Navigating travel expectations at work

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It's not easy to travel for work particularly if you have young kids at home. There’s lots of feelings of guilt, sadness, likely anxiety. There’s a lot of coordination and plans that have to be made, traveling for work is just hard.

In today’s podcast I want to talk about the cocktail of emotions that we experience as working moms when we travel for work. I’m gonna talk about my own experience of traveling when my daughter was young and how I ugly cried on the floor of my hotel room, and then will dig into the three choices you have if you travel for your job and are experiencing lots of guilt and sadness. 

Topics in this episode:

  • Chatting about how tough it is to keep up work-life balance when big changes hit. 

  • Real talk on why the usual calming tricks sometimes don’t cut it. 

  • Believing things will get better, even when it’s all up in the air. 

  • Sharing stories about the tough emotions of traveling for work as a mom. 

  • 3 options for dealing with travel guilt and sadness. 

Show Notes & References:   

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Transcript 

 

Intro 

It's not easy to travel for work, particularly when your kids are young. There's a lot of feelings of guilt, of sadness, of anxiety. There's likely lots of coordination to do, lots of planning to be made in order for you to be gone. Right. Traveling for work is just hard.  

 

In today's podcast, I want to talk about the cocktail of emotions that we all experience as working moms when we travel for work. I'm going to share my own experience of traveling when my daughter was young and how I ugly cried on my hotel room floor during that trip.  

 

And then we're going to dig into the 3 choices that you have if you travel for your job and you're experiencing a lot of guilt and sadness because of it. 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.  

 

All right. Hello, working moms. I'm gonna be super vulnerable with you in this moment. I am in a season of struggle right now. My anxiety is really high. My heart feels like it's racing all the time. I'm worried about dropping the ball and, like, all sorts of things, and I just want to share that with you because I want to be clear with you that I don't have it all figured out.  

 

Yes, I am an expert at teaching work life balance, but it's hard. And what I'm asking you to do in order to create a life that feels calm and balanced in all seasons of life is not easy.  

 

And I know, at least for myself, I'm sure for many more of you, we all kind of hope for this moment where we arrive, but that's not really the reality, right? Different seasons of life, different years, kids being different ages, different circumstances with loved ones.  

 

All these things affect our ability to have the calm and controlled and balanced life that we all want.  

 

Now, that doesn't mean that it's not possible. It just requires adjusting and effort.  

 

And I feel like I've been in one of these seasons for about four months now, ever since we bought our house, where things are really shifting for us as a family. And there's a lot more things to do, and there's a lot more projects to be done, as all homeowners understand. 

 

It’s all going to work out. 

The things and the tools and the rhythms that were useful to me before, just really aren't working for me right now. And I'm in a period of adjustment. And I want to share with you that one of the things that I really hold on to in a season like this, and I hold onto this on behalf of my clients as well, but one of these things that I really hold on to is, is that it's all going to work out. Right?  

 

Trusting the process. 

I don't know what, how, or when, but I know that it's all going to work out. I know that if I keep waking up, if I keep evaluating what I need, what's working, what's not working, testing different tools and just trusting the process that it will all get figured out.  

 

I know that it will. And so I hold that truth for you today as well. And it's one of the biggest reasons, really, that I created this podcast and that I teach on this podcast week after week after week, because I know that it's a process, and I know it's not a one size fits all right?  

 

I know that all of you are coming with different life circumstances, different angles, different perspectives, different personalities, different circumstances, different thoughts, right? And those are all affecting your ability to create the calm and balanced to life that you want.  

 

And I wanna show up in this podcast for you, helping come at it from a variety of angles until you figure out what works for you. All right, so let's dive into today's topic.  

 

Now, this topic has been surfacing for like, months now. I remember several months ago, I coached with a client on this, and it's been coming up a lot more for my clients recently. And then it was mentioned in one of the listener question and answer emails.  

 

I did 2 podcasts on listener question and answers. If you haven't heard those, I definitely would go back, but I decided not to talk about this topic there, and I decided to just do a whole topic on it right here, right now.  

 

So today we're going to talk about travel and making decisions around travel, particularly for your job, and the guilt that so many women experience when they're away from their kids traveling at work.  

 

The first time I travelled for work after birth. 

And I actually remember the first time that I traveled for work after my daughter was born. At the time, I was an event manager, and I was away for an event. I think I was gone for like, five or six days, and my daughter was not quite 18 months old yet, so she was a little bit on the older side.  

 

I'd done day trips. I'd gone away for a night, two nights, but never for a trip and never for work. And so this felt very different for me.  

