Pursue a meaningful life in 2025 (not just a happy one)

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In this week’s episode of the podcast, we’re kicking off the year by exploring the difference between happiness and meaningfulness, and why for ambitious working moms like us, happiness alone just isn’t enough.

We’ll dive into why so many of us feel stuck despite having it all, how to define what a meaningful life really looks like, and the three actionable steps you can take to pursue lasting impact and joy. Trust me, this episode is the perfect inspiration to start 2025 with purpose and clarity. You don’t want to miss it!  

Topics in this episode:

  • The critical difference between happiness and meaningfulness. 

  • Why ambitious moms often feel stuck despite achieving "success." 

  • How to define your meaningful life and set a vision for 2025. 

  • The role of trade-offs in creating a purposeful, impactful life. 

  • Three steps to align your career and life with your bigger goals. 

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

A happy life and a meaningful life are not exactly the same things. When you pursue a meaningful life, you're pursuing a life of purpose, a life of impact. A meaningful life is one that brings deep satisfaction and joy as you pursue big goals. From the work that I do as a coach, I've learned that for ambitious working moms that feel stuck and unhappy in life, it is often because they are left with no vision. They're not exactly sure where they want to take their career and what success for them as a working mom really looks like and what really matters and that makes them feel stuck and directionless. Now, I want you to be happy this year, but more than that, I want you to feel like your life matters and that you are making the impact that you want to make in this world. So today on the podcast, we're exploring happiness and meaningfulness and what it takes to pursue a meaningful life in 2025. Are you ready? Let's get to it.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, your go to resource for integrating your career ambitions with life as a mom. I'm distilling down thousands of coaching conversations I've had with working moms just like you, along with my own personal experience as a mom of two and sharing the most effective tools and strategies to help you quickly feel calm, confident, and in control of your ambitious working mom life. You ready? Let's get to it.

Kicking Off the New Year with Support for Working Moms

Hello. Happy New Year, my friends. I hope you had some really lovely time off over the holidays, that you are feeling renewed and ready to jump into the new year, because I know I am.

There are several ways that I can support you and your ambitious mom life this year. I just want to highlight a couple of them for you right now.

The first is through my group coaching program called Ambitious and Balanced, named right after this podcast. The doors are going to open for that at the end of January. We start February 24th. I'm only taking 10 women into this group. It's going to be absolutely amazing.

So if your goals for this year center around spending more time with your family and actually having a life that's not all about work—whether that's your paid work or your unpaid work—this program is for you.

You’re going to want to go to my website and get on the waitlist, because I'm going to be offering some really special things to those that are on the waitlist. The website is www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/ambitiousandbalanced.

Free Workshop and 1:1 Coaching Opportunities

I'm also going to be giving a free workshop at the end of the month. I just want to put that on your radar—there will be a link to that soon.

And I also want to highlight one-on-one coaching. I’m finalizing my January clients now, who are going to be working with me between now and the middle of the year. I have just a couple of spots left.

So if this is your year that you want to get unstuck and wake up each and every day with a smile on your face—feeling like you are living the meaningful, regret-free life you’re meant to lead—then one-on-one coaching with me is the perfect place for you.

You can sign up for a free consultation call (I call that a breakthrough call) by going to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book.

Happiness vs. Meaningfulness: A Critical Distinction

All right, so those are all the ways I can support you this year in creating the working mom life you absolutely love. Let’s dive into today’s topic now.

I follow a woman named Christine Carter. I highly recommend that you follow her anywhere that you follow someone. She’s the founder and was the executive director at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. So she’s actually a leading expert on happiness.

I was recently reading her newsletter, and there was something in there that really sparked my attention. It was something she mentioned about happiness versus meaningfulness. It really struck me, and I decided I wanted to bring it to the podcast. It felt like the perfect topic to start our year with.

We’re going to talk about the difference between happiness and meaningfulness. We’re going to talk about what it looks like to pursue a meaningful life and why it’s so important for you as a working mom in this current season. And then I’m going to offer you three steps in order to do that.

“I Have It All… But I’m Still Not Happy”

One of the conversations that comes up a lot for my clients is during consultation calls. When we start discussing coaching, I hear from these women what they want to pursue and why they want to start coaching.

What they tell me is that they’re feeling stuck. And one of the reasons I so often hear successful working moms say this is because they say: I have it all.

Meaning: I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of. I have a great job, I have a great partner, I have beautiful kids, I have a house, I make a good income… and I’m still not happy.

I can’t tell you how often that happens. That conversation comes up all the time. So, they come to coaching with this desire to pursue happiness—or so they think. They feel like they should be happier than they are with the life they’ve created.

Why So Many Women Feel Stuck After Hitting Milestones

Here’s the thing—and you’ve likely heard me say this a hundred times on this podcast—most women have never really planned their life past this point.

Their plan was to go to a good school, do well, get a good job, meet someone special, get married, have kids, work their way up at least to middle management, maybe go beyond that.

And then the plan sort of stops there. But of course, our life doesn’t stop there. For most of us, we achieve a lot of that before the age of 35. And then your brain is kind of going: Now what?

What do you want to do with the rest of your life? Your brain really wants to know the answer to that question. And if you don’t know the answer—and don’t feel like you have a mechanism to figure it out—then you likely feel very stuck.

You start worrying about regrets. You wonder if you should be doing something different with your life. And this is what ultimately brings a lot of people to coaching.

My Motherhood Identity Crisis

My story is not all that dissimilar. When I was pregnant with my first, I went through what I call the motherhood identity crisis.

I was asking: Who am I? What do I really want in this next season, this next chapter of my life?

“Have I Arrived?” The Questions Women Ask

A recent client who just started working with me has been wondering if her current job—the one she has worked in her entire career—is really what she wants anymore. Her company values her a lot. She has essentially reached the top that she can reach in this growing company at a really young age.

And she’s asking: Is this really what I want anymore? Have I arrived?

These questions feel very heavy, and they’re hard to answer. On the surface, they seem rooted in happiness, because what’s stirring in a lot of these women is a lack of happiness.

It’s like: There’s got to be more life than this. There’s got to be more joy. There’s got to be more fun. There’s got to be more of something.

Happiness Isn’t Enough for Ambitious Women

But in reality, it’s not about happiness. It’s about meaning.

See, I think for ambitious women, happiness isn’t enough. Of course you want to be happy. You want to feel joy. You want to smile. You want fun.

But when push comes to shove, it’s really about living a meaningful life. It’s about waking up every day and feeling like life has purpose that you want to pursue. It’s about feeling like all of your effort and all of your hard work is moving toward something that’s going to make an impact—something big, something important.

At the end of the day, you want to feel like all of the effort you’re putting in matters. Like: I made a difference somehow.You want to get to the end of retirement and look back and say: I did something with my life.

Why Motherhood Sparks an Identity Reset

It makes sense that ambitious women have this identity crisis right around the time of motherhood. They’ve basically achieved all the things they thought they were supposed to set out and achieve.

And now it’s time to reset. It’s time to decide what their next pursuit is, what their bigger goals are. It’s time to cast vision over their season of life as a working mom—or even over the next several decades of life—so that life takes on meaning again. So that day-to-day life feels like it’s making an impact toward something bigger.

Ambitious Women Want Impact, Not Just Effort

A quick side note: of course, everyone seeks meaning. All human beings desire meaning in their life.

But there’s something unique about the ambitious woman—which is you. The meaningfulness you seek feels really big because you have a really big capacity to achieve, and you have really big potential. That’s off the charts.

You don’t want just your effort to be meaningful—you want it to be impactful. You want it to make a mark in this world. I know you.

Eleven years ago, I was you. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was searching for what I wanted that impact to be. I was searching to align my career and my daily life with something much bigger than me. And now, of course, that’s the exact work I do as a coach.

Deep Impact vs. Wide Impact

As a coach for ambitious women like you, I help you define the impact you want to make in this world and figure out how to align that with your career.

Now, just to be clear, I believe that everyone makes an impact. Whether you are a high-level executive, a stay-at-home mom, a teacher, an individual contributor, or a manager—I believe every human matters.

What I know, after having so many conversations with women over the years, is that some people desire deep impact—in a really focused way. And others want to make a wide impact.

That’s where ambitious women tend to be. They want to make a wide impact. They want to see the ripple effects of their work in the world.

Of course, neither one is right or wrong. Neither one is better than the other. We need people pursuing deep impact, and we need people pursuing wide impact.

But the point is: around this time in your life—when you’re starting to have kids and hitting a stride in your career—it’s not uncommon for big questions like this to surface. Ambitious women want to keep pursuing wide impact, but motherhood can feel like it’s forcing them to pull back.

A Meaningful Life Is a Purposeful Life

The pursuit of a meaningful life is the pursuit of an impactful life.

If you are living a meaningful life, it means you have conscious awareness of the greater impact you want to make in this world. You have some sort of vision. Another word we might use to describe this is purpose.

A meaningful life is a purposeful life. And it’s not one you go out to search for and discover. It’s one you already know.

This is one of the biggest differentiators between a happy life and a meaningful life.

