Balance foundations: Finding clarity in daily life

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In this week's podcast episode, we're tackling the power of clarity in balancing work and life.

As busy ambitious working moms, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with competing priorities. I'll share how gaining clear insight into your daily and long-term goals can help you manage your time better and reduce stress.

Don’t miss out - tune in to discover how clarity can transform your life! 

Topics in this episode:

  • Understanding why having clear priorities is essential for achieving work-life balance. 

  • Identifying and focusing on what matters most in your daily routine. 

  • Creating a vision for your life. 

  • The impact of clarity on managing family and work responsibilities. 

  • How coaching can expedite the process of gaining clarity and achieving a balanced, fulfilling life. 

 Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Hey, working moms. We are in the middle of a series on the foundations of work life balance, and today we're diving into clarity and the importance of feeling crystal clear on both your day to day priorities and your bigger life goals. 

Listen, as an ambitious working mom, at any given moment, you likely have at least five very important things vying for your attention. And if you don't feel crystal clear on which of them you want to put your time and energy into, you will likely try to do all of them, but not very well, or you're going to feel guilty and like a failure because you're going to have to drop the ball on some of them. 

In a life that feels balanced, you have determined ahead of time what your priorities are and why, so that you can more easily decide where to put your attention. 

In today's episode, I'm talking about the importance of clarity and exactly what you need to be clear on in order to create a life that feels balanced. You ready? Let's get to it. 

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom 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, ambitious and balanced working mom community. I am so excited to continue on the series that we have started just last week around the foundation of what it takes to create work life balance. 

So last week, I started with answering this question, what is balance? And if you didn't listen to last week's episode, it's totally fine for you to listen to today. 

You probably are going to want to go back and listen, because I really dive into, like, the misunderstandings behind what balance truly is. 

I don't want you to be chasing something that doesn't truly exist. 

I don't want you to be wasting your energy focusing on the wrong thing. 

Balance is a feeling.

And so in that episode, I really talk about what is balance at the core. And quick, like a recap of that balance, as I talk about in that episode, is at its core level, a feeling. Think about the way we say it. We talk about wanting to feel balanced. That's the word we usually use. And when we're talking about creating work life balance, oftentimes what we're saying is we want to create a life where we experience this feeling of balance. 

With my clients, oftentimes they'll use words like calm, present, grounded. Right? These are other words that we might use to kind of interchangeably with this idea of balance. 

When you think about a life that's balanced, likely the image that comes to mind for you is of you feeling very focused, very controlled, very grounded. You're not in this constant feeling of being torn all of the time, frantic feeling like you're running behind and feeling not enough. Right. Balance is a feeling. 

And I go into that argument in that episode, and when you reorient your idea to that being the goal, it really changes everything. 

I want to take a brief moment and remind you that if this concept, that balance is a feeling, like it's this internal state of calm and presence and control, like, if that idea kind of has a light bulb going off in your head saying, oh, my gosh, that's exactly what I want. That's exactly what I'm trying to create. 

If that's where you're at, I want to offer to you that this is the work that I do in coaching. 

Every single day, I help my clients orient their life around the things that matter most to them, the things that bring them joy, the things that are connected to their bigger goals, the things that bring calm, that bring freedom. Right. 

Even just today, I had a coaching session with one of my clients, and we're at the end of our time together. We've been working together for almost six months. She's got one session left, and she just had this massive smile on her face as she was telling me about how much she's learned over the course of our last six months together, like how much nuggets of wisdom and things that she's beginning to internalize. 

Choosing joy.

And she had this smile because it's all been clicking for her in these last couple of months. It's all been coming together, and she feels so much more like she's able to say no. She's able to kind of regulate her emotion. She's able to choose joy. She's able to not feel like she has to do and be everything to everyone all of the time. She's feeling so much more confident in herself. So many good things are happening for her, and it's been such an amazing journey. 

I know that I can help you create that, too. So don't forget to reach out. Book your free breakthrough call to talk about to get the experience of coaching with me, and we'll talk about our next steps. You can go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to find a time to schedule that call with me. 

The 3 C’s.

All right, so today I want to focus on another foundational concept of balance. In the first of what I like to call the three c's. 

When I talk to my clients about this, the first one, and the one we're going to talk about here today is clarity. Okay? So I want to tell you why clarity is one of the pillars of a balanced life, why it's part of the foundation of what it takes to create balance. 

It's very simple. If you don't know what your priorities are or have a vision for where life is going for you and how all of the various pieces of life kind of sort of fit together, right? You are going to feel a constant pull for your attention. 

The opposite of feeling balance. 

At any given moment, you likely have five very important things that are just vying for your attention. And if you don't know which one to focus on, you're likely going to try to do them all, or you're going to pick one and not others, and then you're going to feel guilty and you're going to feel like a failure because you're not doing them all and you're going to feel exhausted. It's like the opposite of that feeling of balance. 

There's really two parts of clarity that we're going to talk about here on this episode, and what I emphasize with all of my clients, we're going to talk about both of them. But I want to start with the first one here, which is about your priorities. 

Clarity on your day to day priorities.

The first thing that you need clarity on are your day to day priorities. It doesn't matter what your priorities were before you had kids or what your spouse's priorities are, or even your boss, for that matter. What your priorities are is all that matters. 

And another way I want to maybe think about priorities for you is, the things that matter most to you in your kind of day to day life. 

So one way to think about this is, like, at the end of your work day, what do you want to say that you did? Now, for many of you, that might put too much of an emphasis on, like, achievement, like things like checkboxes, if you will. And I don't want you to get in this hyper space of, like, I got to check one more thing off my list. I got to check one more thing off to get there. So that's not what this is about at all. So if that's kind of you and that that brings up a little bit of anxiety even thinking about that. 

Another way that you could think about this question, if we adjusted it ever so slightly, it would be this. At the end of your day. Who do you want to say you were? I actually like this version of the question better because it's what really has you focusing on who you want to be. 

Who do you want to be.

Because when you focus on who you want to be, what you want to do or achieve is actually fairly obvious to you, right? 

So let me give you an example of one of my priorities, which is to be a connected human. Like, connection is a really strong value to me. I want people to feel connected to me. I want to be connected to other people. This would be true in, like, certainly as a mom, as a spouse, as a friend, but just in my community, right? 

So those things are really important to me, and it's how I want to show up as a human being. It's a value of mine. It's a priority of mine. 

So even just this morning, right as I was helping my kids get ready to go to summer camp and get them out the door, it's a Monday morning, and it's like, after we have been on vacation all last week, right? So it's been, how many days is that? It's been like nine or ten days, right, since we were at summer camp last. And both kids are struggling. 

My son didn't wash his clothes yesterday like I suggested, so he didn't have his favorite shorts or t shirts wear, and so he didn't want to get dressed. And after several attempts of both my husband and me, trying to get him to just go into his room and put something on, it's not really that big of a deal, is it? Right, we all know that, but it is to him. 

Being a connected mom.

I realized that I was not actually connecting to him. I was prioritizing trying to get out the door instead of just being a connected mom. As soon as I realized this, that I was sort of putting emphasis on the wrong thing. I was valuing the wrong thing. I was prioritizing the wrong thing. It's all kind of saying the same thing there. I stopped. 

I went over to him, and I asked if I could pick him up, which he was really glad at this point. He was flopping all around on the sofa. I was in the kitchen and so forth. So I went over to him, I picked him up. He, like, nuzzled his head in my shoulder, and I said, you know what? It is really hard to get dressed when you don't have anything that you want to wear. Like when you don't have your favorite t shirt. I get that. That's really hard to get dressed. 

And you know what? It's totally true about that for me too. If I look at my closet and I don't have the things that I want to wear that day, I take an infinite more amounts of time to get dressed than I normally do when I have the exact thing that I want to wear. So he's not wrong. I totally, totally understand why he's feeling that way. 

So I walked him to his room, and I started to pull out different shirts. And eventually it became a little game for him. And he said, well, why don't you take all of my shirts out, and I will tell you, yes, no, or maybe. So I would hold up a shirt, and he would tell me, yes, no, or maybe. And then I hold another one, yes, no, or maybe. Until we just had a couple of maybes. And I held them up, and he said, well, hold them all the way up so I could see the whole shirt. He knows exactly what these shirts are. He wears them all the time. And so I hold both of them up, and he, picks one, and the little moment is overdeveloped, and he's able to come out and have breakfast, and we're able to move on. 

My priority was to be a connected mom. It was not to try to get out the door on time, right? I had to drop that priority of just being on time. 

My daughter, I found her actually laying on her bed, dressed, but sort of zoned out as she was listening to this story podcast that she likes to listen to. And I came in, I was like, hey, your breakfast is ready. What's going on? And then I just saw one look at her face, and I saw something else was kind of happening for her. And so my priority in that moment just totally dropped. It went from needing to get her to eat breakfast, to pack her backpack, to get out the door on time, and it dropped to being a connected mom. 

And so I took a couple of steps towards her. I stroked her hair. I said, hey, it looks like you just need a little help today. Do you want me to bring your breakfast in here and you can listen to your podcast in here by yourself? How does that feel? Good? And she shook her head, yeah.

It's not something I would normally do. I wouldn't want her to eat breakfast in her bed. I don't want breakfast all over her bed and so forth. But that was not the priority at the time. Clean sheets, not the priority. 

Being a connected mom that really listens, hears, responds to what my kids need, that's the priority. 

What I find oftentimes with my clients is that there's an overemphasis on their priorities being something that they do. 

When they get to the end of their life, they're not going to remember what they did on a day to day basis, but they will likely remember who they were during various seasons of life. 

They'll be able to look back and feel proud of the way they showed up without regret. 

In a balanced life, you know what your day to day priorities are. 

You know how you want to show up and what it's going to take in order for you to do that. 

That way when your kids having a rough morning, or when you get a call from school because they're sick, or when you have a client that's moved to their meeting from the end of the week till tomorrow and you haven't really prepped for it, you know what your priorities are, so that when things don't go according to plan, which of course, they never go according to plan, then you know where you want to focus your energy, right. 

You don't flounder and try to do too much or, overemphasize things and, like, put time and energy. What I mean by overemphasize, you don't put time and energy towards things that really aren't important to you. Right. Is being 100% prepared for that meeting that your client just moved the actual priority or is 70% okay, which might actually allow you to leave work tonight at a decent hour so you can get home and be present with your family. Right. 

Is showing up for every single meeting the most important thing to you, or is being selective, with your meetings that you decide to attend so that you can kind of have mental capacity to take care of your sick kid? 

I said it before, I'm going to say it again. In a balanced life, it's not that you don't have multiple things vying for your attention. It's that, you know, with some level of inner certainty. Which of those things is the most important thing to focus on. 

So the second type of clarity is long term clarity. 

Now, most women I talked to, me included at this point, have never planned their life past this moment in time. Go to a good school, get good grades, get a good job, find a partner, get married, get promoted, have kids, hopefully on some level in that order. 

That's what we all think of in some way, very stereotypical way of thinking about it. Kind of the life that we have all planned on some level, or the expectation that we have of ourself, you know, after high school. 

And for most of you, you've actually achieved that you know, give or take some life bumps in there. So now the big question is, can you...did you hear it? Did you hear it in your head? 

Clarity on your next steps.

The next obvious question is, now what? What vision do you have for your life now that you are a successful professional with kids? Like, what's the next big goal? I mean, otherwise, your brain is kind of going, what is this all for? 

For my one on one clients, I have each of them go through a workbook that I call define your regret free life. And it has them go through a series of exercises that helps create this kind of next level of vision. And my clients tell me that this particular workbook with these exercises is some of the hardest work that they do in, our six months of coaching together. 

And it's also one of the most rewarding, because for many of them, they start naming things that they've never named before, that they haven't been willing to put words to, or they name things that were once a dream that they'd kind of lost and was sort of forgotten, and that they get to rekindle again. Right. 

Connecting with our dreams and big goals.

So for some, it's kind of old dreams that resurface. For others, it's brand new dreams that they've never. That they've never shared with anyone. Writing a book, having a successful Ted talk, starting a business, kind of making their passion their job, whatever it is. 

And then for some of my clients, there's this emphasis on things that they want to do or like, achieve in their life. And for others, it's more of this idea. It's a little bit more general than that. It's more about a way of life that they want to have. 

Like, for example, one of my clients might say something like, they want to feel uninhibited in life, meaning they want to be able to travel with without their family or change jobs when it's no longer fulfilling. 

They just want to feel like that they're not stuck, that they always can follow their heart and follow their passion, like that's their life dream. 

For others, there might be an emphasis on something like community or an importance of, like, an inner community of some kind, which means that for them, they really want to live close to their family. 

Regret-free life.

For some of my clients, they've named that as a dream, and then they have gone and lived with their family. We will either work together to get them to move closer to their family, or I'll get a message a couple of months later, six months, even a year later, that's like, I finally did it. I finally moved closer to my family. It's what I've always wanted, because that's a part of their regret-free life, right? 

And so it helps orient their sort of bigger decisions in life as they move through, because it's connected to this bigger, these bigger goals that they've set for themselves. 

I know for a lot of you, and for a lot of my clients, when they come to me, they feel you might feel like you're drowning, right? Like there's so much to do, everything feels so important. There's not enough time to do it all. And so there's this consistent feeling of failure and not enoughness. And it barely feels like you make it through the day exhausted before you crawl into bed and just wake up and do it again. 

When you feel clear on your day to day priorities, when that is crystal clear to you, you're going to stop feeling like you're drowning and you're going to start treading water. 

But when you know exactly what your regret free life is, when you can have this longer term vision of where you're going, what life is all about for you, and it makes sense in this kind of bigger picture, then you stop treading water and you start actually swimming in a direction. 

That's the best analogy I can give you to understand why clarity is such a foundation, such a pillar of creating a balanced life. 

Look, I know that finding clarity is really hard to do on your own. There are deep questions to answer with no right answer. There's no right way of doing any of those answers. 

You could find some really good books on this to help you sort of design your life or help you name your purpose or kind of understand your parachute color, right? So you, if you remember that book back from, I think, the nineties or so, that, nineties, maybe early two thousands, that really helps give you, like, career direction, right? Tons of great, very useful, helpful books. But if you really want to find clarity fast, you want to go from drowning to intentionally swimming in a direction as fast as possible. 

The best way I know how to do that is to coach together. I can walk you through these conversations quicker than you will ever be able to read a book, journal, out all the answers, digest it, have conversations with people, overcome the fear and discomfort of having to change things up, and then finally decide and make a decision and move forward. Right? 

I know, because that was the path I took. I had this amazing book that I read called free by Mark and Lisa Scandrett. Took me over a year to read it, to do all of the exercises, to join a small group that was kind of exploring this book to discuss all of the decisions with my husband, to kind of get through all of the wade, through all of the fear that was going on inside of me and all of the what ifs and finally make a decision about what I wanted to do. 

From the time I started reading that book to the, to the time that I really felt that sense of like freedom and clarity and next steps, it was like a year and a half. 

In coaching for my best clients. That clarity process takes less than a month, a year and a half or a month? And for some that happens. That's too fast, right? For them, it might take them longer than that, but we're talking weeks, not years. 

If you want me to walk you through this clarity process, best way to do that is to schedule that free breakthrough call by going to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book now. 

Next week we are going to continue on this conversation around the foundations of what it takes to create a life that feels balanced. 

In week one, we focused on the concept that balance is a feeling. This week we are focused on the first c, which was clarity. And then next week we're going to dive right into that second c, which is confidence. 

All right, can't wait to talk to you next week. Let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson