Stop rushing

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“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” or “Come on, come on, come on!” these are familiar phrases when rushing through daily life, particularly as a working mom. Although every working mom can relate, rushing is completely optional. There is a physical, mental and emotional impact that a “rushed” life has that takes away from the calm, present and joy-filled experience of everyday life and there is a way you can avoid it.

In this episode, I dive deep into the mindset behind this hurried life, dissecting how our day-to-day hustle shapes our interactions and well-being and how, in the end, we bring this upon ourself (yikes!). I will also dive into 3 steps to help you shift from the relentless chase against time to a more controlled and present approach to life's demands.

Topics in this episode:

  • Busy moms often feel rushed – why does this happen?

  • How rushing feels stressful and chaotic, leading to impatience and hasty actions.

  • Rushing is a mindset you can change, not just a result of having too many things to do.

  • If you had to choose between being “on time” or present, which would you choose? It’s important to know your answer.

  • 3 steps to feeling less rushed and being more in control of your time/energy

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Come on, come on, come on. Let's go, let's go, let's go. Every working mom has said this to their kids as they are trying to rush them out the door and get them to school on time. 

Every working mom has experienced a day of back to back meetings where it feels like you're just going from one thing to the next until, boom, the workday's over. And now it's time to rush to get your kids and get them to the next activity and get dinner on the table and get them to bed.

Rushing is a common experience for all ambitious working moms. 

Some might even say it's sort of a way of life. And yet, nothing good comes from rushing. 

Living a rushed life is a life where you are always feeling like you're not enough, where you always feel behind, where you always feel like you're failing. 

It's a life that feels frantic. It feels overwhelming. It has you snapping at your kids, pushing them out the door, never feeling present. 

In today's podcast, I want to share with you what's behind this experience of rushing and show you how you are in complete control of whether you feel rushed or not. 

At the end, I will offer to you three steps to stop feeling rushed so that you feel more calm, in control, and present at both work and home. 

Rushing is completely optional. 

You do not have to be a rushed working mom. Rushing is completely optional. You ready to hear how? Well, 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. Now, if you are watching this episode on YouTube, because just a reminder, I recently launched my YouTube channel where I am posting videos of this podcast as well as other short videos to help give extra support and encouragement for you as an ambitious working mom. 

Now, if you are watching me on my podcast here on YouTube, then you will see that I am wearing a tie dye shirt. 

Now, I am feeling a little conscious here of my tie dye shirt because it feels a little bit unprofessional to me as I am recording this, but I decided to go for it because my son actually picked out my outfit today, which is something that we occasionally do when my son is having a really difficult time getting himself dressed in the morning. 

We have a little game where I get to pick out his clothes, and he gets to pick out mine, and we have to wear what the other one picked out. 

Now, there can be some rules to this. So, like I said, no dresses today because I was going on a long walk, and he told me that he wanted shorts and so forth. So we kind of work within some parameters. 

But my son picked out this tie dye shirt. Actually, I tie dyed this myself. We tie dyed it together, and I just decided to launch right in. And I'm wearing these amazing earrings that happen to match it. So here I am on this recording, wearing my son's selected outfit and matching earrings. 

Okay, so here we go. Let's talk about rushing. That is this feeling of, like, gotta go, gotta go, gotta go, right? 

And there's this sort of energy that comes with rushing that I know so many working moms, daily experience for them. And for some, it's just like, in the morning, it's like getting their kids out of the door, rushing them to school, getting to work. 

Rushing all day, everyday.

And for others, it's more like an all day chronic experience where every day, all day, they're just feeling like they're going from one meeting to the next, from one activity to the next, carting their kids around, rushing to all these other, activities, rushing to do the homework, rushing to get them to bed, rushing to, like, finally get to sleep at night, or finally get to do whatever you want to do in the evening. 

I was having this conversation with one of my clients recently about her morning rush experience. 

She has four kids, ranging in age. There is just a lot going on for her. It’s very chaotic in the morning, getting the kids dressed, getting them out the door. And she's constantly feeling like she's telling them, like, come on, come on. We got to go. We got to go. Let's go, let's go. 