Happiness vs. Meaning: The Key Difference

To live a meaningful life, you have a conscious understanding of why you are doing what you are doing and why it matters.

In a happy life, you might have activities and commitments that bring you joy. But you don’t consciously understand how they’re connected to a bigger vision and purpose—if they’re connected at all.

Happiness is about the present moment. It’s about pursuing things that bring pleasure and joy and satisfy needs and wants today.

But a meaningful life often means pursuing tasks and commitments that are connected to a bigger goal or vision. Sometimes that means you feel happy in the moment. But sometimes it feels really hard. Sometimes you trade off short-term pleasure in order to fulfill that bigger goal and that bigger impact.

Career Trade-Offs: Choosing Meaning Over Balance

I had a client who was ready to pursue a new job. It was really challenging for her, though, because she had worked so hard to get to where she was in her company.

Her company had different career goals for her than she had for herself. The next job they wanted her to take—she knew it wasn’t really something she wanted. But it was the stepping stone to get to the job she really did want.

There was a trade-off: she would be sacrificing a lot of work-life balance, a lot of day-to-day happiness, for at least a year or two, in order to pursue the next step in her career later on.

In the end, she chose to do it because it felt meaningful and purposeful to her.

Now, she could have equally chosen and justified a different job—one with more balance, less travel, and more time with family. That would have been easier, but it wouldn’t have felt as meaningful.

So sometimes there are trade-offs you have to make in order to pursue a meaningful life.

Happiness vs. Meaningfulness in Everyday Goals

Whenever you’re pursuing a weight loss goal, you experience the difference between happiness and meaningfulness all the time.

To lose weight, you have to change the way you eat and make time for exercise. Most of the time that’s a sacrifice of joy and pleasure. You have to give up foods that bring comfort and joy in order to pursue a bigger goal and dream.

And that dream is not just to lose weight—it’s to feel healthy, to fit in your clothes, to look in the mirror and love the way you look and feel.

Happiness is often the pursuit of wants and desires in the present. Meaningfulness is the pursuit of wants and desires that are going to pay off in the future.

Why Happiness Is Temporary and Meaning Is Lasting

Because happiness is so focused on the present, it’s very temporary.

The joy of drinking a glass of wine wears off quickly. The happiness of a weekend vacation fades as soon as it’s over.

But meaningful pursuits bring long-lasting joy. You think back on the hard work, the sacrifices, and the effort, and you feel sustainable pride and satisfaction in your accomplishments.

To summarize: happiness tends to be based in the present moment—fulfilling temporary desires—while meaningfulness is rooted in a bigger vision or purpose that brings lasting joy, fulfillment, and satisfaction, though it often requires sacrifice.

The Coaching “Magic”: Happiness Now + Meaningful Goals

Now, of course, you can have both a happy life and a meaningful one. You can pursue both at the same time. It’s not an either/or.

In coaching, as I walk women through resetting their vision and aligning their careers with it, I’m also helping them find happiness and joy in their current life under the current circumstances—while nothing has changed.

That’s where the magic happens.

If you can love your current job, your current career, and your current circumstances while at the same time pursuing the next career shift and setting vision over what you want next—something you know you won’t regret—that’s magic.

Not too long ago, my client Stephanie said this on the podcast, right around Thanksgiving. She said: My circumstances haven’t changed at all. That’s what’s so surprising.

She thought she needed to pull back her career, go part-time, or take a break in order to have a meaningful life. What she learned instead in coaching was how to love her current life just as it was and add in more purposeful, impactful pursuits.

That’s really common for my clients. They come thinking they need a big career shift, a break, or an overhaul. But in reality, what they need is an internal perspective shift and crystal clarity about what they want to pursue next.

A Regret-Free Life Comes from Meaning

Happiness and joy can be felt right now. And simultaneously, you can pursue goals, dreams, vision, impact, and purpose that feel deeply meaningful and pay off in the future.

When I ask women why their goals of work-life balance and career matter to them—why they want to invest time and money into coaching—the number one reason I hear is: I don’t want regrets.

They don’t want to get to the end of their career, the end of their life, or even just the end of their kids’ younger years and think: I wish I would have done it differently. I wish I wouldn’t have worked as much. I wish I wouldn’t have pursued my career in that way.

They want to make sure the time and energy they’re putting into their career, life, and choices are the ones they want to be pursuing.

When you focus on defining what a meaningful life is for you—and then make decisions to pursue what matters most—you leave no room for regret. That’s where a regret-free life comes from.

And I want this to be that year for you.

Put Words to What Matters Most

There are three steps I want to offer you in order to really focus on meaning and make that happen this year.

The first one is this: you have to focus on putting words to the things that matter most.

The things you value. The bigger dreams you have for yourself and your family. The things that are worthy of your time and energy.

Those can’t stay unknown. Your conscious mind needs clarity on exactly what a meaningful life looks like for you—one filled with purpose, one filled with vision.

Your brain needs to know. Otherwise, it’s like driving a car without a map. You may have a general idea of where you want to go—or where you don’t want to go—but not enough clarity to steer with intention.

That kind of life leaves you going in circles, feeling stuck, repeating the same days, and wondering how to get out of it.

If that’s been your life these last several months or years—rinse and repeat, feeling immobilized, unsure how to reset vision and language around what matters—then this is the step you need to work on.

Step 1: Put Words to What Matters Most

The very first thing you have to do is put words and find language to describe the things that matter most to you—and what your meaningful life truly is.

Step 2: Recognize How You’re Already Living It

Step number two is to actually reflect on how you are already living that meaningful life and the dream you’ve always had.

Once you put words to it, now you want to reflect on how you’re already doing it. I want you to find all the ways you’ve already made progress—or are making progress—toward that vision, toward that meaningful life you’re creating.

The more you do that, the more satisfied you’re going to feel today and the less far off you’re going to feel from living that purpose.

When your brain focuses on the progress you’re making instead of all the ways life feels misaligned or far off, you’ll feel more motivated. And that motivation creates more progress.

It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. The more you focus on how today is already the life you dreamed of living—and how you are making huge strides toward the next iteration of that life—the better you feel and the further you go.

Step 3: Invest Time and Money in Your Vision

The third step is to actually invest time and money in either clarifying that vision or making exponential progress toward it.

Literally, there should be time in your calendar set aside for reflection, for vision casting, for taking steps toward bigger goals and vision.

This is one of the reasons my clients love coaching. It’s forced accountability. Every week, for at least one hour, you’re going to talk with me about your goals. And that’s likely one hour more than you’ve spent all year thinking about your goals and making meaningful progress.

Along with coaching sessions, there are exercises and reflections tailored to you and your goals that help you make exponential progress between sessions.

Statistics show that you are 90% more likely to achieve your goals of work-life balance, a meaningful career, and a meaningful life if you hire a coach—because of the forced accountability.

But even if you don’t want to invest financially, at the very least commit your time. Read books. Find mentors. Have intentional conversations about what it will take for you to live regret-free.

Don’t Leave Your Life to Chance

If you wake up tomorrow without some sort of commitment for how you want to pursue your meaningful life this year—and you just hope it’s going to be different—you’re leaving it up to chance.

And chance means you may or may not ever make progress. It will feel like rinse and repeat.

A meaningful life is a regret-free life. It’s one where you are pursuing sustained joy and satisfaction. It’s a life you feel proud of living, where you wake up every day feeling purposeful, with an all-in vision for yourself and your family.

Coaching Options for 2025: Group and 1:1

If that’s not where you are today—but it’s what you want to create for 2025—it’s time to invest in coaching.

Depending on your goals, we can work together in two ways:

  • Group coaching program: Ambitious and Balanced — Doors open at the end of the month. If you’re focusing on creating work-life balance and reprioritizing so your family comes first, this program is for you. Get on the waitlist now.

  • One-on-one coaching — More focused on vision casting, career shifting, and getting unstuck. If that’s you, I still have a spot to start in January and work together through mid-year. Book your free breakthrough call at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book.

All these links are in the show notes for you.

2025: The Year of Meaning

Working moms, it’s not just about happiness. It’s about meaning.

It’s about pursuing a meaningful life in 2025. If you want to get out of your own way and create meaning for yourself, I cannot wait to work with you.

Be sure to follow this podcast. Get on my email list through the show notes. Sign up for the waitlist for my group coaching program. Or work with me one-on-one.

There are so many ways I can help you this year create the life you want. I can’t wait.

And until next week, working moms—let’s get to it.

Your Next Step

Hey working moms, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode! I want to let you know that the next cohort for my group coaching program, Ambitious and Balanced, is starting soon.

If you’re looking to make 2025 the year where you not only learn how to create sustainable work-life balance but also put it into practice—so that you and your family come first without sacrificing success at your job—then this program is for you.

I’m only taking 10 women into this cohort, and you’re not going to want to miss this opportunity.

To learn more, head over to my website: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/ambitiousandbalanced

This is the year where you feel successful both at work and at home. I can’t wait for you to start!

I’ll see you next week, and until then—let’s get to it!

Rebecca Olson