Balance foundations: The right way to think about work-life balance

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In this week's episode of the podcast, we're diving into a topic that every ambitious working mom grapples with: balance. 

Today, we're kicking off a new series that takes us back to the basics of crafting an ambitious and balanced life. We'll start by debunking the myth that balance means equal time for work and personal life. Get ready for some eye-opening insights and practical tips to help you redefine your journey toward true balance.  

Let's get to it! 

Topics in this episode:

  • Understanding what balance truly means. 

  • Debunking common misconceptions about work-life balance. 

  • Why balance should be viewed as a feeling rather than a strict time management concept. 

  • The importance of focusing on internal thoughts. 

  • Mindset and emotional well-being. 

 Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Let me ask you this. Would you ever get in your car knowing that you're supposed to get to the other side of town, but you have no idea exactly where you're supposed to go? 

I mean, of course not! You'd find yourself driving in circles and feeling frustrated because you don't actually know the destination, right? The same is true with life as an ambitious and balanced working mom. 

If you don't know the goal or the end destination of what an ambitious and balanced life looks like, then you're going to find yourself frustrated going in circles just trying to get there. 

Today I am launching a series bringing us back to the foundational principles of what it takes to create an ambitious and balanced life. 

And today, we're starting with defining the destination. Because when you know exactly what it is you are trying to achieve in an ambitious and balanced life, you are infinitely more likely to actually achieve it. 

So, in today's episode, I am walking you through the most common misunderstanding of what a balanced life is and setting the record straight. Fair warning, I get a little passionate about this. So, are 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. 

Foundational principles of balance.

Hello, ambitious and balanced working mom community. Hey, over the next several weeks, I want to bring us back to some of the foundational principles of this podcast and this community, and really what all of my coaching is based on. 

It's important sometimes that we sort of get out of the weeds, out of the nitty gritty of the everyday life, or in this case, out of the nuances of what it takes to create an ambitious and balanced life, and we sort of zoom out and remember the bigger picture here, the bigger process. Right. 

We have covered a wide range of topics on this podcast since I started it three and a half years ago on what it takes to create both an ambitious and balanced life. 

But over the next several weeks, I want to zoom us back out and remember the process so that you can remember how all of these little things sort of fit together in the big picture. 

If I used an analogy of gps, right, it's sort of been like for months now, we've been following the turn by turn map, and I want to swipe screens and go to that screen that where we zoom out, right? 

Where it kind of shows you the little mark of where you are right now. And then it has a little blue line that shows you exactly how you're going to get to where you want to go to the destination. Right. 

That's the screen I want to be on for the next couple of weeks. And what we're going to focus on today is that destination. Right. 

It doesn't matter what the process is of getting from here to there if you have no idea where there is, right? So we're going to dive into talking about exactly what does it mean to create an ambitious and balanced life. 

We're going to dive into defining that destination, the end goal. 

Before I jump in, I want to take a moment, and I want to remind you that if you want to take all of these strategies and tips that we talk about right here in the podcast to the next level, if you're looking for a guide, a guru, or lately I've been thinking about myself as like a coaching ninja for my clients in helping them find more and more success at faster and faster rates. Then I want to encourage you to sign up for your free breakthrough call. 

Free coaching call.

This is a free coaching session for anyone that is interested in working with me and wants to get a better sense of how coaching works and to determine if we're really going to be a good fit together moving forward. 

You can book that free call by going to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com book. All right. 

Now, the first foundational principle that we're going to talk about on this series is understanding the destination, or maybe a better way of saying that is understanding the goal, right? 

Because so often what I hear from working moms when they talk to me or they message me or they schedule their breakthrough call and we start talking about their life, they tell me that they want to experience more balance. 

And of course, that makes sense. I'm a working mom coach, and a good portion of what I teach, what I talk about, what I coach on, is what it takes to create a balanced life. 

But so often what happens when I'm talking to someone that's feeling really out of balance and needs help changing their overworking behaviors, their people pleasing, their perfectionism, you know, I'll ask them, well, what does that really mean to you? 

Like, when you say you want to experience more work life balance or just balance? You know, what do you even mean by that? Because this word balance is a completely subjective word, right? It's a subjective idea. 

