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If your internal dialogue about yourself and your work is primarily negative, meaning your thoughts tend to skew toward: I’m not good enough, I should be doing more, they’re going to find me out, I’m not very good… then you will likely always over prioritize work and not feel balanced. Today’s episode is part 2 of a 4-part series on the thoughts that you have about yourself, where we are covering four different areas of life and the impact your thoughts in those areas have. Today, I am covering the thoughts you have about yourself at work.
Topics in this episode:
How your thoughts about work effect your family
When you have a great day, why that energy carries you through your day
When you are stuck in “not enough” you will always try to do more
The importance of feeling successful at work
Show Notes & References:
Need a mindset overhaul so that you can feel happy and satisfied in your working mom life? Click here to book a free call where we will talk about exactly how you can achieve the life you want: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
If your internal dialogue about yourself and your work is primarily negative, meaning your thoughts tend to skew toward, I'm not good enough. I should be doing more. They're going to find me out. I'm not very good, then you will always, overwork and over prioritize work, keep trying to make everyone happy, and quite honestly, you just won't feel balanced.
The thoughts that you have about yourself and your work are some of the most important to becoming an ambitious and balanced working mom. They either move you toward your goals and towards those feelings of success, or they hold you back.
Today's episode is part two of a four part series on the thoughts that you have about yourself, where we're covering four different areas of life and the impact your thoughts in those areas have.
Today, I'm covering the thoughts you have about yourself and work. 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.
Well, hello there, working moms. I'm excited to be with you today. I am celebrating one of my clients. She and I are about halfway through our coaching together, and she came to me, about three months ago, feeling very lost and confused on what she wanted to do with her career.
And she wanted to fix a bunch of her procrastination and time management problems so that she could be more present and just enjoy the life that she had and her beautiful kiddos.
Imbalanced behaviors & thoughts.
And one of the things that we determined in our coaching together was that, a lot of her unhappiness in her career and a lot of her procrastination and other imbalanced behaviors, as I like to call them, a lot of these were stemming from thoughts like, I'm not doing a good job. I should be doing more. I don't deserve this job. I'm not good at this. I don't know what to do.
These were the dominant thoughts that she had about herself as a worker and about herself in her job. And I want you to imagine if these were your dominant thoughts every day as you worked, truly imagine this.
You wake up the morning, feels super chaotic as you get the family out the door, and as you get yourself ready for work, there's a low level of anxiety because you're nervous about the work day ahead, just like you are every day, because you don't think you're doing a good enough job.
And when you finally get to the office or when you sit down at your computer, you just feel paralyzed because you're not exactly sure what you're supposed to be doing.
And so you're questioning yourself, which spirals into thoughts like, I don't deserve this job. I'm not good at this. They're going to find me out. And those thoughts feel overwhelming, and they are just oozing with judgment and anxiety and fear.
Can you picture it now?
If you're like me? Just listening to this scenario, these thoughts, it kind of makes my heart race. It brings a kind of fluttering in my chest that I usually associate with some sort of, like, panic or anxiety.
If this was you, how well do you think you would perform at your job? Do you think you would get your best work done? Do you think you would be productive? Of course not.
The thoughts you have about yourself as a worker, have a profound effect on your job.
Because the thoughts that you have about yourself as a worker, at your job, or even just about your job, they have a profound effect on your ability to do your job.
And it doesn't matter if you work 40 hours or 30 hours or 50 hours a week. It doesn't really matter if this is the script in your head, you're going to feel terrible about yourself and the time that you spend working, and you're going to be unhappy and feel out of balance.
Your thoughts about yourself in your job are just one of the four sets of thoughts that make the biggest difference when it comes to becoming an ambitious and balanced working mom.
And today, this is part two of a four part series on, the thoughts that you have about yourself and the impact on you and your life.
Last week, we talked about the thoughts that you have about yourself in your marriage. And today we're going to talk about the thoughts that you have about yourself at work.
And then over the next few weeks, we'll dive into thoughts about yourself as a mom and the thoughts that you have about yourself and your future.
If you didn't listen to last week's episode, that's totally okay. You can listen to today's and then go back and listen to the first one.
I'm not necessarily building over the course of these four weeks. We're just separating our thoughts and the types of thoughts you have based on the various areas of life.
The impact your thoughts have on your life
One of the things I taught last week in the episode was I talked about the impact that your thoughts have on your life.
Remember that your thoughts are what drive your feelings, and your actions are fueled by those feelings. So if you want to change something about you or your life, if you want to stop procrastinating, if you want to end people pleasing, if you want to become a more confident decision maker, if you want to ask for a promotion, if you want a different job, if you want to care less about how messy the house is, if you want something different in your life, ultimately, the thing that needs to change are your thoughts.