And she's criticizing some of her kids, particularly her oldest ones, for, like, what they're choosing to wear and then making them change clothes and then getting angry.

And she's upset and frustrated at her youngest, who won't put on their shoes. And it just feels like so much to manage in lots of different ways. And it is a rushed experience. 

The Sunday morning rush.

And I actually sort of had this experience yesterday. It was Sunday, and I let myself sleep in. Yay me. I got up around 7:50 in the morning, and we had to be at church at 9am. 

And so I come out, and my kids are watching cartoons, which is what they typically do on a Sunday morning. And I come in, and I tell them, hey, it's time to get off the tv. It's time to take showers. We gotta head to church. And it is immediately met with all of this resistance. 

They start flailing themselves around the room. They're so upset that it's time to turn off the tv and that they don't wanna go to church. 

And my oldest just, like, digs in her heels and is like, no, I'm not going to church. And I'm thinking, you just had, like, 90 minutes of watching tv and doing your own thing. We haven't taken showers in, like, three days. We always go to church on a Sunday. It's not an option for you to not go. What is going on? 

And needless to say, I was not very patient in the moment. In fact, I got to that yelling stage, something I absolutely hate. And I know it happens to all of us. It happens to the best of us. 

And I just wanted them to get going and to see that we had things to do and somewhere to go. And internally, I'm thinking to myself, what is the deal here? Why can't you just do the things that you know you need to do and help yourself get ready? Which is something that we always do on a Sunday. Right. 

For you, this experience might not be getting to church, but it's maybe getting to school. 

Our kids go to school five days a week, and generally speaking, they wake up around the same time, and they have breakfast at the same time. And every day they gotta get out of their pajamas and into clothes, and they have to put shoes on, and they have to pack their backpacks. 

And yet, every day, there seems to be, like, massive resistance to this.

And all of a sudden, there's this rush out the door, and it's met with a massive amount of resistance, which, as a parent, is extremely frustrating if you haven't really done all of the work to shift your mindset on this. 

So today on the podcast, we're gonna talk all about rushing. 

And I want to talk about it from three different angles or three different perspectives, if you will. Three different sides of rushing. And then we're going to talk about three steps to sort of ending that experience of rushing that I know so many working moms struggle with. 

So the first angle or the first lens that I want to talk about or evaluate this experience of rushing, it's really the most common way that we think about it. And it's rushing as a feeling. It's how we describe it. Right. 

Feeling rushed is an emotion, an experience in the body.

I feel rushed. It's an emotion. It's literally an experience that you're having in your body. And, descriptions of that emotion that may kind of go along with this are, like, frantic or stressed or overwhelmed. 

And it's that experience that you feel in your body where your heart is racing and your blood pressure is rising, and there's almost this, like, fluttering or kind of twitter in your body, and you can't sit still, and maybe your heart's going faster. 

It's really uncomfortable, this experience of rushing. That's what it feels like in our body. 

Now, the second angle, I want to think about or talk about rushing, because I want to talk about what happens when you're feeling rushed, because, obviously, it's just not this experience in your body. It's this whole experience. 

And when you're feeling rushed, there's a lot of things that you tend to do. 

Tunnel vision.

One of the things that happens is you get this tunnel vision. You can't focus on anything else but doing the thing, getting out the door, getting on time, getting to wherever you need to go. Nothing else matters. And you're likely not very patient, especially probably with your kids, right? 

Like me, you might actually yell at them on occasion or say things or do things in the way that you don't really want to in order to get them out the door. 

And maybe if you're at work, you just kind of have to ignore everyone, what you hate doing, just to, like, get to the next meeting. Like, people are trying to interrupt you, ask you things you have no time for. 

You don't feel present with your team. You don't feel present when you're at home or when you're with your family. 

When you're rushing, there's a whole host of franticness, frantic action that takes place. 

You got to find your keys, you got to find your purse. You got to get the lunches. You got to get the backpack. 

Or if you're at work, it's like, oh, my gosh, I got to find my notes. I got to get my coffee. I got to check this email really fast. There's this last minute frantic nature that tends to happen when we're feeling rushed. 

