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The motherhood identity crisis is the internal questioning that happens after you start having kids. “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” are fundamental questions that need to be answered in order for you to continue operating as an ambitious woman. In today’s podcast I am sharing with you two reasons why women experience an identity crisis after becoming a mom and what they can do to help themselves through it.
Topics in this episode:
Normalizing the identity crisis after motherhood
The importance of knowing who you are and what you want
Why ambitious career driven women experience a crisis after having kids
3 steps to moving yourself through the motherhood identity crisis
How coaching can help you get out of crisis mode faster
Show Notes & References:
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Transcript
Intro
Hey working moms! It’s the start of a new year. And today I am bringing you one of the most listened to episodes of this podcast.
It’s called the motherhood identity crisis and I wanted to start the year by rebroadcasting this particular episode because to create the kind of ambitious and balanced life you want, it starts at its very core, with YOU.
It’s you knowing who you are and feeling unshakeable.
The problem is, for almost every mom I have ever spoken to about his topic, whether my clients, or my friends or my neighbours - whenever this subject comes up, I hear; “yep, me too, I’ve experienced that.”
It’s the motherhood identity crisis.
It’s the moment when you say; “oh my gosh, who am I? What do I want? What is most important to me?”.
It’s this internal crisis that so many women experience when they become moms.
It is fundamentally different. It is confusing, it is hard.
So it doesn’t surprise me that this is one of the most beloved episodes of this podcast because not enough of us are actually talking about it.
So today in this episode, I want to normalise the motherhood identity crisis.
I want to show you 2 different type of experiences that I have noticed women go through as they being to process who they truly are after they start having kids.
And then of course, with most episodes, I end with some very tangible questions to help you start the process of sorting through who you are and feeling clear and confident about yourself again.
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, working moms. I want to give a shout out to one of my past clients. Her name is Sarah, and Sarah and I stopped working together about a year ago. I'm actually really hoping to get her on this podcast to share her whole story. So I'm just going to give you a little bit of a snippet here. Sarah had this dream that she had been working toward and it was a big reason why she hired me as a coach, because she really wanted this dream to become her reality and it is finally coming true for her. I'm just so excited.
Sarah is a veterinarian, and when we first started working together, she was actually still in classes, finishing up her degree, and then she moved into residency. But her dream was to start her own vet clinic. And just last week, I got an email from her that said, I did it. I turned in my notice. It's all coming true.
It's just so fun to hear from some of my clients from past years that reach out to tell me that the things that we were working on are coming to fruition. And it just feels amazing every single time I hear from one of them. And it just sends this resurgence of excitement and energy back into me as a coach because I am just so passionate about helping amazing women go after their dreams and not feel held back by motherhood. it's just so good. And I can't wait for you to hear from Sarah as she shares more of her story, hopefully on this podcast soon and how she made her dreams a reality as well.
Once you become a mom, things change.
Today on this podcast, I want to dive into a subject that seems to be quieter than it should be. I don't know why more women are not talking about this. Every single working mum that I have ever spoken with over the last five years, and I have probably had direct conversations with at least 500, if not closer to like, 600 or 700. All of these women that I have actually had conversations with, every single one of them would describe some similarities in their experience. They may not be using the same language, but they are all describing exactly the same thing. And what they're describing is exactly the same thing I went through as well. So I completely understand what they're saying. And now I have an ear for it. I can hear it.
Who am I and what do I want?
And every single person I'm talking to, people tell you that once you become a mom, things change. I mean, of course they do. We all understand that to be true on some level. We understand that our time is going to change. The amount of time that we have to devote to work, to ourselves, to our marriage, our sleep changes, our rhythms change. Pretty much everything about our external life and circumstances are going to be different once we have kids.
But that's not the only thing that changes. I've never met a mom that, on some level, at some point after having kids, has not asked themselves one of these two questions, who am I and what do I want? And the, what do I want question - just to be really clear, that's not like a surface level question they're asking themselves. It's like, what do I deeply and truly want? And these two questions, who am I and what do I want? These are at the heart of our identity. And although the answers to these questions, who am I and what do I want? May or may not actually have changed since having kids and since becoming a mom, the fact that we're asking them causes an identity crisis. I call it the identity crisis after motherhood.
And it's remarkable to me how we, as a culture, at least in America, don't give space for these two questions to be answered. Because, again, I have never met a woman that hasn't asked one of these two questions not long after having kids. We don't give space for women to internally adapt and shift. Becoming a mom is probably the biggest internal transition that you will ever go through. And I know I'm not alone when I say this.
After having kids, normal has completely changed.
For me, my thought process before my first was born was that she was going to come and that I would take, like, four months off on maternity. I would bond with her. I'd learn the ropes on how to breastfeed and sleep and manage life. And then I just get back to work, and I would essentially just pick up my life in exactly the same way it was the same as before, except I just add in a tiny human into it, right? And I've never met a woman that would actually describe the transition into motherhood in this way. Life does not, quote, return to normal after you get back from maternity leave or even a year or more later. After having kids, normal has completely changed. There's a new normal. But again, we're not just talking about the circumstances of life changing and becoming a new normal. We're talking about all of the things inside of you changing as well.
And I want to take a moment and just normalize that. It makes perfect sense that your brain is asking lots of fundamental questions about who you are and what it is you want. Once you have kids, it's normal to wonder if you really want to go back to work or if you would rather just spend your day with your tiny human. Even if you found yourself in a super ambitious career prior to having kids, it's normal for you to start questioning that.
After you have kids, it's normal for you to feel like a failure because you can't achieve at the same level you could in the same way before you had kids. It's normal to question your working habits and your priorities. Once you have kids, it's normal for you to want to be with your child more than you want to work. And it's also normal for you to want to be at work more than you want to be with your child. All of it is normal in all major life transitions.
This throws our internal compass into question. That's essentially what's going on here, right? Your North Star and what was directing you and what was most important to you and what was guiding you and where you are headed that's changed since becoming a mom. It's not a problem. Your job is just to give space to answer the questions with intentionality and to reset your compass. This is ultimately a really big reason why clients hire me. They want me to help them reset their priorities and reset their compass. They want to feel confident in themselves again in their life. Now, as a working mom, they want to feel crystal clear on exactly what it is they want in their life and in their career. And I walk with them through all of that in coaching in a really intentional way.
Now, up till this point in this podcast, I've kind of generalized this identity crisis that happens for working moms. I want to normalize it for you. Every working mom goes through a bunch of internal confusion and a need to essentially reset themselves once they become a mom. But I have found that women fall into basically two camps when it comes to this identity crisis.
This transition is not going to happen overnight.
The first group are women who had a very clear career trajectory before they had kids. And then once their kids came along, that trajectory or really it's the desire to be on that trajectory changes. It's like they were super career focused and driven before, and now all they want to do is be kid focused and they really just want to be a stay at home mom, at least for some period of time. And you can imagine for these women, but that's a really big shift inside of them that's confusing. I know that this transition is not going to happen overnight, right? It's going to feel a bit like a crisis for a while in your brain because for the last ten or 15 years you've been mostly focused on furthering your career and on external success. That Pivot isn't going to happen super easily into something different. So it makes sense that questions like who am I and what do I want, become super prominent if this is the kind of internal shift that's going on inside of you.
And I can think of several clients that hired me to really help them figure out what it was that they wanted next. Like they weren't super happy in their career, in their job, or they were feeling super out of balance and they just wanted something more meaningful and fulfilling in their life. And as we started the process pretty early on in the six months together, they realized very quickly that all they really want to do is just be home with their kids, whether that was just for a year or maybe it was even indefinitely. And for many of them, by the time we were done with coaching after six months, we had either created that exit plan for them and they were in the middle of executing it, or they were done with it altogether. They had quit, they had left, they had moved on into this next phase of being home with their kids for whatever length of time that we had decided. And in coaching, what we did is really help determine exactly what it is they want and then help them to feel super confident about that decision and about themselves in that decision.
And let me be clear, many of these women that I'm talking about that went from this big shift internally away from sort of career ambition and into family ambition. They were breadwinners of their family, which is sort of an identity in and of itself to be the main provider of your family and then to just decide that that isn't what you want anymore. You just want to be home with your kids. It makes sense that there's a whole big internal crisis that happens with that.
As a mom, you simply don't have the same amount of time to put towards your work and career.
So that's one of the crisis that happens after you become a mum. But that's really a smaller portion of at least the working moms that I work with. Most of the women I work with fall into a different sort of crisis. It's not that they don't want to keep moving forward in their career - they still have a whole lot of ambition and a desire to have a meaningful, successful career. It's that they have split priorities. So for these women, they have been thinking that their ability to be successful has been dependent on how much time and energy they have to put towards their career.
And as a mom, you simply don't have the same amount of time to put towards your work and towards your career like you did before you had kids. You don't have time or energy or desire even to be working all the time and to always be available and to be working on the evenings and on the weekends and on vacations. And because of that, they feel or you feel like you're failing because you feel like you aren't getting enough done. You feel like you're letting people down. And then you start feeling like you need to prove yourself, which of course, causes you to work even more and kind of go into imbalance behaviors. And then of course, you start feeling like you're failing as a mum because you're not being present and spending all of the time that you think that you should be with your kids. And it just kind of goes on and on and on.
Having two very important priorities running simultaneously.
For these women, they still want a meaningful and successful career. I mean, that really hasn't changed. But they also want to feel present and connected and successful as a mom. And for these women, what they're doing is they're shifting away from a singular focus, which was their career, and into learning how to have two very important priorities running simultaneously. And that causes a whole lot of crisis within them. Because in order to truly learn how to split your time and your energy so that two things are successful at the same time, where you're not like choosing one or the other, but they're both moving forward towards success in the same way, that requires a whole different way of operating, right? And when you're learning a whole different way of operating, when you're having to change the way you spend your time and the way you think about your priorities and you're having to change mindsets and expectations. Ultimately, that requires you to go through a bunch of trial and error and failure and that kind of shift of habits and failing and trying to figure out how to manage two priorities at the same time. That creates a whole lot of internal crisis as well.
The crisis is normal.
So the identity crisis for a mom is totally normal. Whether it's because you really in the end want to shift your energy and your goals towards your family and your kids, or it's because it requires a whole lot of behavior changes, that also is very crisis inducing. No matter what the reason is, the crisis is normal. And the first step to moving through this identity crisis - I've said it before in a couple of different ways here already. The first step is that you have to give yourself some intentional space to move through it. And that intentional space could be as simple as pen and paper and developing some good journaling and reflection practices to help you sort through some of these thoughts and feelings that you have as a mom, particularly as a working mom. And if you're able to hold yourself accountable through that, that's a great process to go through.
Give yourself intentional space.
Or intentional space could be something like hiring a coach like me to guide you through the process. No matter what you do, you have to decide to give yourself some space to process through the transition. Because if you wake up tomorrow and go about your day with the same exact thoughts and feelings and behaviors and expectations, you're going to experience the same crisis that you're experiencing today because nothing will have changed. So step one is to give yourself some very intentional space, deciding exactly how you're going to start processing through some of the thoughts, feelings, and crisis experiences that you're having internally. That is ultimately step one.
Defining who you are at a core level.
Step two is in that intentional space, you're going to need to answer two questions. The first is, who am I? And the reason why this is such an important question to be answering is because first, I want your brain to see that who you are likely has not changed in the way that you think - fundamentally you are still the same person. Your desires may have changed, but who you are at the core has not. And the second reason why this question is so important to answer is because I want your brain to stop thinking that who you are has anything to do with your job. Your identity is not found in your job, in your career, in your success. It's not found in even being a mom. And I actually give my clients workbooks and question prompts to really help them get to the heart of this question. I help walk them through the process of really defining who they are at a very core level.
My job does not define me.
But to get you started, I want to give you a couple of questions here to answer. And the first one is, what is amazing about me? Or you can make a list with every line, starting with I am I am smart. I am funny. I am strategic. I am a good listener. I am a board game geek. I am a breadwinner. I am in tech. I am a world traveler. I want to challenge you to come up with 50 things to describe yourself in the ‘I am’. Some of them might be amazing things, and some of them you might not see at first as being amazing. That's okay. Remember the identity crisis that happens after motherhood, it happens because your brain was thinking who you are was completely wrapped up in your job and your success and in your future goals. And when bringing in this tiny human into your life all of that changed almost in an instant. What we're doing is reorienting your brain back to my job does not define me. My success does not define me. I define me. And so you're putting words to that. Who am I?
Now, the second question that I want you to answer in this very intentional space that you're giving yourself to go through this identity crisis, and I do want a little sidebar on this. If you're listening to this and you've just had your first kid, great. Perfect timing to listen to this and do this work to really understand who you are and what it is you want and move yourself through this process. But for I know a lot of you, you probably already have your first or second kid, and they're probably at least a couple of years old, if not older. No problem. If you are still experiencing this sense of internal crisis and you could probably trace it back to motherhood, that's no problem. I think every season of life is a season of life to be answering these two questions and reminding your brain who you are and what it is you want. I don't want a year to go by in my life where I'm not reorienting myself back to the amazingness of who I am and kind of making sure that I'm on the right path based on what it is I want today because our desires change over the course of our life.