 

And I have, like, visceral memories. I remember so having to excuse myself from working, like, in the middle of doing something and saying, I just need a moment. I'm going to be back. And I went to my hotel room, and I bawled my eyes out like ugly, cried my eyes out, had to wash my whole face, cold water, reapply makeup, really pull myself back together.  

 

And I remember at one point, talking to my husband - this just, like, brings tears to my eyes as I think about it. I remember on that trip talking to my husband just a couple of days in, I think, and I said, I need you actually, to stop sending me pictures and videos and facetiming me with my daughter because it was just too hard.  

 

And actually, I have some really positive memories of this trip, too. Funny enough, I remember this video that my husband had created with our daughter, and it was them searching for her favorite stuffed animal, which was a rabbit called Howard. And so it's the Howard video, and I love that video. I watch it all the time, and it happened when I was gone. He and she made this little video and sent it to me. So I have these positive memories, too.  

 

But I remember this moment. I remember this season so viscerally. It was very, very hard of me. And the reason it was so hard is because I felt so attached to my daughter at the time. It wasn't just sadness, but it felt, like hurt to be away from her. And it felt like a part of me was missing at that time.  

 

“It felt like I was choosing my job over her.” 

And there was other emotions too. I felt really guilty for being away from her, for not being there at story time. When my husband, started out in the beginning of the week telling me that she missed me and that she was asking about me, all of that brought about all of this guilt, and it felt like I was choosing my job over her. And I really didn't even like what I was doing right.  

 

There was a part of me that knew that I was very unfulfilled at the work I was doing. It was in that season between transitioning from being an event manager to my business as a coach, and I was kind of in the messy middle of kind of doing both.  

 

And I knew that I didn't really want to be doing what I was doing, and I was sacrificing time with my daughter to go away and do this job I didn't want to do. Excruciating to me.  

 

And if you are a working mom that travels a lot, I know that there's a cocktail of emotions. They might be similar to mine. They might be a different cocktail, a little bit of a different mix. But regardless, it's an emotional experience.  

 

Normalising this experience as working moms. 

And I wanted to really share my story with you to help normalize that experience, because I know that the human brain likes to label hard and emotional as being bad, as if something is wrong, as if it shouldn't have this much emotion around traveling, as if you might be in the wrong job because. Or your priorities might not be right, because you have all of this emotion. Right.  

 

Our brain likes to label our emotion and tell stories about our emotion, particularly labeling as being bad and wrong. And none of that's true. Right.  

 

And then some of you might be listening and thinking, you know, I don't experience any of that. I actually feel totally fine away from my kids, and that I want to also normalize that too. There's different seasons, different ages, different jobs. It all makes a difference on what we experience as a working mom.  

 

And I could tell you today, my kids being nine and seven, I still feel this pull to be with them when I'm away from them. But I don't really experience the guilt. I feel maybe a little bit of sadness, particularly if it's a long trip, but in a lot of ways, I feel exactly the opposite.  

 

I feel calm and I feel at peace with being away from them. Sometimes I even feel excited to be away from them, to have time to myself. It's like a whole different cocktail of emotions right now as I travel and am away from my kids.  

 

It's a different season and a different set of circumstances.  

But here's the most important thing, and we're going to dive into this more right now. I have different thoughts about those circumstances today. That's why I'm experiencing different emotions. My thoughts have actually changed. Right.  

 

I recently did a podcast on mom guilt, and if you remember, what I say, is that that guilt or that experience of guilt has nothing to do with your circumstance, right? It has to do with your thinking about your circumstance.  

 

“You feel guilty because you're thinking you're a bad mom.” 

So, in this case, you don't feel guilty because you're traveling and are away from your kids. You feel guilty because you're thinking you're a bad mom and you're doing something wrong because you're traveling and away from your kids, right.  

 

When my daughter was 18 months and I took that first trip, my thoughts were, oh, I shouldn't be doing this. I'm doing something wrong. I'm failing her. I'm not a good mom. I shouldn't be here. I don't want to be here. Right.  

 

Of course, with those thoughts, I felt an immense amount of pain, guilt, anxiety, hurt.  

 

I'm leaving on a three day trip in just a few days, actually, and I'm going to be away from the kids. I think I'm going to be away from them for, like, three and a half days. And I have completely different thoughts about that…  

 

  • I'm excited for this trip.  

  • I can't wait to get away.  

  • This is exactly what I need.  

  • This couldn't have come at a better time.  

  • This is going to be so much fun.  

  • My kids are happy.  

  • My husband can handle it. 

 

Totally different set of thoughts right now. Our thoughts are always the crux of how we feel. Our thoughts are always dictate how we feel.  

 

Why are you feeling guilty? 

So this is the first thing I want you to dive into. If you're struggling with work trips right now, write out your thoughts about it. If you're feeling guilty, why are you feeling guilty?  

 

What are your thoughts about yourself as a mom because you're traveling? 

 

You have to get all those thoughts out of your head so you can look at them, evaluate them, and decide what you want to do with them.  

 

So the second thing I want to dive into here, I want to talk about your options. Because the human brain is very repetitive. It likes to think things over and over and over again.  

 

You always have a choice. 

And one of the, the things your brain likes to forget is that you have a choice. You always have choices, right? You are an at will employee. You are desirable. Other companies would hire you. You have a choice. In fact, you have at least three choices, right?  

 

Number one, you can stay in your current job. You can have the same thoughts you have right now and be miserable with those thoughts, or you can go look for another job that has different travel requirements, or you could stay where you're at and negotiate your travel, right? You have three options.  

 

Now, as a coach, as your coach, really, at least for this moment, or in this podcast, I want to actually remove number one, right? Staying in your current job and changing nothing. Meaning you don't change the way you think. You don't negotiate at all. You don't adjust what's going on internally or externally.  

 

You just kind of wake up and hope that all of your thoughts and your feelings would magically be different tomorrow.  

 

I want to remove that option. It's the least desirable of all of those options. But to be honest, it's how a lot of us operate, right? We kind of operate with this sense of hope that we're going to wake up tomorrow and things are going to be different, but we don't actually change anything to make them different.  

 

We're kind of relying on the magic of the universe to hope that things will change. And that's not ultimately how life usually works. The divine do not usually intercede in our life in that way.  

 

So just waking up tomorrow and doing nothing, not changing the way you're thinking or feeling or adjusting anything, we're going to remove that option.  

 

That leaves us with two, right? You could leave your job, or you could negotiate at your current job for less travel.  

 

So let's talk about number two, because I assume most people on this podcast would actually choose number three. But it's important to give option two a little moment, right?  

 

Finding a different job is an option for you.  

It's a viable option to everyone. When I go back and look at that trip that I took when my daughter was 18 months old, a lot of my emotions stemmed from the fact that I didn't like what I was doing, that the time spent working didn't feel like it was worth being away from my daughter. Right.  

 

I've done a past episode on how important it is for your job to feel fulfilling in order for you to feel balanced. I'll link to that in the show notes. It was quite a while ago, but it was a really good one.  

 

And while I don't think it's a requirement that you really love your job and feel fulfilled by your job in order to feel calm and balanced and in control, it certainly makes it easier when you wake up every day and you feel like you're in the right job, you're going to the right place, you feel valuable in what you do, it makes it so much easier to feel calm and in control and make balanced choices. 

 

Manage your mind. 

If you're in a job that you don't want to be in, it's not impossible. It just means that you have to manage your mind around that a lot. You have to put in a lot of effort to think about why you're choosing to stay in that job, what it brings to you and your family, and why it's important for you to stay.  

 

So not impossible, just effort has to be put there.  

 

So it's important to take a moment and decide if you really want to stay in your job or if really changing your jobs and finding something that was more fulfilling to you would actually be the better option.  

 

But let's focus on the last option, which is the option I think most of you would choose, which is to negotiate. Right.  

 

With that client that I had a session with several months ago, where we took this entire session to really talk about travel. She travels a lot for her job. We talked about all of the different types of travel that she did for her job. There were sales meetings. There were clients that she needed to meet. There were conferences she needed to attend, conferences that she needed to present at. There were international travel trips and local travel trips.  

 

We took a moment. We listed out all these different types of travel to talk about which one she felt she could actually negotiate on. And this was hard for her because all of these travel opportunities were really good for her and her career. Right.  

 

There was an argument, at least in her mind, that all these were equal. And ideally, she would go to all of them. And so we had to take a moment and dial back and remember that career growth was not her only goal.  

 

Before her daughter was born, and likely even before she was married, career growth probably was her number one goal, and she would have gladly gone on all of those trips. It was exactly what she wanted to do.  

 

Our goals change once we become mothers. 

But now that she has a family, she doesn't want to do that. It's not that career growth isn't important or even as important as it was before. Still very important. It's just not the only goal. Right.  

 

There's another goal that has risen up over the years since her daughter was born that has equal importance, and that is being a really connected and present mom.  

 

Career growth and being a great mom are now intertwined as a single goal, which means she has to get out of the mindset that she's choosing one or the other, and she has to see the whole picture.  

 

If her career is amazing but she feels terrible as a mom, then she's not meeting her goal.  

 

If she's an amazing mom, but her career is taking a big hit, then she's also not meeting her goal.  

 

It has to be both.  

 

So we dialed it back and we talked about her goal and how the goal had changed, and ultimately what it meant for her to be focusing on career growth while being the mom that she wants to be.  

 

Curating your yes. 

And what she landed on was the importance of priorities and boundaries and not saying yes to everything, but rather being more selective with her. Yes. Or I like to say curating her yes, right.  

 

She needed to come up with her non-negotiables. What was she not going to miss particularly?  

 

In her family life, there were obvious things like birthdays that she didn't want to miss, but there were other kinds of milestones that she wanted to be present for as her daughter got older, entered elementary school, things that she wanted to make sure that she was always going to attend and that she would be saying no to travel if it ever impacted those things.  

 

Focus on what is most important. 

So she had to come up with that list for herself. All those travel opportunities were good, but they weren't all important. And she needed to focus on really what was most important to her so she could figure out what travel she needed to say no to.  

 

And what she was able to identify were things like her leadership of her team was really, really important to her, particularly because she was in a new role.  

 

Strategic meetings that really helped further her career a couple years down the road. Those were important to her when it came to travel. Key networking events that she really needed to show her face for because there were key clients. Those were important to her.  

 

She was able to start focusing on what was really important in her job, what was going to make her successful in her job, and then look at the different travel opportunities that were there and start to decide which of those fit the bucket of her priorities.  

 

I want to offer that to you too.  

 

What does success as an ambitious working mom look like to you?  

If career growth and being a great mom are, like, combined as equal, what does success look like? You have to see that in your mind if you're ever going to start to make decisions, to prioritize it. 

 

And one of the things that we do in coaching is we dream. We get your brain out of the current state of the immediacy of the things that need to get done, and we start thinking long term.  

 

Making decisions today that help future you. 

That's essentially the definition of proactive living. Right. It's thinking further ahead and then making decisions today that help you to get to that place.  

 

The last thing I want to offer to you, and it's something that I talk a lot about here on the podcast, but I keep talking about it because it's so important to see it in, in all contexts how important this is. It's like one of my main tools that I talk about with my clients all of the time, and that is that you need a plan or a strategy for how to take care of your emotions as you make decisions on your travel plans.  

 

And what you're going to do, because for sure, really big emotions are going to come up. Right. It's going to be difficult just to sit down with a pen and paper and to write these things out.  

 

A whole bunch of anxiety is going to come up as you go into a conversation with your boss where you're wanting to let them know that you're not wanting to travel as much. And here's your plan for your travel and so forth.  

 

You are going to have a lot of anxiety. It's going to feel very overwhelming. You're not going to feel like a team player. You're going to worry that they're going to judge you or think you're not good enough. Big, big emotions are going to come up.  

 

When you are about to leave for your next trip and you're saying goodbye to your kids, you're going to feel all sorts of emotions at that time. Sadness, potentially guilt, anxiety. All these different things are going to come up.  

 

Then when you're on your trip and you're thinking about your kids, you're going to feel sad and you're going to feel all these other things, right? There's going to be a cocktail of big emotions that come up as you're making plans to change the way you do travel, or just even when you travel, of course those big feelings are going to come up.  

 

What are you going to do when they surface?  

 

What's your plan?  

 

What's your plan for taking care of your emotional self?  

 

Because you're likely just going to want to push through, which we usually describe that as being stuffing your emotions. You're just going to want to push through them, ignore them. And I promise you, the more you do that, the deeper and harder and bigger your emotions are going to get.  

 

Interact with your big emotions. 

One of the biggest insights I have for you in creating an ambitious and balanced life is to not figure out how to be absent from your hard feelings, essentially how to get rid of them, but instead to learn how to manage and interact with them differently, with kindness and compassion.  

 

  • How are you going to handle your big emotions and big feelings in these moments?  

  • How are you going to treat yourself?  

  • What is your plan? 

 

If you come up with a plan, you're going to be infinitely more likely to follow through with that plan and be kinder and more compassionate with yourself during those times.  

 

Now, if you're looking for more support and being a present and connected mom, while at the same time being really successful at your job, remember, it's twofold. There's two goals really all kind of wrapped up into one.  

 

I have the perfect audio series for you that I want to share. It's a 19 day audio series where each audio is five minutes or less. I kept it short and sweet on purpose. We're all busy working moms, right?  

 

Where I cover little mini topics on what it takes to be a present and connected mom even while you're going after big, ambitious career goals. So you can find a link to that in your show notes.  

 

You can go to my website as well and find it there. You can go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com.  

 

I know if you love this podcast, you're going to love that audio series too. So check out that free resource as well. And until next week, working moms, let's get to it. 

Rebecca Olson