And if you were a fly on the wall looking at you, you would see all of this buzzing around to kind of get to the next thing. That's sort of what rushing looks like. Those are the actions of rushing. 

But if someone could look at the thoughts in your mind, they would also see a whole bunch of rushing going on as well. Like, you're worried about what you're doing. You're thinking about being late. You're worried about walking into your meeting late or getting your kids to school, like, past whenever they're supposed to be there. 

Thoughts of failing or inadequacy come along with rushing.

There's maybe lots of thoughts of, like, failing or inadequacy or, like, oh, my gosh, why am I rushing again? This shouldn't be happening. 

These feelings of, like, not enoughness, I'm not doing enough. I'm doing something wrong. Your mind is frantically racing and rushing as well. Those are the thoughts that tend to be associated with rushing, which is our third perspective here. 

Rushing is a mindset.

But what I really want you to see is that this experience of being rushed, it's a mindset. It happens in your mind. 

It's also a body experience that happens with the feelings and its behaviors as well. And it's no wonder that this experience of being rushed feels so bad. 

It's no wonder that when we are rushing our kids out the door, they hate it because they're experiencing all of those same icky feelings and associations and behaviors as well. 

I'll never forget when I was walking my daughter to first grade. So that was a couple of years ago, I had 100% forgotten that it was an early bird day. Like, she was supposed to be at school 50 minutes earlier than when she's normally at school. Just totally forgot.

And so we got out the door 30 minutes late because I just didn't remember. And we were walking to school. I'm, like, trying, like, come on, we gotta go, we gotta go. I mean, we're late, we're late, we're late. 

“Sometimes it's just okay to be late.”

And she is just moseying her way to school. And I remember she's like, mom, sometimes it's just okay to be late. 

And I stopped and was like, yep, yep. Sometimes it is okay to be late. You're right, Lillian. 

And I just wanted to, like, smack her upside the head because she was, like, teaching me a lesson in this moment about, it's okay to be late sometimes. 

Our kids hate that experience of feeling rushed, just like we do. 

So here's the important part that I really want you to understand about the experience of being rushed. It's optional. It's 100% controllable. 

Now, before you roll your eyes at me and you turn off this podcast, I want you to hear me out. 

The experience of being rushed has nothing to do with how much you have on your plate, how many meetings you have stacked up today back to back, how late you're running. 

Generally speaking, we associate the experience of being rushed with not enough time. And it's true, if you're chronically feeling rushed, you may want to take a really hard and honest look at how scheduled you are, why you're saying yes to so many meetings and not kind of leaving space for you to do your work. 

You may want to look at your morning routine with your kids if you're constantly feeling rushed, getting out the door and start maybe playing around with the different variables when you get your kids up, how you get them dressed, when you make them lunch, how much you help them out. 

You have choices on how you spend your time and the way you structure your time so that you're not always feeling rushed and up against the clock. 

We want that to happen less. You are not at the whim of the demands of your meetings or your requests that come in from your boss or your employees or your team or your clients or your kids or your spouse. 

You have a choice. 

That is one of the fundamental principles of the ambitious and balanced working mom community. And what we're all about here on this podcast is remembering that you have a choice. 

When you take full ownership over what's not working in your life and what you ultimately want to change. Meaning you see how you're creating or at least contributing heavily to a problem in your life or a challenge in your life, then you have the ability to actually make change in the way you want. 

If your chronic feeling rushed is all about how many things you have on your calendar and how many meetings you have that day, and the demands of your job and the demands of your kids, or that your spouse isn't there in the morning to help out or whatever it is…

As long as the problem is found in something other than you, then you have no choice. You have no control. You're just simply the victim of your time and your calendar and your schedule and your demands, and it feels terrible. 

Take full ownership over your life and problems.

So I know this little sidebar here as I want to get back to the topic of rushing. But it's always good that we take a moment and remember that you have control, that you get to take full ownership, not to blame or to shame you or to make you feel awful about yourself. It's so that you can take back control, do something about the things that aren't going the way you want them to go in your life. 