Because they are your fuel. They are the energy that pushes you in a certain direction and when it comes to work, you want that energy and that fuel to be pushing you toward faster decisions, better prioritization, better time management, caring less about what other people think, feeling confident in meetings and presentations.
You want the internal fuel to be driving good, positive behavior, habits and emotions. Because everyone listening has had this experience that I'm about to share.
Okay, I'm going to give you another visualization here. I want you to imagine having a really great week. You show up to all of your meetings feeling prepared. You feel like you've contributed at all of those meetings. You felt heard. You were able to answer people's questions easily. The words just kind of kept flowing out of you and your emails and conversations.
Maybe you didn't get everything done on your to do list, but you're ending the workday feeling really satisfied and proud of what you accomplished today. Both the quantity of work, like your productivity and the quality of the work.
How does it feel when your work feels purposeful and present?
And as you step into your house to be with your family, you feel really good. Your work feels purposeful. The time you spent working today feels worth it.
Now, I want you to imagine your energy as you spend time with your family in the evening. I want you to imagine how present you will be. I want you to imagine the types of conversations that may happen with your spouse.
Can you see it? Can you feel how that day feels and how it affects the time that you spend with your family?
Okay, now I want you to imagine one of those days where you feel like you're getting nothing done. Everyone keeps interrupting you. You can't focus. Maybe you show up to meetings a couple of minutes late. You feel unprepared. You feel like you leave with more questions than answers.
You want to be home with your family, but the emails you said you would write and the deliverables you said you'd get done today, they just keep you feeling tied to your computer.
And when you finally get home, I want you to imagine how you feel and what you do. How would you interact with your baby, with your kiddos, with your spouse? How present and connected would you feel? What do you feel like doing?
Can you feel the energy difference between these two experiences, these two days? Can you feel the impact and the difference of the impact each of these days has on your family and on your home life and your ability to be present outside of your work life?
Now, you might say, I, totally see it. Rebecca, I have for sure experienced the difference, because I know we all have. But I don't get to decide when these days happen and when they don't.
Our actions are fueled by our emotions and thoughts.
My response to you is, of course you do. Because what you do during your workday, how you respond to people and the urgency of tasks and to do lists how you choose to spend your time and your ability to focus.
Those behaviors and actions are fueled by your emotions and your thoughts. Nobody puts those emotions and thoughts in you. You are in 100% control of them.
You get to decide how you feel.
It doesn't matter if you get one thing done or five things done or ten things done today. You get to decide what you think about that. You can either decide to think, oh, I'm so behind. I should have gotten more done today. Or you could think, I did exactly what I was supposed to do today. I did enough.
It doesn't matter if your presentation or meeting went exactly as planned or if it went off the rails. You get to decide what you think about that.
You could think, I'm exactly the right person to figure this out. I'm the right woman for this job. I did my best. I know we'll get through this. Or you can think, I shouldn't have been leading this meeting. I did a terrible job. People think, I shouldn't be in this job. I've got to prove myself.
It doesn't matter if everyone seems to be out of the office today, so there's very little interruptions. Or you have a day where everyone needs something from you and is messaging you and emailing you. You get to decide what you think on this kind of a day.
You could think, this is exactly what I get paid to do, to navigate all of the various tasks and reprioritize and decide what's important. You could think, a good manager trusts their employees to get done what needs to get done.
You could think, it's not my job to make decisions for everyone. It's not my job to be, responsive to them. Or you can think, oh, my gosh, everybody needs something from me. I'm letting everyone down. I can't get anything done. I need to focus. I should be able to get more done today.
You get to decide.
There are always 100 things that you could think about the same situation. Some of those thoughts are going to make you feel really good, and they're going to fuel you with confidence and decisiveness and feelings of success.
And others are going to make you feel behind and like, you're a terrible manager, like you shouldn't be in this job.
Your circumstances don't determine what you think about yourself and your job.
Your circumstance, the amount of meetings that you have in your day, the amount of interruptions that you get, the way a particular conversation goes with your boss. These circumstances don't determine what you think about yourself and your job and what you do as an ambitious working mom.
If you want to feel balanced, the time you work needs to feel worth it.
Likely you spend 40 plus hours a week working. And if you want to feel balanced, that time needs to feel worth it. You need to think that, this is the best use of my time.
You need to believe that you're good at what you do and that you deserve to have the job that you have. You need to think that the trade off that you're making with your time is totally worth it.
These thoughts matter. They affect the way you feel and your ability to be present at home.
Just as you experience through those two different visualizations I walked you through, they affect the way you experience your job and your success.
You cannot be an ambitious and balanced working mom and not feel successful at your work.
That's a big part of what makes you ambitious, someone that has big goals, that's going after big things, and it's capable of more than average. And that's looked at as a leader.
If most of the time you don't feel successful and you're not thinking, I'm good at what I do, I deserve to be here, then this is a big source of what needs to change for you.
Let me be clear. It may not be that your job needs to change or that your boss needs to change or the demands of your job needs to change. It might just be the way you're thinking about yourself and those demands and your job, likely that's a big part of it.
The client I told you about in the beginning of this call, after about seven or eight sessions of really talking about what she believed about herself in her job, and she started to learn the mindset tools that I teach, to think more intentionally and to believe in herself and what she did and how good it was. And she started finding real evidence for how she was the perfect person for this job.
After about seven or eight sessions of talking about this and learning these tools, things really began to shift for her. And at this point, she's made a decision to not stay at her company. But it's not because she wasn't good at her job. It's not because she couldn't hack it like she was thinking before.
Making decisions based on what you want.
It's not because she's some imposter. It's because she wants to. It's because as she grew in confidence in herself, her ability to think clearly and to make decisions based on what she wanted opened up to her.
I have another client who's been wrestling with if she wants to keep working or if she wants to take a break from work for a while and just be home with her kiddo.
She's been wrestling with how much flexibility she wants in her job and the impact, that that has on her happiness. In one of our last sessions, we talked about if her company didn't give her what she wanted in terms of flexibility, was she willing to leave and to quit? Essentially, how important was it to her? It was surprising to her that it was difficult for her to answer that.
And what we uncovered as we talked about it was that she had some thoughts that this job, specifically this company, was really the best she could get.
She'd gone through a long job search several years earlier, and she found it difficult to find a company and the role that she was in and the benefits that she really wanted.
And so she sort of has a lot of sneaky thoughts that her company and her job is sort of the best she can get. And because those are her thoughts about her job, she feels a little stuck. She feels like she has a little less wiggle room, and she sort of has to make this job work.
And this conversation reminded me a lot of a conversation I had with another client several years ago. And it stands out to be one of the most favorite conversations I had with a client that I have really ever had, because we were talking about what she wanted next in her career. And she also had thoughts very similar to this.
I remember I asked her, so is this really it? Have you peaked in your career? She paused for a minute and then she started laughing and said, Well, I guess so. And we had a really good chuckle out of that because she wasn't even 40 years old.
And although she really wasn't aware of it, her brain was telling her that she'd peaked, this is the best that she could get. And believing that was causing her to feel stuck and like she had no options and that ultimately she was really just going to go downhill from here in her career.
And we're going to talk more about these sort of potential thoughts in another episode. Because:
What you believe about your future, about your potential in the future, has a really significant impact on your ability to feel like an ambitious and balanced and successful working mom.
So although a lot of these thoughts are sort of more about your future, and these clients are talking about their future on some level, they're also a lot about them and their ability as a worker.
This is the best I can get. I can't get anything better. There's nothing else out there for me that's better than this. If those thoughts are really true, of course you're going to stay stuck, no matter how unhappy you are. It's the best that you can get, right? That's what your brain is telling you.
Your thoughts about yourself and your work, both the performance of your work and the work itself matter.
You might be one of the millions of women out there that are feeling like an imposter at her job, that are battling with low confidence, low self esteem, self doubt, particularly about your work.
If you know that your internal dialogue needs to change, that your self talk is skewed to the negative, and it's causing you to overwork, over prioritize, try to make everyone happy and feel completely out of balance. This is where I can help.
I am a life coach for working moms. I help you to feel confident about yourself and your decisions. I help you to get clear on what it is you really want in your career and in your life as a mom, and then I help you to make it happen.
If you're ready to experience joy in your working mom life, if you want to feel successful and go after those big goals in your life, I want you to reach out and schedule a time to talk with me.
This is a chance for us to dream about the life that you want to talk about, what's getting in the way of you having that life, and then to get really clear around how we're going to help you get to that life in coaching.
Book a free breakthrough call.
To book this free 60 Minutes call, you can go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to fill out a little form that helps me get to know you, and then to schedule a time on my calendar for us to connect.
Working moms, your thoughts about yourself in your marriage, they matter. The thoughts that you have about yourself in your work, they matter. They contribute to you being able to be the ambitious and balanced working mom you want.
We'll pick this up with part three in our series next week, and until then, let's get to it.
