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Most ambitious women have a core value of “being available” that they're almost ashamed to admit. It's like a value that they don't want to value. Always being available makes it difficult to create work-life balance because it has you always being “on” and unable to shut down your work brain, rest or be present with your family.
In today's episode I dive into 6 excuses that your brain is likely using to justify being available and the over-working behavior that comes with it. You cannot be both present and available, at some point you will need to choose and I’ll explain the first steps on how to do that.
Topics in this episode:
The core value no one wants but most women have: being available
Why valuing being available is not helpful to creating work-life balance
How to know if you are over-valuing being available
6 excuses your brain is using to keep you feeling tethered to your phone and to responding to messages and emails
You are still good at your job, even if you are unavailable
The first step to stop being available: decide when you are working and when you are not and communicate that to your team
Show Notes & References:
Check out the Ambitious and Balanced podcast on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPZA5JKXYxjCMqodh4wxPBg
If you are ready to learn how to shut down your work brain and to be “unavailable” to work, sign up for a free breakthrough call where I will walk you through the 3 essential steps. Click here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
Over the last seven years of coaching ambitious working moms, I have learned that most women have a core value that they're almost ashamed to admit. It's like a value that they don't really want to value. And what they realize in our work together is because they value this, it makes it very difficult for them to create work-life balance.
So, in today's episode, I'm sharing with you this sort of under the radar, this secret value that most women have, but nobody really wants. And I'll be diving into six excuses that your brain is likely using to justify this overworking behavior. And I'll offer the first steps to making a change.
You ready? Let's get to it. All right.
Hello, working moms. Now, just a quick reminder that this podcast is now available on YouTube. So if you are listening to me on an audio platform, Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you may listen to me, you can also now watch me give this podcast on YouTube.
And for all of my first adopters, for all of my listeners that have turned into watchers, I'm excited to be looking at you, seeing you, interacting with you. Please comment on my episodes. Let's have a conversation around what it means to be an ambitious working mom in today's world.
You can find me at @RebeccaOlsonCoaching on YouTube. Of course, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. I would love to have you join me and make sure you're following me, because you just never know. I will likely start putting up some video content along with these episodes of the podcast.
So check it out.
All right, let's dive into today's episode. We are talking about a core value that most ambitious women have, but nobody wants to have. It is a core value that is oftentimes unspoken of, and I would say most of us have never really even thought about it.
Like, it's a core value. And yet we make so many decisions based on valuing this that I think naming it and calling it a core value is actually pretty accurate. So here's what it is.
Availability or responsiveness.
It's kind of like a slash. Sometimes I'll let my clients do, when we're doing core value exercises, I'll let them put a slash between it. So, availability or responsiveness.
Now I'm going to pause for a moment.
I'm going to let you take that in. Most women value being available and responsive.
Do you value being available/responsive?
Here's how you'll know if this is you. See if you can sort of identify yourself in any of these. Okay. You feel tethered to your phone, and it brings up anxiety when you're away from it for too long. All of your apps related to work, your email app, your team's app, your messaging app, all these apps, they remain on and notifications are on all the time. There's never a time when they're not. One of the last things you do before you fall asleep is you check your email or your messages. One of the first things you do when you wake up is you pick up your phone and you check your email or your messages.
Another way to know that you are valuing availability or responsiveness is you have a hard time not answering notifications. When you see that little number go up or you hear the little ding go off, right? Another way you know is you can't remember the last time you took a weekend or a vacation completely unplugged. Or if you have a hard time going out and leaving your phone in the purse, like you always have to have it available to you on top, like on the table. Or another way is that you schedule time for yourself, for your work. I call this heads down time. But you're always moving that appointment, or you're scheduling over it, or you're moving your personal appointments out of the way, things like that.
So I'm not saying if you do one of these things or multiple of these things, you're doing something wrong. But if you can identify with several of these points, you are likely someone that has a very difficult time not being available or responsive, and you likely value that. And that's not - I mean, I want to go on the record here saying - that's not a bad thing, but it makes work-life balance exponentially harder, if not near impossible.
Always being available can drain your resources.
In a balanced life, you have regular times that you are not thinking about work, available to work or actively working, right? You have to. Your brain needs to shut down. It needs to be off. It needs to rest. If your brain is constantly available to work, meaning it's just ready to jump right in there and answer an email or solve a problem or field a question, then it's still in active mode, right? It's still draining your battery.
Think about it like a laptop, right? After an hour or so, whenever you have the kind of setting set on your laptop. I have a laptop. That's what I work from. It'll go dark, right? It'll go dim. It'll go on low power mode. But even if you don't get on the computer again, eventually it would drain the battery all the way out, right? Because slowly it's still using memory. It's still processing just at a really low, slow level, right?
So this is what happens to you and your mind and your energy and your presence if you are always available and responsive, right? Not actively working. Your brain is still trying to hold on to information, which continues to drain your energy and your presence. In a balanced life, you have times, regular times, where you are not actively working, available to work, or even thinking about work.
Sandra’s Story..
Now I'm remembering a client of mine, Sandra. We started out slow, right? Because she was working evenings. She was working weekends most of the time. And so we started out slow. She decided she wanted to take Sundays off. She didn't want to log back on. She didn't want to check her email. She wanted to be completely off on Sundays.
And even with this small change that I know actually doesn't feel small. It actually is very difficult and very challenging. She noticed so many things when she was able to do it. She had more energy to be with her son. She found herself planning more fun things to do as a family because she sort of had the bandwidth and the energy to do it. She actually started to notice how it had this trickle down effect to some other overworking habits. She was able to say no a little bit more to her team and let them handle fires that were coming out instead of always jumping in, all with this kind of one commitment to select one day where she was going to be completely off.
What if you look back on your life and realize you never truly stopped working?
Now, I've heard from some women on this subject that they actually don't desire this, right? That they enjoy working and they enjoy being available to work. They choose that so much so that they're being available and responsive. It doesn't bother them, right? They know it's a value, and it's okay to them.
Now, there's a couple of things I want to say to this. If this is you - and I said this just a little bit ago, but I'm going to reiterate it - if this is you, the first thing you need to know is that creating a life that feels balanced is going to be difficult for you, right? You're going to have to put in a lot of effort into creating balance in other ways.
The second thing I want to say is that, and this is probably more to the point, actually, is that I question if this is actually what you want. Are you sure that you want to look back at your life and see that you never really stopped working? You didn't find time for rest, for hobbies, for spending kind of extra time with your family? You worked, right?
I have a hard time believing that that's what you truly want. And I want you to pause, even for a moment and do a little gut check on that with yourself. If you are questioning whether you really want to change your availability and your responsiveness, right? Is this really the life that you want to look back on and say that this is how you operated, that you prioritized work and being available over anything else? Right.
100% availability is not a requirement for success.
Now, what I do hear from my clients as we start diving into this, and if there's ever a question around if they really want to change these habits of being available and they want to kind of devalue being available, is we start talking about their desire to be successful at their job, because that's usually what comes up in your brain. What you think is, if I deprioritize being available and responsive, if I stop valuing that, then I won't be successful at my job, right?
And what I want to offer to you is that this is not a fact. In order for you to be successful, you must always remain available and hyper responsive. That's not a factual statement. That's a belief, right?
In this case, it's probably a very unhelpful belief if you want to be changing your work habits and actually create a life that is balanced, right? If you could learn how to be just as successful and less available, wouldn't you want to do that? Right.
So I want to jump into six excuses that come up when I start talking to women about changing their overworking habits, which includes being less available and less responsive and not valuing that so much.
Okay, the first one we just talked about, right. It's the misunderstanding that in order for you to be successful in the way that you're successful now, you always have to be available and responsive. It's the belief that it is being available and responsive that is what is contributing to your success. That's a misunderstanding, and it's an excuse that comes up a lot. So that's the first one.
You can be prepared for tomorrow while maintaining boundaries tonight.
The second excuse, - and I hear this one a lot and it sounds so convincing, like it's so good in your brain, it makes so much sense, - is the excuse is, “Well, if I stop valuing being available and responsive, then I won't be as prepared tomorrow.”
So it's kind of this tie between being available and responsive and being prepared. You want to get ahead of all of your messages in your email so you can be better prepared tomorrow. That requires you to be available and on and responsive.
Sounds pretty reasonable. And it's true. Preparing more tonight and checking your email and getting online or checking messages and answering a couple of things is in fact going to help prepare you for tomorrow, but it's also going to eat away at your energy and keep you from being present with your family, your spouse, or just finding rest too, right?
So yes, it is true that it will prepare you, but it's also not going to create balance. It's just going to cause more overworking. Because we all know when you just start checking the email once, then it kind of dovetails into one little small task. And so like, five minutes turns into thirty minutes, which turns into an hour. It happens all of the time for all of us, right?
So the misunderstanding here is that what's required for you to feel prepared tomorrow is being available in answering emails and messages today when you're not supposed to be working, right? That's a misunderstanding. That's one way that you can feel ahead and prepared, but it's not the only way. It's just the way you've most practiced, right? So there's a misunderstanding in that.
You can be a committed team player without being available at all times.
The third excuse that I hear a lot is this attempt to justify being available is that you don't want to be seen as being uncommitted or not a team player, right? As if regular time off from work somehow indicates that you're not a team player, focused or committed to your job in some way, right?