That is my hope for you in this community and through this podcast. All right, tangent. Done. 

What I really want you to hear is that if you are chronically feeling rushed, it's likely time for you to take a hard look at what is causing you to feel rushed in your day. 

Maybe it's just a particular time. Maybe it's just the morning time or just the evening time, or maybe it's all day and start to take a hard look at the things that need to be fixed so that it doesn't happen so often in your day and in your life. 

The experience of being rushed, it happens in our mind.

Let's get back on track, though. So the experience of being rushed, it happens in our mind, it happens in our emotions, in our body, and it happens through our behavior, and it's all optional. 

You can have the same routine with your kids and then be just as resistant and you not feel rushed. You can have the same busy schedule with back to back meetings all day and not feel rushed. 

But the only way that happens is if you recognize that the entire experience of, feeling rushed and being rushed and all of those frantic behaviors, they stem from the way you're thinking. 

And if you're feeling rushed, likely your thoughts sound a bit like this. 

  • Oh, my gosh, I'm going to be late. 

  • I'm so behind.

  • I don't want anybody to be disappointed in me. 

  • I don't want to walk in late. 

  • I'm going to look bad. 

  • I'm going to look like a fool. 

  • There's not enough time to get anything done. 

  • Oh, I got to get to that.

  • I got to get to sleep. 

  • I got to get my kids to sleep so I could just find a little peace and quiet. 

  • I got to get out the door before the bell rings. 

  • I got to get up to school on time. 

Notice these thoughts, these rushed, frantic thoughts. That's what it feels like in our head or sounds like in our head, right? 

And what's the focus of all of these thoughts? It's time. 

And more specifically, it's about being on time. 

My friends, if being on time is consistently your focus, you are always going to feel rushed. 

If being on time continues to be a number one priority, you are always going to feel behind and frantic for more time. 

Now, I'm not saying that being on time is not important. It definitely is. 

My personality type really likes to be on time and prioritizes being on time all the time. It hates being late, but only because of how guilty and shameful I feel when I'm not. 

When I'm not on time, there's this whole, like, blame cycle that happens that sort of cultivates this experience of inadequacy when I'm not on time. And that's something I've had to very consciously work on myself. 

I help my clients work on it. It has helped slow me down. It helped slow my clients down so that they're more present and they're kinder to themselves. But here's my point. 

Being on time cannot be your number one focus or priority. 

Would you rather be on time getting your kids to school, or feel present and connected with them in the morning? 

Would you rather be on time to all of your meetings, or feel like you walk into that meeting feeling focused and grounded? 

Do you want your boss to see that you are someone that is always on time or always walking in, feeling prepared and confident? 

Now, of course, the real answer is that you want both, and I can guarantee that both are possible for you. But likely it will require you making some changes to your schedule, your time, how structured your time is. 

So there will be some uncomfortable decisions and choices that you are going to have to make with your time. And focusing your attention on always being on time and not being behind is actually never going to help. 

Because as we've been discussing, when you focus your mind on always needing to be on time and you never feel behind and you're always worried about it, you create this experience of being rushed in your mind and your body and through your behavior. 

So focusing on that is not actually going to help you be on time and feel controlled and calm and connected, present, confident, whatever it is you want to be feeling. 

3 steps to ending the rush.

So let's talk about the three steps to ending the rush. Okay, this is really the first one, you need to decide your priority. If it's not being on time, what is it for? 

My client that I spoke of at the beginning of this podcast, she said being connected was really her goal. That's what she really wanted in her morning routine with her kids and the monotony of having to get her kids dressed and ready and out the door, she wanted to be connected to them. That was her actual goal. 

Calm and grounded.

Now, if you're always feeling rushed at work and you're going from one meeting to the next, your goal might be to be calm and grounded. 

Imagine yourself not feeling rushed as you go in from meeting to meeting, but feeling calm and grounded. How different would you show up if that was your energy? 

How would you interact with your team differently? 

How would you speak up differently in that meeting? 

How would you be willing to share more of your ideas? 

Would you be more clear headed? Would you be able to tap more into, like, your vision and think long term? In those meetings, the goal can't be to be on time. 

And amazingly, when you drop that as a goal or as a priority, you're actually going to get better at being on time, I promise you. 

But number one, decide what your actual priority is, and let me probably add in there why it's more important to you than being on time. If you had to choose, why would you choose that instead of being on time? 

So that's step number one, to decide the priority based on where you find yourself constantly rushing and what you want to change. 

Whats your mindset?

The second step, to end all of that rushing, is to write down what you would have to be thinking in the moment in order to keep to that priority. What's your mindset? What's your focus that you will intentionally have to direct your mind to in order to prioritize the feeling of being calm or confident or present or prepared. 

For me, my priority is almost always feeling connected. It's one I like to come back to a lot. Whether I'm talking about being with my kids or connecting with my clients or my business, connecting to the impact that I'm making. 

I'm, someone that just really wants to feel deeply connected. That's a really good focus. That helps me really experience more calm, more focus, more positive experience, and joy in kind of all areas of life. 

Decide what's important.

So for me, if that was my priority, to be connected, not necessarily on time, I would need to be thinking…

  • I decide what's important. 

  • I'm willing to be late for this. 

  • This isn't life or death. 

  • Nobody's going to get hurt here. 

  • I'm enough, no matter what. 

  • I would rather be present and grounded than be on time for this meeting. 

  • No one really cares if I'm late. 

  • I'm still a badass working mom. 

  • I'm still amazing at my job even when I'm late to meetings. 

  • I'm in control of my time, and I know what I need in this moment. 

  • Rushing isn't going to make me any more successful. 

  • I'm always doing enough. 

Write down how you know these thoughts are true.

Now, the last step I have for you, after you've written down all of these thoughts, is I want you to think about and write down how you know these thoughts are already true. 

It's already true that I am doing enough in pretty much all areas of life. I'm not lazy. I'm not a slacker. I have lots of goals. I have lots of tasks. I have lots of focus. I am not an idle person. I am always doing enough. That is already true about me. It's just something that I need to believe and remember in the moments of rushing. 

How about you? I want you to take a look at these thoughts that you created in step two that you wrote down and I want you to find evidence for how they're already true. 

Now, I know this can feel like a long exercise, so if you want to break it up and kind of make a commitment of maybe just a week to journal about this, pick two or three of these thoughts each day and write about how you already know them to be true. 

Spend 10-15 minutes tops writing about it. It's going to shift how you feel in your body. 

You're going to immediately start to feel a sense of calm, a sense of focus, a sense of control, a sense of confidence, all the things that you are not feeling when you're feeling rushed. 

The goal of these three steps is to help your brain see another path so that that path becomes more accessible in the moment when you're rushing so that you're more likely to be able to stop and say, hold on - being on time is not the priority here. 

Being connected is. 

Being calm is. 

Being controlled is. 

I remember when my son was littler and he couldn't put on his shoes. Or actually, to be more accurate, he didn't want to put on his shoes by himself. And it used to frustrate me that he wouldn't do it. Like, why can't you be helpful in the morning? Just get your shoes on. 

And I remember very consciously switching my priority to being connected with him. And I found that rather than being rushed and irritated, that he wasn't getting his shoes on after maybe the second or third time of being like, hey, can you put on your shoes, bud? 

I, Instead, I would come over to him. I would get the shoes myself, and I would come over, and I would be like, hey, bud, it looks like you need some help putting on your shoes this morning. I'm here to help. And we would do it together. 

Amazingly, or maybe not so amazingly, he would always, when I would do this, be more calm, he would always be more compliant. He'd feel sort of my softness or my tenderness for him in the moment. 

The agenda of being connected.

Like I wasn't resisting his resistance and there'd be connection. But it only happened when I dropped the agenda of being on time, and I picked up the agenda of being connected. I know that you could do this, too. 

Shift your focus off being on time, and you'll stop rushing, and you'll find yourself much more in control of your time than you probably ever have been before. 

All right, working moms, I'll see you next week. And until then, let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson