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Clarity is essential to work-life balance. When you are clear, you don’t second guess yourself and you make more decisive decisions. Clarity is like a road map for your brain telling it what is most important.
For most women, once they have children their priorities change. What was once important no longer seems to matter. This is a moment where most women need to re-decide what it is they want in their life. They need to decide what living “regret-free” looks like.
In this episode I’m going to dive into the 3 things you need to get clear on if you are going to create balance. I will focus on finding clarity in your career, long term goals and day-to-day priorities.
This is part 2 of a 4 part series on creating work-life balance.
Topics in this episode:
Why clarity is an important part of work-life balance
What happens when you are NOT clear
How to find career direction
The importance of casting vision over your motherhood experience
Why you need to dream big
Why understanding your priorities will help you make tough decisions
Show Notes:
Click here to listen to part 1 of the Creating Work-Life Balance Series
Want some additional support to creating work-life balance? Check out the Work-Life Balance Formula, a free training where I teach you the exact equation for feeling present at home and happy at work. Click here to sign up: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.net/balanceformula
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Transcript
Intro
It's really hard to find work-life balance if you don't feel clear around what your priorities are, what your long-term plan is, or where you want your career to go. Your brain craves direction. It wants to know that you are on the right path. Getting clear is what ends second-guessing and helps you make quicker and more decisive decisions. And that’s why clarity is one of the 4 components of balance.
In this episode, I’m going to be diving into the 3 things you need to get clear on if you’re going to create balance and give you some tools on just how to do that. This is part 2 of a 4 part series on creating a balanced life. Here we go...
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!
Hey ambitious working moms how are you doing today?
In this episode, we're going to be focusing on the 2nd component of what creates balance. Now, if you missed the last episode you don't have to go back and listen to it before listening to this one right now but I do suggest checking it out as you will want to hear each part of this entire 4-part series.
As I spoke about in the last episode there are four C’s to creating balance: confidence, clarity, a controlled mind, and lastly commitment. And today, we are really going to be focusing on that 2nd component, clarity.
Why it’s hard to find balance.
It's really hard to find balance if you don't feel clear around what your priorities are, what your long-term plan is, where you want your career to go, what's most important to you: our brains crave direction. It wants to know your goals. It wants to know that you are on the right path and that what you are doing is going to actually get you there.
The reason this is such an important part of balance is because it ends the second-guessing. It is really hard to feel balanced when you're constantly questioning yourself, your career, what your life is all about, these are really big questions that need to be answered in order to feel balanced.
How many working moms feel.
A lot of the women I work with sort of plan their life up to getting married and having kids. And then that happens and they go now what? Having kids tends to be a moment that naturally shifts our priorities and goals and it's a moment that we really need to decide if the path we're on is the path we still want to be on. I talk to a lot of women that say they wish they could just get back to the way they were before kids. Where they were more focused, productive, took time to work out and make time for themselves and they weren’t guilty about anything…and I always say that's not a helpful way to look at it. You're trying to fit yourself back into a box of priorities and goals that you had before kids because that box itself has changed. Instead, you need to spend the time to simply redefine your box.
Now, if you remember in the last episode what I did to build my confidence and my belief in self - which was the first C, I spent time defining who I was and getting comfortable with who I was. I defined my values and my identity and my purpose. And it is important to start with building up your confidence first before moving on to that step of gaining clarity, because usually what comes when you start to get clear, is change. Change in jobs. Change in the way you operate. Change in your priorities. Change in mindset. And even if the change is really good for you, your brain is still very scared. Our brains always want to avoid change no matter what.
And oftentimes what keeps us from getting clear on what we want is the fear of not getting it right. But, the problem is, rightness is subjective. You get to decide what is right for you. No one else can tell you what is right because they are not experiencing your life, your thoughts, and your feelings. And someone that has done the work to build up their belief in self first is going to find that clarity and certainty faster.
OK, so let’s talk specifically about what you need to get clear on. What does clarity entail?
I have found that in order to truly experience a balanced life, you need to get clear about three things: your career, life dreams, and priorities.
Let's talk about your career first since it is usually the biggest source of imbalance. You likely spend 40 plus hours in your job during the week and about 20 with your kids. The trade-off of working must feel worth it. You cannot be constantly wishing you were spending more time with your family or feeling like you're sacrificing for the sake of your family if you really want to feel balance. So getting clear on your career doesn't necessarily mean that you're in that dream job, but you need to have a sense that the job you're in fits into a bigger vision of where you want your career or life to head.
How you may feel as a working mom going back to work after maternity leave.
Now, you may remember from the last episode, before I was a coach, I was working in corporate event management. I had a commute of about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes each way but I loved my job. I was very clear that where I was exactly where I wanted to be, no questions. Then when Lillian was born that immediately changed. The commute was excruciating and felt like a complete waste of time when I could be spending that same time with her. I also found myself very unfocused at work. I would procrastinate on projects, take lots of snack breaks, check my phone constantly. I felt terrible at work. I was not operating at my best and I always worried that people would find out. I remember I use to take really long bathroom breaks because I would take my phone with me and scroll through pictures of my baby and text the daycare and cry. I knew I couldn't keep doing what I was doing, but I also didn't want to be a stay-at-home mom. I had to get clear on what I wanted in my career.
How I got clear on what I wanted in life.
So, what I did is I used all of that self-discovery work (the values, identity, purpose) to point me in a direction of what I wanted and what was most important to me. I literally used it like a compass. I took my notes and all of the words that I had come up with and I said ‘what’s the common theme here?’. Based on just who I am at the core what do I know about what I want and what fulfills me in my career.
When I wrote it all down, the answer was very clear. What's most important to me: is people development. I could see this throughout all of my life. I could see how I always was asked and called out to be a mentor. I could see how every job I had no matter what it was, my favorite part was always training people. I could see how I naturally had a problem-solving, don't settle kind of attitude that pushed people to be their best. My friends would describe me this way, my colleagues described me this way. This is just who I was. And understanding this about myself is what gave me direction in my career. I started looking specifically at jobs inside my current field that focused on people development, and then later I started exploring leaving the industry altogether to do something that completely focused on people…which eventually lead me into coaching.
What not to do when getting clear on which path to take.
Notice what I did not do here to find clarity in my career. I did not go out exploring a bunch of careers and do a gut check on whether they were right for me. I started with the core parts of what I knew about myself and asked where is this pointing me. If you go about it the first way, it sorta feels like throwing darts at a dartboard…you kinda just hope one lands. It’s really hard to change careers or change anything if you don’t feel certain it’s what you are supposed to do. This is where “rightness” comes in. You have to feel certain it’s right for you. And the only way to do that is to look inside of you. To let your core self guide you. That’s why we do the confidence first so you really know who you are and can use that throughout the rest of the process. Remember, a big part of the goal in getting clear is ending all second-guessing. It’s making some decisions about what it is you want and what is most important to you. So, you begin to feel certain.
The second area you need to get clear on is your life dreams.
What are life dreams?
Life dreams I like to think of as just your bigger goals in life they are the things that you want to accomplish more in the big picture or the long-term. This could look like all sorts of things. It could be milestones like buying a house, or financial freedom, or traveling. Or it could take the form of volunteering or being a part of your kids’ PTA, or being on a board, or I have a client that wants to one day have a Ted talk. If you don't name these things and get really specific the likelihood that they will happen is near impossible. Just think about a typical weekend. When you get really clear around what you want to accomplish during the weekend, the likelihood you’re going to accomplish is so much greater than if you’re not clear and just leave it up to chance you accomplish very little. Well, the same is true in the bigger picture of our life. When we get very clear around what it is we want to accomplish and what goals we want to achieve in our life, we are infinitely more likely to accomplish them, than if we were to leave it up to whatever opportunities life may throw our way.
One of the big pieces of your life dreams, that really can’t be determined until after you start having kids…is what you want out of motherhood. What are the experiences and memories you want to have as a family? What do you want to look back on when your kids are graduated from high school and feel? Because you're gonna feel something and what we don't want it to be is regret.
In a lot of ways, your life dreams can feel like a bucket list. Things you want to do or accomplish in your life…but I also like to think of your life dreams through the lens of who do you want to become. What character qualities do you want to develop over your life.
Here are some of my dreams:
Have a job that allows me to be home with my kids after school
Travel overseas with my kids when they are young
Buy a house in the San Francisco Bay Area (which since it is the most expensive place to live in America – requires a certain income level)
Learn to be more present and meditative
Run a turkey trot
Develop more empathy and compassion for people
To re-learn how to ski and teach my kids
Honor and celebrate the little holidays like valentines day and saint Patricks day through crafts and festivities with my kids
When I started this journey of creating a balanced life, I definitely was not able to rattle this list off to you. I would have told you that I didn’t know what I wanted or if I had any larger goals…but in reality, it was just that I dismissed them so quickly as either ridiculous or impossible that I didn’t even notice they were there. So as you start to explore this, you have to allow yourself to dream big without restrictions.
The last thing you need to be clear on in order to really feel balanced is your priorities, in other words, your schedule and commitments.
In order to feel balanced, you must use your time wisely and purposefully.
When you feel balanced, everything on your calendar feels purposeful and necessary. You feel a sense of control over your time. There is no “have to” in a balanced life…there is only ”want to”. In order to feel balanced, you have to feel like you're using your time wisely and purposefully. You can't say yes to everything.
Is it more important to you that you have quality time together as a family or that you have a home-cooked meal? Because sometimes you can't have both. Sometimes you have to decide that eating out or making hot dogs is worth it in order to honor the priority of quality time together at the end of a workday. So there's a constant need to ask what's most important in this situation or in this task?
Aligning everyday activities with your priorities.
As an example, through my process, I was able to name that having a very deep, supportive, and local community was a priority to me. And at the time we were commuting about 30 minutes to our church, which was the hub of our community. After naming this as being one of my key priorities, it led us to leave that church, which was truly the best church I had ever been apart of – in order to find something more local. We freed up time and energy to commit to people in the neighborhood we lived in.
Also because of this priority, we started to move what would normally be backyard activities to the front yard. Where we could say hi to our neighbors as they passed by and really start to build for ourselves, local friendships, and connections.
Can you see how we started to align everyday decisions with the things that were most important to us – those daily priorities? We make over 30,000 decisions a day. And if you have to constantly weigh decisions to figure out what is most important…it will exhaust you.
When you take the time to preemptively name your priorities, your decisions will flow more naturally and take less time and energy.
Key points we covered.
So, to recap. A balanced life starts with confidence. You have to believe in yourself first before you can do anything else. Out of that confidence, you want to get clear on 3 things: your career, your life dreams, and lastly your day-to-day priorities.
What will start to happen is you will begin to build for yourself a road map to guide you into the next season of life. The second-guessing will start to dissipate, you’ll stop questioning yourself and what you’re doing, you’ll be able to wake up every day with a sense of purpose, and ultimately you’ll begin to cultivate that feeling of balance.
Be sure to check out the next episode that will focus in on the third component of work-life balance: controlling your mind. Ambitious working moms…let’s get to it.