We used to have a society where you would pick a job and then you would stay in that job the rest of your life, and that was, on some level, success. And we don't live in that type of society anymore. We pivot all of the time in life based on new desires and new goals and new wants. So if you have kids, multiple kids that are older and you're still in the middle of this crisis mode on some level, there's no judgment here. Now is just the time to reset and find that new internal compass today, not to get back to the old compass, because the old compass doesn't really exist anymore. It's the new compass. It's defining these things for yourself based on where you are at today.
What is it that I want?
All right, so the second question you're answering here is, what is it that I want? Now, you have to be really honest with yourself as you answer this. So for many of you, your brain's going to draw a blank as you go about trying to answer this question. It's totally common, and there's no real right way to answer this question. And it's worth exploring it in lots of different ways.
What do you want out of your career?
What do you want out of your motherhood experience?
What do you want in your marriage?
What do you want in friendship?
What do you want to get to the end of your life and say that you did or accomplished?
If it's easier, start with what you don't want. Because I know for many of us, we know the things that aren't working in our life, and we can rattle those things off. That's fine. Start there and then move into the opposite of them, right? What's the inverse of those things that you don't want to help you point your brain to some of the things that you do want? The point of answering these questions is to start giving your brain a sense of direction.
It’s time to dream big.
For most women, they only ever planned their life up till this point. You go to a good school, you get a good job, you work your way up, you get married, you start having kids, and then your brain kind of draws a blank, right? You probably never quite thought that far, and that's all you're doing here, you're answering that next question, and then what? So I encourage you, as you start this process, of really answering the question, what is it that I really want? Do it from a place of curiosity and exploration, not from any place of judgment and not even from a place of practicality. I want you to dream a bit. I want you to really think about what would be the most fulfilling life that you could possibly live. You only get one life. You might write a bunch of things down that will never actually come to fruition, and that's okay. Those things are helping to expand your brain to think about what's possible out there. And it's going to lead you to the ten things that you will in fact, actually do that will be super fulfilling to you.
This is just an exploration process to help you in making some really concrete decisions. Because the last step here in helping yourself move through this identity crisis, once you've done all of this exploration around who you are and what it is you want is to ask yourself, is the path that I'm on right now the job that I'm in, or the career path, is that going to get me to where I want to go? Is that going to get me to the what do I want answers? Because if the answer is yes, great. That means you should stay where you're at. You're right on track.
Living with intention.
Now you probably just need to deal with some of your imbalanced behaviors that are causing you to feel like you can't rest and be present in the way that you want. But if the answer is no, it's time to start creating an exit strategy and figuring out exactly what you do want to do next. It amazes me how often people think that these types of questions like the who am I and what do I want? That these types of answers to these questions are just supposed to come naturally to them. Like, maybe through osmosis in some way - as if you pick your path in life and any time you want to pivot from that path, it's supposed to feel really easy and super clear and simple. That would be nice if that was the way it worked. But that's not the human experience. The happiest, most successful people are not the ones that are coasting, they are not the ones that are taking the simple and easy path - they're the ones that are living with the most intention, that are taking the time to look within them, to answer deep questions and then orient their life around whatever answer comes out of them.
The internal shifts that happen after Motherhood, they are real and you are not alone.
If you take just one thing from this podcast, my hope is that you feel seen and heard. Because the identity crisis, the internal shifts that happen after Motherhood, they are real and you are not alone. And the solution to moving through that crisis moment is to give yourself some very intentional space to do it. As always, I am here to support you through this process. The fastest, most efficient way to figure out who you are and what it is you want in this season of your life is to create a plan to have it. Hire me as your coach and in six months, you could be in a new job. You could get promoted, you could take a break from work for a while, if that's what you want. You could be in a happier marriage. You could feel like you're never missing out on your kids life. You can learn to curb all of that overworking tendency that you might have so you can be present and available to your family and make sure that they are, in fact, always the number one reach out. Schedule that free coaching session with me by going to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to get that process started.
Conclusion.
I am here to help support you through this moment. Whether you feel like you are in the depth of the crisis or you are somewhere on the surface of it, I am here through all of it to help you through. All right, working moms. I want you to have a great week. Let's get to it.
