The missing link that creates balance: commitment (part 4)

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In this episode, we are going to be talking about the missing link to creating a balanced life: commitment. Most people have some sense of what they need to do in order to create balance, they’re simply not doing it. That is why commitment is so important. When you are committed, you follow-thru, no matter what. In this episode I am going to break down commitment into 4 actionable parts and explain exactly what you need to be doing to achieve the ambitious and balanced life you desire.

This is part 4 of a 4 part series on creating work-life balance.

Topics in this episode:

Balance as a goal
Why commitment is such a big part of reaching balance
Expect discomfort when creating balance
A time management tool that is important to creating balance
Why “more time” can no longer going to be your go-to solution
A simple tool to evaluate if you are experiencing balance

Show Notes:

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

Transcript

Intro

Commitment is the missing link to creating balance. Most people have some sense of what they need to do in order to create balance, they’re simply not doing it. That is why commitment is so important. Because when you are committed, you follow through, no matter what. This is the 4th of a 4-part series and really the most important part because it’s about taking action. You have to actually do something different if you are going to create a balance in your life and in this episode, I am going to be breaking down commitment into 4 actionable parts and explain exactly what you need to be DOING to achieve the ambitious and balanced life you desire. 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!

Commitment in our daily life.

Hey ambitious working moms I hope you all are doing well! I am so excited because now all my parents are fully vaccinated and this week I got to actually hug my mom for the first time in about 14 months. It was glorious. And in today's episode, we're going to be diving into the 4th C, which is the 4th component that creates balance, which is commitment. And I love that this beautiful moment that happened with my mom happened this week right before I am recording this podcast because I think the pandemic has been such a great illustration of commitment. My parents and I were committed to all of us, but particularly to them, staying COVID free. We were committed even though it was extremely uncomfortable. And that’s what we're going to talk a lot about in this episode, that commitment to a goal or in this case to a balanced life often does not feel very comfortable. I saw my mom only a few times in the midst of this pandemic where I would have normally seen her dozen or more and we never hugged or touched even when we did see each other. That was very hard. I cried and she cried a lot! But we were committed to the goal of keeping them safe.

And now, before I go on talking about commitment and the role it plays in creating balance, I do want to say that this is the 4th of a 4 part series about creating balance and you don't have to listen to the other three episodes in order to listen to this one now, but I do highly recommend going back and listening to the whole series. There are four components to balance: confidence, clarity, a controlled mind, and lastly commitment, which is what we're going to talk about in a moment.

If you want to create balance in your life then this is your road map to get there. Remember that balance is a feeling. It's not a perfect schedule or a completed to-do list or a certain amount of time spent with family or even a certain amount of help around the house, balance is something you feel.

Balance as a goal.

And I like to think of balance like a goal. Most people can wrap their brain around a goal like losing 10lbs because it feels very tangible and attainable, you can break it down step-by-step, but balance feels a lot less linear and so it’s confusing. The purpose behind this four-part series is to break down balance in such a way that it begins to feel tangible and attainable, just like losing weight.

But just like when you have a goal to lose weight it's not knowing what to do that gets you to that end goal. Most people know that if you want to lose weight it's essentially a combination of exercise and diet. You need to eat healthy and you need to move your body, it's pretty simple. But even though our brains know this, it doesn't mean we actually do it. The knowledge of how to lose weight isn't the thing that gets us to the goal and it's the same thing with balance. Simply knowing what balance is and how to create it doesn't mean you will attain it. And that is why I've added this fourth component to creating balance: commitment.

Now those that feel committed to losing 10lbs, will do it eventually. They may stop and start along the way, they may have to figure out what works for them and their body, but they will get there. Those that feel committed to having a balanced life will figure out how to get there as well. There may be some trial and error, but eventually, it will happen.

So just like with any goal, it's going to feel hard at times. If it didn't, then it likely wouldn't even be a goal to begin with because you would already have attained it. Goals are innately challenging, they're meant to push us toward things that we want, but they require effort. And let me just say that our brains, generally speaking - don’t like effort. Our brains always want things to be easy.

My story on attaining commitment to my goals.

I remember after my daughter was born and I did all of that work to really build up my belief in self and found clarity in what I wanted in life and in my career…it still took me almost 11 months for me to actually execute my plan. I was afraid. Afraid of failing. Afraid of the unknown. Afraid of getting it wrong. I was afraid of the impact it would have on my family. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to leave corporate event management job and go into coaching (which was in alignment with my values, identity, and purpose) but I wasn’t yet committed to it.

I think a lot of women experience this, where they know what it is they should do - they should not be working after their baby goes to sleep, they should make time for just themself, they should look for work in a different company, and they feel pretty clear on it but yet they haven't committed. They haven't decided to go all in.

But it's when we go all in that we actually make progress. It's when we commit to seeing the goal all the way through, that we will start to see traction.

So really commitment is all about taking action. In the first two components we talked about in this series, we talked about confidence and clarity, and in a lot of ways, these are intrinsically focused. The third component that we've talked about in the podcast is a controlled mind which is all about having a mindset that allows for balance, but that's also kind of intrinsically focused. This is the component that's about taking action. You're not going to magically create a balanced life if you don't change some things that you are doing.

So, I’m going to be breaking down COMMITMENT into 4 actionable parts.

4 ways to implement commitment into your life.

The first part of commitment is to decide ahead of time your calendar. Literally calendar in all of the commitments, meetings, plans, projects, family meals, workouts, marriage time. All of it needs to fit into your calendar. Your brain cannot be confused about what you should be doing at any given time and even if you can get it all done. You simply have to decide all of your commitments, you need to make a whole bunch of decisions, including what’s important and what’s not and then stick them into your calendar. Now, it’s very important when it comes to calendering all of your commitments, is to be calendering the things that are not urgent. The family meals, playtime with your toddler, workouts, me time, marriage time, all of it needs to go into your calendar. Those things don’t feel very urgent and so we oftentimes don’t put them into our calendar but your brain needs to see them as being an important part of balance, and so you have to also calendar those in, they all have to fit. And the reason this is so important is that if you don't decide ahead of time what you are committing your time and energy to then you kind of leave it up to the moment. And/or you leave it up to the ‘loudest’ commitment. Sometimes that’s a project or a deadline, or even a person that’s the loudest - that’s generally speaking the thing that we do first when we haven't decided ahead of time. Or, we will often go to the thing that is the easiest, even if it’s not very important for us to do, like checking emails or answering certain emails and doing quick wins on our to-do list rather than the important tasks that we know we need to be getting done. So you have to decide ahead of time your commitments and put them all in your calendar. That is the first part of this step.

The second thing you need to do is expect discomfort. It's not going to be easy to stick to your calendar and your commitments and you should expect that it is not always going to feel good. Just like it didn't feel good for me to not get together with my mom and my family over the holidays. And it didn't feel good to just see her in passing and not be able to give her a hug. None of that felt good. But being committed to the bigger goal was what was most important. And so the same is true here, being committed to your bigger goal of balance is not always going to feel good. Now I said this was going to be actionable, and it is! Because when you expect discomfort you won't allow yourself to jump to any conclusions about what that discomfort means. So for example you're going to likely have to say no to more people in order to keep to your calendar. You're going to have to say no to meetings, projects, family members, and it's not going to feel good. But just because it doesn't feel good doesn't mean it's wrong and doesn’t mean you are selfish or that people are disappointed in you. You can’t jump to any of those conclusions…you’re just going to expect saying no and sticking to your calendar is uncomfortable.

Why more time is not the key to a balanced life.

The third thing you are going to do is allow for creative problem-solving. What I mean by this is ultimately that you are no longer going to allow more time to be the solution to your problems. Instead, you are going to creatively problem solve to complete the task or project in the time you allot. Because here's what a lot of ambitious women do: they simply say I'll just work on that when I get home tonight, or after I put the kids to sleep or I will work through my work-out time. Essentially you're just allowing the solution to be more time. When you are committed to balance your solution can no longer be more time. You have to start allowing for more creative problem-solving in order to complete tasks and projects in a shorter period of time. Sometimes what I like to do is to imagine the deadline that I've given myself is almost like turning in an assignment to a teacher where if I don’t turn it in at the time that I say I’m going to turn it in, then I fail. I get a zero. If I'm not going to allow myself to fail and I don't have the option of negotiating with the teacher on a different deadline, then I am forcing myself to get creative about how I finish that project, or how I write it, or what I do. Or sometimes I just decide that it can be less than perfect because turning it in is better than failing. I begin to problem solve how I can get to a desired result without putting in more time. This is a big part of creating balance. It’s beginning to push your brain into different ways of thinking about your commitments, your time, and your productivity so you get more done in less time.

The last part of commitment is to evaluate. You're not gonna really know if you're making progress, if you're feeling more balanced, if you're living the life you want to be living, unless you stop and evaluate. I like to break evaluation down into simply three parts, and to be honest this is exactly how my coach taught me to do this: what's going well, what's not going well and what am I going to do differently. That's it! You have to start with what's going well because you need to get your brain into the positive space it needs to be in order to be objective about what you're going to be doing differently when you get to that part. So, you start with just talking about what’s going well. What are the things that you are doing? What are the ways that you're behaving or acting? The thoughts that you’re having? The feelings that you’re having...name it all. It’s very important to name as much as possible about what’s going well, before heading into the second part which is usually a lot easier for our brains to determine what’s not going well. So then you can make a list of the things that aren’t going well. The things that you are thinking, or feeling, or the things that you’re doing that aren't going well and then lastly, very important - What are you going to do differently next time? Or what are you going to do differently tomorrow, or next week? Or, whenever you decide to evaluate. And this almost becomes your to-do list if you will, about creating balance. And a lot of times what’s on that list of ‘what I’m going to do differently’ has a lot to do with how you’re going to calendar your time, and your energy differently next time. Right, it might look like allocating more time for things that are just taking more time. It may mean saying no to more meetings in order to create more time. Oftentimes I have found that when you evaluate and get to the point of saying “What am I going to do differently”, that has a really big impact on how you are going to choose to calendar your time and your commitments - which is the first part of commitment, right, that’s what we talked about. So, there is almost this circular nature to these 4 parts. You decide ahead of time your commitments, you expect to feel uncomfortable, you push yourself to creatively problem solve when things aren’t going exactly how you planned, and then lastly you have to evaluate and make changes to your calendar and commitments in order to do better next time.

What I love so much about this 4th component is that it is often the missing piece to creating balance. Remember it's not that we don't really know what we're supposed to do, it's that we don't do it. It's that we're not committed enough to allow discomfort, to evaluate without judgment, and to push ourselves to creatively problem-solve when necessary.

Conclusion

I know you ladies know how to be committed, you're ambitious! And part of being ambitious is committing yourself to bigger and higher goals. And balance is no different. Balance can be viewed just like any goal. It requires confidence, clarity, a controlled mind, and commitment. These are the 4 C’s to creating a balanced life.

Remember, balance is a feeling. It is something found inside your body. You have to look INSIDE you if you are going to create it. That’s why each of these components were things you are completely in control of because we don’t want to be waiting on someone or something in order to create the ambitious and balanced life you want.

So, it’s time to really take control of balance in your life. And if you missed any of the other 3 episodes, I will link to them in the show notes. We will continue to talk about balance on this podcast and break it down into even more specific and actionable steps. So, be sure to subscribe and be on the lookout for new weekly episodes dropping on Monday mornings.