It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that, but on some level, that's what your brain wants to say. It wants to believe that being available and responsive is what makes you committed and to being a team player, right?
Of course there's a misunderstanding there. That's not true. That is not, in fact, what makes you committed or a team player, being always available and responsive. That's ridiculous.
You can be a supportive leader and still unplug.
The fourth excuse I hear a lot. Oftentimes, this one kind of surfaces with my clients that lead big teams or big projects or kind of work with important clients. It's this sense that it's your job to take care of them, right?
It's your job as a manager, as a leader, to take care of your employees, your team, which means being available to them, answering their questions, right? Same thing with big, important clients. It's your job to be available to them, to answer their questions whenever they surface, right? As if them being cared for and feeling supported is you always being available to them. Which of course is not true, right? It's a misunderstanding, of course.
There could be seasons or projects with particular deadlines where it might be required for you to be more available. I'm not saying that's wrong or bad, but remember, my argument is that there are regular times of being completely offline and unavailable. It should be the default that you're not available, that you're not going to be responsive, right? Not the other way around.
And if you're in one of those jobs where you have a really needy client that's kind of always asking for things, it's going to be very uncomfortable for you to put some boundaries in place and to clearly communicate when you're working and when you're not working. But that is what will be required.
You can choose peace and deal with tomorrow tomorrow.
The fifth excuse for not wanting to change this habit, if you will, this value of being available and responsive -and if I'm totally honest, this is the one that my brain likes to use a lot and justifies - is I'll be anxious otherwise, right? Sort of like my brain isn't going to be able to settle down unless I check all the boxes and I know that nobody needs anything from me and I've kind of answered all the emails that I need to answer for the day and so forth, right?
And it's true that checking your email just before you go to sleep to make sure nobody needs anything from you and nobody's waiting on anything from you and to get a sense of what your workload modes might be the next day, all of that is very settling in your brain, but it comes with consequences. Your presence, your energy is compromised, right?
And it continues to solidify this belief that working more is a priority over rest time with your family and fun. And I can guarantee if you're checking emails right before you're going to bed, then there is something you are not doing with your husband or partner in that bed. You know what I mean?
When you are tethered to checking emails and messages, there's no room for playful, fun, spontaneity, intimacy, right? Your brain can't even think about those things because there's no space. It is trying to get prepared for the next day.
I have a client who's actively working at this, right? She wants to shut her laptop at 5:30 and be done for the day. Not logging back on, not checking her email on her phone or anything like that, right?
And so we've been working on this together and it's been getting easier for her. She's coming to our sessions going, “I've been doing this more regularly. I really am shutting down my computer at least several times a week and not logging back on and not thinking about working.” So I asked her, I said, “What's unlocking this for you, right? How are you able to do this? What's driving your ability to do this?” And she said the most amazing thing. She said, “It's the belief that it's all going to get done and if it doesn't get done, it's okay, because it's okay to leave things undone.” Such a powerful thought, isn't it?
You will not figure out how to get more done in less time, until you start giving yourself less time.
All right, the last excuse that I hear, the last one I want to offer to you as to why your brain thinks you always need to be available and always need to be responsive, is that you're going to fall behind. Or another way of saying this is that your to-do list is going to get exponentially longer and you won't be able to get through it all.
Look, I totally understand the anxiety that can come up with a long to-do list, but I promise you, you will not figure out how to get more done and check more things off of your list in a shorter period of time until you give yourself a shorter period of time to do it.
If the answer is for you to be available and responsive and be checking and answering emails and messages throughout your evening, which means that you're just spending more time working, then your brain is always going to believe that it needs more time in order to get your job done, right?
You do not always need to be available and responsive in order to get your job done, or for you to be good at your job, or for you to be a team player, or for you to be committed to your job or for you to feel prepared or ready for tomorrow, right? These are all misunderstandings, lies, untruths, if you will.
You must choose.
I've told you this story on the podcast before, but I had a client many years ago who told me this story. She actually shared it on the podcast also a couple of years ago, but she was holding her toddler. I want to say that her daughter was maybe a year and a half, and she was making dinner and she was trying to answer a message from someone on her team. And I think her mom was also texting her in the middle of it.
She had like four things going all at the same time. And in a very intentional swat, her daughter batted her phone out of her hand and it fell on the floor. It was like a swat. And it was like a “Look at [me], Mom”, like, “Hey, focus on me.” Like, “I haven't seen you all day. Mom, come on.”
I mean, obviously she didn't have those words, which is why she swatted the phone out of her hand. And I remember it was like this wake up call for my client. She realized she really can't be multitasking all of these things all of the time. She had to choose between being present for her daughter or being available to her team. She couldn't do both. She had to choose.
You ambitious working moms have to choose between being available to your team, to your work, to your job, to your clients, or being present for yourself, being present for your family, your kids, your marriage, right?
You have to choose. You can't do both. You can't multitask through both.
Four tangible ways to start making some change.
Now, if you, are already bought into this idea of needing to be a less available and responsive, - like, you hear the six excuses that most women tell me, and you hear it, and you hear the misunderstanding and the lies that are a part of it, and you are ready to start making some change - I want to offer a couple of starting points for you. I have four things that I want to offer to you.
The first is if you are really ready to change this habit and you want to be less responsive, less available, you want to value that less so that you can be present, the first thing you need to do is you need to decide when you are working and when you are not.
Your brain needs to be very clear on this commitment of when you are going to be off. It can't be wishy washy. It should be in your calendar and your mind totally on board with the idea that this is off time, right? So that's the first one.
The second thing is you have to communicate when you are going to be off so that people know that you're not going to be getting back to them, right? If you are somebody that has been chronically available to people and responsive to people, then people are going to… they have come to expect that of you. And it's going to take some time to untrain them, if you will.
They're going to probably, for a while, still reach out. Even if you communicate it. That's okay. Your job is to just not answer and to get in a habit of not answering or not checking. I mean, in this case, you probably shouldn't even know that they're messaging you because you have, on some level, turned off those notifications. So you can't check it, but you have to communicate to your team what the plan is, right?
The third thing is that you need to figure out what you need in order to be successful at this. I remember a very specific session I had with a client who was going on a week's vacation with her friends who had decided to take her laptop with her because she had planned to do a little work, check a little email from time to time, and just simply be available if people needed her.
And I challenged her to be completely offline during this vacation, to be completely unavailable. And she agreed that actually that was what she wanted and she really needed, and her brain needed that time off. And so we created a plan for what she needed to do in order to do that. And that included removing some apps from her phone and changing some passwords so that it would not be very easy to kind of check her notifications and check those apps, right?
You might need to do the same thing in order to be completely offline. You might need to remove your work email from your phone. I removed my work email from my phone probably at this point about six months ago, and it has radically changed my ability to be present in the evenings. I am so much calmer. My mind is so much calmer. It is able to engage in more restful activities ever since I did that, right?.
So what do you need to do in order to be successful at really being offline and unavailable? That's the third thing.
The fourth thing, the last thing I want to offer to you is to decide exceptions ahead of time. The ahead of time part is what's really important here. So if there's a really clear emergency, your brain and your team need to know exactly what that is so that they can contact you, right?
I remember I had a client that had a plan to be completely off for like a week over the Christmas holiday, or it was something like that. And she just determined her emergency plan and then she communicated that with her team, right?
And so what she had determined was what emergency has to take place where it's okay for my team to contact me and to kind of involve me in whatever's going on. And she prethought it out, right.
So I remember one of the emergencies was that somebody on her team was going to be fired for doing whatever they were going to do. Like somebody was going to lose their job. I remember that was a part of the criteria, the emergency criteria. If someone was going to lose their job, then it was okay to contact her.
The second thing I remember she said was, if they were going to lose one of their big clients that she works with, if they were going to lose business, which was going to have a massive impact on the company, then it was okay to engage her during her off time, if you will. And then she communicated that to her team so that her team knew that these were the only examples or the only instances in which they should be contacting her and should they contact her while she was off, it was her own filter for like, “Do I respond to this or not? Is it one of these two emergencies or not?” Right?
You need to know what your exceptions are and you need to think about it ahead of time so you're not trying to make that decision in the moment, because then it becomes a very reactive decision, right?
In a world of accessibility and always being on and technology that has an insatiable draw, choosing to be unavailable is not the norm. But it's what we need to do, and it's what we do here in this ambitious and balanced community, you cannot be present and available at the same time. You have to choose.
And working moms, I know that you are capable of making a choice to not be available and not be responsive, if that's what you want.
You are still good at your job. You will still be successful at your job. You will still be seen as a team player. You will still be seen as committed. You can still be amazing at what you do and not be always available and responsive.
Don't forget to check out this podcast on the YouTube channel. You can find me at @RebeccaOlsonCoaching on YouTube.
And of course, if you need help, if you are looking to choose you, if you are looking to choose rest and your family and presence, and really learning how to not multitask through life, but actually learn how to be present through it, that is where I come in. As your coach, I would love to connect with you.
You can go to my website to learn more about the coaching that I do and to book a call with me by going to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book.
All right, working moms, until next week. I will see you and talk to you then. Let's get to it. Bye.
