessen that discomfort and to make sure that you feel like you're making the right decisions for you.
But you will progress much faster if you just are simply willing to jump all into it and start making changes today the moment you realize there's an opportunity to do so.
And so this was her moment, this was Lindsay's moment, where she could decide to make a decision based on what feels good to her, what supported her goals of rest and joy and, prioritization of family and not work.
Or she could make a decision in the old way, which was to make sure nobody was disappointed and to make sure that everybody was feeling like they were supported by her and felt good and nobody was feeling like they weren't getting the best from her and that she was giving all of herself.
That would have been the old way to do it, but the old way would have her take less time off and her not feel rested and totally connected with a clean mind to dive right into that job.
This was her moment.
In the end, what she decided to do was take the three weeks off and she also decided to coach with me in that call as well.
And I remember she said that first week was really hard, but after that, she was so grateful to have that time of rest and to just sort life out a little bit and reconnect back to herself again.
Cultivating a new mindset.
It was a really good kind of restart a reboot for her as she started the coaching process with me and began to cultivate that new mindset that was going to really serve her best in this new job.
All right, I know that was a bit of a tangent of talking about Lindsay's breakthrough call, but I think it's a really important setup to what this conversation was that I had with Lindsay last week.
So Lindsay's been in this job now for a few months and it feels amazing to her.
The company actually promotes a bit of work life balance, encourages their employees to use their PTO to prioritize their family to do what they just need to do in life, which has really, really helped her uncover where it is in her life that she was the problem.
Because now the company wasn't asking her to over prioritize work, the company wasn't asking her to work past her normal hours, but she was still feeling inclined to do that.
And so it's given us a lot of opportunity to coach on her own mindsets and behaviors that are getting in the way of her meeting this goal.
But one of the things that came up in this last week is how much more time and energy she seems to have in her day.
It's amazing what happens when you let go of all of the overworking mindsets that have you prioritizing work and feeling like you're not good enough.
That have you staying available to everyone all of the time. And when you let go of that in your head, it's amazing what kind of space you have.
So we're almost three months into coaching and she's about two months into this new job and all of a sudden Lindsay has space, just like she had space in the three weeks between jobs.
And so I challenged her last week. I challenged her to not just plan activities and things that she wants to do with this kind of extra space and time, the things that she hasn't really had time to do.
But I challenged her to plan some things that felt luxurious to her.
Luxurious. What a word. I love that word.
I looked it up before I started writing this podcast today. And here's the definition, it means to experience great comfort and extravagant living.
I was challenging Lindsay to plan for some things in her week or in her day, to plan to do some things that felt extravagant, that felt a little excessive.
And I remember she told me, she said, oh, my gosh, this feels so uncomfortable.
And I have to admit, though I've been coaching myself on this topic for a while now, it still feels pretty uncomfortable for me to plan and to do and execute on things that feel luxurious.
Most of us are taught to value responsibility, not luxury. And one of the reasons why you're so good at your job and you've made it as far as you have it's because you're highly responsible. You're not excessive. You make rational choices that fit in with goals, with logic.
And luxury feels kind of like the opposite of that. Luxury feels excessive. It feels unnecessary, it feels irresponsible.
It's simply a state of great comfort.
I know it feels that way, but it's really not. It's simply a state of great comfort. Doesn't that sound amazing, to live a life of great comfort?
And let me be clear. I don't necessarily mean that luxury and money go together. Pause for a minute. Who's the first person you think of when you think of someone living a luxurious life? Who is that?
Now, it's likely someone that has a lot of money, somebody probably pretty famous, where they could spend money somewhat excessively or frivolously on their everyday life.
And it's true that money, and lots of it, can contribute to a luxurious life where you're experiencing great comfort.
But that's not the only way.
I challenged Lindsay to come up with a list, a list of things that she could do that felt luxurious to her. And a couple of things came to mind right away.
She told me the story of her last birthday and how she had gone to trader joe's and purchased, like, a ton of flowers, and she spread them around the house so every room had flowers in it. So that when she woke up in the morning of her birthday, she felt surrounded by beautiful flowers.
It doesn’t have to cost a fortune for luxurious living.
Being surrounded by flowers on a regular basis, where it's not just in your living room or your kitchen, but it's in multiple rooms. That feels luxurious, doesn't it? It's not a lot of money, but it brings this feeling of great comfort, of luxurious living.
She suggested taking a nap was luxurious, and I completely agree with her, particularly when it's right in the middle of your workday. That is a life of extreme comfort, am I right?
To feel tired and then as a response, to go take a nap doesn't cost you anything, but it feels so good, so luxurious.
I challenged her, even maybe it's not a nap, but it's a bath. What if you took a bubble bath in the middle of your workday? How luxurious would that be?
I told her about a eucalyptus delivery I did for a while, there was a eucalyptus farm in California that would send me fresh eucalyptus every month or like, every three weeks. And I just loved it. I loved the smell of eucalyptus.
And it was so wonderful to have this smell permeate my home essentially all of the time. It felt so luxurious, and it was like, $15 a month. It wasn't much.
She mentioned going for a run as being luxurious or working out, and I know so many of you would say that same thing. That all you really want, what would feel so good to you is to be able to work out or go on a run and have just a little me time.
But I challenge you not to think of that as luxury.
“Me time” is an everyday experience - not a luxury. It shouldn't be something that's optional.
That is an everyday experience for you. It should be an everyday experience for you. Your health should be at the top of the list. You deserve that. It shouldn't be something that's optional. It's something that's prioritized. So I don't count that as luxury.
On some level, something luxurious needs to be optional. It's something that you have to choose to do that you don't really have to do.
Your health, working out, going for a run, doing what you need to do for your body to keep you healthy and good and feeling good - that's not optional.
And when we start working together, I want to make sure that's true for you.
All right, so here's my challenge to you. On this podcast, I want you to come up with a list of things that feel luxurious, things that feel somewhat excessive, but just make you feel really good.
A recent luxurious event for me has been signing up for a few wine clubs. That's something my husband and I have always talked about. We enjoy wine. We live near Napa Valley, and we've never joined a wine club. And just last month we joined two.
We already spend money on wine. And joining a wine club is really not all that much more expensive. But it just feels so luxurious to be a part of a club and a winery where we love the wine, where we don't usually drink that type of wine or that elevated kind of wine every day. But now we're going to have more access to it.
It feels so excessive to me to be a part of a wine club. I know I could just go to the store and get good wine, but it just feels so good, so fun, so exciting. I feel elevated as I think about it.
So I went to this Korean spa recently, and they had these big bottles of water with expensive water. Way too much money for just a bottle of water. But they had filled them with lemons and cucumbers and watermelons and strawberries, and they were selling them for, like, $15. And it felt totally luxurious to buy one of these.
Making decisions based on great comfort and love for myself.
Totally unnecessary, for sure. But it tasted so good, and it felt so good to be treating my body in that way. It was a decision based on great comfort and love for myself.
Lindsay had told me about how much she wanted to be reading more. Not like necessary books, just fun, fictional books, right?
And I suggested that one luxurious thing she could do was plan 30 minutes of reading time right in the middle of her workday. She could curl up with some tea or some delicious flavored water and just read for a while.
It doesn't cost you anything, but it feels so luxurious. It feels somewhat excessive.
Write your luxury list.
So that's my challenge to you. Make a list of things that you could do either on a daily basis or a weekly or a monthly. Make a list of things that you could do that feel super luxurious to you that when you think about doing them and prioritizing them, your heart starts to beat a little faster and your skin starts to feel a little itchy.
That's kind of how we know we're on the right track. It should feel a little uncomfortable to you.
Next, I want to talk about why it's important that you do this. But to do that, we're going to need to talk about why it's hard.
So there's really three reasons, and I spoke about the first one earlier. It has to do with responsibility.
For high achieving women, responsibility tends to be a very important value of theirs. It has been what has contributed to you being really successful, but yet your brain has equated being responsible with being self sacrificial, being responsible.
And your brain has associated being responsible to putting everyone else first, with being responsible and not spending money on yourself. But that's not what responsibility means.
Responsibility, by some definition, is essentially making very intentional, well thought out decisions that are based on priorities instead of emotions.
So one of the things that you're doing as you're making a list and committing to doing some things that feel super luxurious to you is that you're teaching your brain that you are responsible, that you're going to get it done, that you're going to continue to be successful.
And you can also prioritize yourself or spend money on yourself or do things just for comfort. That those two things are not mutually exclusive.
Feeling guilt when doing things that feel luxurious.
The second reason why women struggle to do things that feel luxurious is they feel guilty.
Now, this happens all of the time on breakthrough calls with women. They are all in to coaching, to wanting to meet their goals. But as soon as we start talking about the investment, it's a sizeable investment of $8,000.
As soon as we start talking about that, that to reach these goals and to stop prioritizing work and to be the mom that they want to be and to move up in their career without working more hours.
When it comes down to actually making a decision on the call as to whether they want to spend that money to do that or not, guilt shows up and it feels so big and so overwhelming.
And oftentimes women tell me if this was something that their kid needed, there would be no question about it. They would spend $8,000 in a heartbeat if their kids really needed this.
Or they would suggest to them, they would tell them for sure you should spend that money if it's going to make you happy, it's going to help you reach your goals. You for sure should spend that money.
But when it comes to them, it feels irresponsible and they feel guilty for spending that money.
Guilt is only a feeling.
Now remember though, guilt is a feeling. It's an emotion that we experience in our body. And our emotions, they come from the way we think. They come from our mindsets.
And so in this case, when you're thinking about scheduling and prioritizing a few luxurious things in your daily life and you feel guilty for it, that's coming from a very specific thought.
A thought like:
I shouldn't have to spend this money
I shouldn't be feeling so burnt out
I could be spending this money on something else.
People need me, I have to be available to them.
I'm taking this money from my family.
I'm taking time away from my family.
I already don't spend enough time with my kids.
They're not going to feel supported if I'm not available.
Gut wrenching thoughts, right? I'm sure all of you can relate on some level to some of these thoughts.
I have these thoughts at times when it comes to prioritizing yourself and putting your needs first, guilt often comes along with the territory for a while.
Not because you shouldn't be prioritizing yourself or doing things that are luxurious, but because one, you've patterned that thought into yourself. You've been thinking this way for 30 years and so it's sort of just a default way of operating.
But two, you feel guilty almost like a safety mechanism. Your brain wants to make sure that you're not really doing something stupid, that you're not really being excessively selfish, that you're not really being mean and self centered and pretentious. And on some level, your brain equates those two.
Your brain thinks that people that live luxurious lives are selfish, are self righteous, that think too highly of themselves, that don't work hard enough. They're frivolous, they're irresponsible, all of the things you don't want to be.
So anytime you make a step in that direction, a step toward prioritizing yourself and doing something just for you and doing something that feels good and luxurious, your brain throws in a whole bunch of guilt to stop you.
Intentionally choosing to do luxurious things and prioritizing luxurious things helps your brain disassociate that guilt.
It's going to help your brain really understand the line between frivolous, selfish and self love, self, compassion.
Feeling not worthy or deserving.
Now, the third reason why women struggle to do things that are luxurious for themselves is because they feel like they don't deserve it. This is a big one for women in particular.
Women feel the need to earn their worthiness as if it comes from their achievements and their successes. And you hear me talk about this on the podcast a lot.
Your enoughness, your worthiness. It doesn't come from your resume. It doesn't come from what you've done. It comes from who you are. Who you are and what you do or what you accomplish. Those are two very different things.
Everyone is deserving of being a priority simply because they exist.
Because they are a human being that breathes air, and because they bring value into this world from their existence.
Doing luxurious things and feeling like a priority and experiencing great comfort, you don't earn that. You're born with that right.
And when you start to commit to doing luxurious things and to prioritizing yourself and doing things just for you, even when it feels a little excessive or a little irresponsible, when you do that, you fill your enough bucket. You fill your I am worthy bucket.
One of the most luxurious trips I have ever taken was a few years ago. I think it was two years ago. I went to Cabo, Mexico, with my mastermind. I was a part of a Mastermind for over three years. There was between 30 and maybe 100 in the cohort at any given time. And almost all of us were women.
All of us were life coaches. And all of us were striving to make a difference in the world. Making a difference through our coaching.
And in this Mastermind. We met in Cabo and it was this all exclusive resort. Amazing pools and food and drinks and it was all inclusive.
Someone would come to my room and literally turn down my sheets and put out my robe and my slippers and leave a little bedtime suite.
I had a veranda off my room where I would eat breakfast every morning that was delivered to my doorstep every day. I wore nice clothes. I had fun heels. It felt lavish. It felt fun. It felt so luxurious. It was so great.
I'm going to have to post some pictures about that again soon. I'm sure you've seen them, but it was a couple of years ago. I'm going to repost them for you. It was such a luxurious trip.
That experience, not from the content of the Mastermind retreat, but just from the experience of letting myself feel luxury, was a lesson that I will never forget.
It up leveled me in a way I had never imagined was possible.
I deserve this.
I am worthy of this.
I can make this my everyday experience if I want.
It's not just for a select few. It's for me.
I get to live that mindset every day.
And for five days that I was there, it was really hard not to. It was really hard not to feel special and wealthy and excessively important in some way.
And I came home not with any more money in my pocket or any more time in my schedule, but an elevated sense of self worth of confidence that I deserve, I am worthy of. I have access to luxurious experiences that were meant for me.
The thoughts about myself went way up on that trip. That is what the experience of committing to luxury is all about.
It's about up leveling in your mind. It's up leveling your belief in self.
I challenge you to start small.
It doesn't have to be a big commitment of time or money, but it's a commitment to follow through with engaging in luxurious activities in your daily life.
You deserve that.
You are worth it.
And I challenge you to commit to that.
Now if you're someone that wants to break free of your not enoughness, if you are someone that wants to create for themselves a luxurious life where maybe that includes making more money but ultimately it's just a shift in where you're spending your time and your energy and how you're thinking about yourself and your life.
That my friends, is the heart of the coaching that I do. And I would love to speak with you on one of these free breakthrough calls.
Book a free coaching call.
If this is resonating with you, it's very simple. You go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book and that's going to take you to a little form to fill out where I get to know you and the vision of what it is you want in your life.
And after you submit that form, you'll be automatically directed to a scheduling page where we will find a time to connect directly.
You can have a luxurious life. Working moms, you deserve a luxurious life. Go after it.
Working moms, join the movement where we are not choosing between our ambitious goals and our family, but we are having both. We are balancing both and experiencing joy in both.
All right working moms. Until next week, live a luxurious life and let's get to it.