Of course we can open up a dictionary and we can look to how it is defined there in the dictionary. Actually, just had a mental image of me opening up my grandmother's encyclopedia Britannica. Yes. She had a entire full set, beautiful blue set on her bookshelf. I remember it quite well.

And I remember she would send me over there to look things up. And so if I went over to her encyclopedia Britannica and looked up this word balance, the image that I think I would see is a scale, right? Like one of those kind of grecian scales where you have a hanging disc on one side held by, like, chain, and then you have a hanging disc on the other side held up by chain. And it's sort of like tilting back and forth based on how heavy something is, right? 

The balance scale.

It's a scale. It's a balance scale. When we talk about work life balance, oftentimes, on one side of that scale, what we imagine to be is work. And then, like, the energy and the time spent on work, and then on the other side in that other disc is life, and it's the time and the energy spent on life. 

And so this image that we often have in our heads of work life balance. And what it means is this, like, scale with work on one side and life on the other, as if there's meant to be some sort of energy and time balance between these two things. 

And then, of course, for some people, their scale has other pieces to it as well. Like, there's more discs. So thhey have, like, the work disc, and then they have the life disc. And also a part of their scale is, like, is their workout or their health disc. And then maybe they have a kind of community disc involved in that. 

So there's all these different scales that are trying to, like, if you were watching me on YouTube right now, you'd see me trying to, like, balance all of these different things to try to find some equality between them so that it remains kind of upward and balanced. 

But, my friends, this is the wrong image to hold. When you think about creating work life balance and having an ambitious and balanced life, the idea of equality is near impossible, and it's not actually what you want to achieve. 

Think about this word that we use, balance. Right? When you talk to someone about balance, what are the words that you use? 

The most common thing that I hear when someone tells me that they want to experience balance is they say, I want to feel balanced. 

The word feel is what's really important there, because it's getting to the heart of what you actually want to experience. When you say you want work life balance. You want to feel something, right? 

Balance, at least in the way I want us to think about it here in this ambitious and balanced working mom community, is that I want you to think about it like it's a feeling. That's the end destination of where we're all trying to go. We're trying to get to a feeling or a state of being. 

Other words that I've heard used to describe this sort of balanced feeling is calm, centered, grounded, present. The end destination that you're looking for when you're creating an ambitious and balanced life is not one where you're frantic and where you're pulled in every direction. And when you have to go from one thing to the next thing to the next thing, and you're feeling absolutely wiped out and exhausted at the end of the day, right. 

An ambitious and balanced life is one where you're doing all of those things that you want to do, right? You're setting really big goals for yourself. You're going after success in your career, and you're feeling calm and grounded and present while doing it. This is a really important distinction to make, that balance is a feeling - I want you to really, really understand why that's so important here. 

Because the end destination, the goal of a balanced life, is not some set of perfect circumstance where you equally spend time working and then being with your family, or working out or taking care of yourself or seeing friends. 

Controlling the uncontrollable.

Because if that was true, if that was the end destination, if that was the goal of a balanced life, you would ultimately be trying to control the uncontrollable. 

Because if you think about what it would take in order for you to achieve that sort of life, where there's sort of this equality of time and energy amongst all the different buckets of your life, what you would likely need is you would need your husband or partner to step up more, right? Which is likely not something you can control. I'm sure you've probably tried, but it does. It is fruitless. It never works. 

You would probably need to have less on your plate at work, which means your boss would have to give you less, or you'd have to delegate more to someone else. You'd have to have more people on your team, and that's also something that you can't control. 

You would probably need your team, or like your direct reports, to step up more, to not need you so often, to not have to hold their hands so often. Right? Again, that's nothing you can control. 

In order for you to wake up every morning, and work out, and I'm sure that's something you would love to do on some level. You would need your kids to get to bed at a reasonable time, to not wake up, to not get sick in the middle of the night, right? To not wake you up again, not something you could control. You would probably need more help with childcare. You would need more kind of time and flexibility in your day, which might mean you need to live closer to your family, or you need your family to be more willing to help out. Again, not something you can control. 

Or perhaps you're in one of those jobs that's really seasonal, where you go in and out of being really busy in different seasons. Maybe that's based on the annual calendar, maybe that's based on, a project based calendar. 

But in order for you to really create the equality of time and energy that you desire in this sort of like scale balanced life, what you'd really need is for projects and for clients to not all need you at the same time. And again, that's not likely something that you can control. 

Do you see this theme here? 

When, you focus on creating equality in your time and your energy across work life, friends, family, community, and you, this has you focusing on trying to get other people to do things on your timing and in your way, based on your priorities and standards, which is never something that you can control. 

This way of thinking about the destination or the goal of the ambitious and balanced life, it has you trying to control all things that are unfair, controllable, and besides it being uncontrollable. 

Like, let me also take a moment, and I want you to think about why you want to control all of those things in the first place, right? 

If you were really able to control all of those circumstance, right? You were able to control your workflow, how much your partner helps out around the house, when your kids get to sleep, if they wake up, when they cry, when they're happy, what your workload is, the quality of work that your direct reports do or your team does, if you were truly able to control all of those things in order to find that equality that you're looking for, what's the result of all of that? 

Like, why do you want that in the first place? Think about that for a moment. 

What's on the other side of that for you? 

Yes, obviously balance, because that's what, that's like the umbrella that we're talking about. 

But really what is, what's on the other side of balance of all of that, of you controlling all of those circumstances? 

It's peace, it's calm. It's a feeling like you are successful and that you can actually handle everything, right? 

The end result of more equitable time and energy spent between work and home and personal is still a feeling. It's still a state of being. 

Balance is a feeling. 

The destination or the goal of an ambitious and balanced life is an internal experience. 

Let's talk about what changes when you frame the goal in that way, right? If you stop trying to find all the more equitable things in your time and your energy, if you stop trying to create systems and structures, all in an attempt to create control of your external circumstances, in hope that you experience balance, and instead, you focus on controlling what's going on inside of you, then the focus, like the mechanism of how you go about creating that ambitious and balanced life that has you focusing on, ultimately, two things:

Your thoughts and your emotions.

Those are the things that are inside of you that create that internal state of being that we're talking about that you have complete control over. 

It's why we spend so much time on this podcast talking about the way you think, your perspective, your mindset, so many of the tools that I offer to you in this podcast, and that I walk all of my clients through, is about changing your internal story about things. 

Because the way you think about something is ultimately how you feel about it. And that informs your behavior and your habits and your actions, right? 

Your emotions, those are your feelings. Those are literally the sensations and vibrations that take place in your body is a response to the way that you think. 

And so, in coaching and in this podcast, what I teach you is how to have a more compassionate and loving relationship with your emotions. So you stop trying to avoid all of those feelings of failure, all of those feelings of disappointing others, any other negative emotion. 

Because avoiding negative emotion is a huge part of what creates imbalance in life. 

And that's why we talk about it so often here on the podcast…

  • Calm

  • Grounded

  • Present

  • Sufficient

  • Enough

I want you to experience those emotions. 

No matter what your circumstances are in life, no matter how much your husband or your spouse helps out around the house, no matter if your kids are having a terrible day, or they're in their terrible twos and they're constantly melting down all day, no matter if you get one thing done today on your to do list, or ten things done on your to do list, no matter if your to do list is 50 things long or it's just a couple of things long, no matter if anyone else on your team is is a working mom and knows what it is you're experiencing. 

No matter if you have a boss or a company that understands what it's like to be a working mom, no matter what, I want you to experience a life of calmness, groundedness, sufficient presence, and ultimately, joy. 

That is the goal. That's the destination, my friend. 

And when you truly understand that that's what we're trying to create in an ambitious and balanced life, we're trying to achieve an internal state. 

No matter what our circumstances are, it changes the process by which you go to create that, right. 

It has you focusing on the only thing you ever have control over, which is your internal thoughts and your internal emotions. 

Now, working moms, the fastest way I know to hit this goal is through coaching. 

It is hiring someone that has not only been where you have been, but they are equipped to walk you through that journey themselves. Right? 

There's no need to reinvent the wheel to figure out how to experience that feeling of balance. I just will show you. 

Don't forget to schedule that free breakthrough call to start the process of creating a life that feels balanced. 

No matter what your circumstances are, I will walk you through it. 

I am a guru, I am a ninja at helping working moms create an ambitious and balanced life. So you can schedule that free breakthrough call by going to my website, www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com

Can't wait to talk to you. And until then, let's get to it. 

Rebecca Olson