The One Thing Working Moms Want More Than Balance

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What if the life you're chasing is actually the life you're already living? In my State of the Working Mom 2026 research, I discovered something surprising: most working moms don't want to change their lives. They just want to change how they feel in them. In this episode, I'm unpacking why presence is our greatest currency, how we get so caught up chasing what's next that we miss what's right in front of us, and the simple daily practices that can help you feel more grounded, connected, and balanced. Because you worked hard to build this life. It's time to actually enjoy it.

In this episode, we unpack: 

  • Why working moms want a different feeling, not a different life. 

  • How constantly chasing what's next steals your joy. 

  • Why work-life balance is a feeling, not a circumstance. 

  • Two daily practices to feel more present at work and home. 

  • Simple ways to stop your phone from stealing your attention. 

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Transcript 

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. 

 

Hello, hello, working moms. I want to start today with a question that I asked all of the working moms in the research study I did that resulted in the report, The State of the Working Moms in 2026. Because the answers to this question were really, really surprising. 

 

I asked all of the women I spoke to in these interviews, I asked them if they could just wave a magic wand, and life could be exactly the way they wanted it, to describe life to me. 

 

I certainly expected that some of them would say things like a different job or a husband that helps out around the house, or big potential changes. I want to move and be closer to my family, all those types of things. I want to hire somebody to do a bunch of stuff for me around the house. 

 

But that's not really what I heard. Almost none of them described a radically different life than the one that they were leading. They described a life they already had with one very crucial difference. 

 

One mom put it this way. She said, "If I could just wave a magic wand, I wouldn't change what I do, I would change the feeling I have while doing it. I would change the feeling I have while doing it." 

 

Stop Chasing What's Next and Start Being Present in the Life You Already Have 

I want to say something to you today, and I want it to really land for you. Because I know for so many of you listening, this is you as well. 

 

You are actually living the life that you dreamed of living, the career that you worked so hard for, the kids and the family that you really wanted. You are literally living a life that you once dreamt about, but along the way, a lot of us start chasing the next version of life. 

 

That's what it means to be a high achiever, to be ambitious. There's always a next. 

Today, I want to invite you to stop chasing what's next and anchor into the life that you already have. 

 

Because this is theme three of six from the State of the Working Mom Report, and it's probably my favorite. 

 

If you haven't yet downloaded that report, you can do so by clicking on the link in the show notes. It's completely free. It will walk you through all of the various conversations that I had with women, the themes that I found, and also offer to you a couple of resources to help you in your working mom journey. 

 

So one of the themes that came up again and again in all of these conversations is that presence, our present, our ability to be present, that's actually the currency of our life. 

 

And for so many of the women that I spoke to, and I know for so many of you out there, your presence sort of feels just out of reach, right? Trying really hard to be present, to be attentive, to be focused, but your brain is constantly occupied, and it feels like there's very little left over for the moment that's right in front of you. 

 

One mom of twins told me this: "My kids asked me to play the moment I walk in the door." And I say, "Ugh, just give me a minute. Let me relax for just a moment." And of course, that minute turns into 15 minutes, that turns into 30, that sometimes turns into never. And I hate that. 

 

Another woman described being at her son's baseball game with her phone in her lap. And I wanna be really clear about what she said, because it matters. She said it wasn't like she didn't want to be present watching her son play baseball. It was that she just couldn't figure out how to stop herself from checking email and being available and sending messages. 

 

And then one woman said to me, and I think this kind of sums up the whole theme, she said, "I don't want more time. I just wanna actually be in the time I already have." 

 

And here's what I took from all of this, right? Presence, this currency of presence, it doesn't just happen to you, right? It's not that some of us are naturally more present than others or some of us have circumstances that allow us to be more present than others. Presence is a choice. It's a practice, it's a way of being. 

 

How the Word "But" Keeps Us From Being Fully Present in Our Lives 

I've been thinking a lot personally about how much I use the word but, like and or but, right? It's good, but it's going well, but this went well, but we're making progress, but things are really good, but almost everything good in my life seems to show up with a but attached to it. 

 

My business is doing really well this year, but it's also come with a lot of hard. I'm really excited about this coaching firm I just joined, but it's a big investment. I love going to my son's soccer games, but I wish he would just put in a little bit more effort. 

 

Here's what I've been reflecting on. When everything has a but, I'm never fully believing that things are good. I'm sort of already halfway into the next problem and the issues and the challenges, which of course pulls my attention from all that's going well in my life and has me focusing on the things that are not. 

 

Stop Focusing on What's Wrong and Start Noticing What's Right 

So lately, in my own coaching and in my own life, I've been practicing something different. I've been choosing to focus on the good, on the progress, on what's right and leaning into that side of life on purpose instead of letting everything come with a but. 

 

My coach, my personal coach, actually calls me out when she hears the word but. She stops me and goes, "Nope, no but." And I have a little sticky note here. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see it. It says and, literally just this little note that says and, and it reminds me to not but my life all the time. 

 

Now hear me, because I don't want this to sound like just be grateful, right? Just be positive, just have a glass-half-full kind of mentality, right? I'm not telling you the hard parts of life aren't hard. They certainly are for me. I know that some of you listening are exhausted. I know that trying to pretend otherwise would be near impossible. 

 

I don't want you to ignore the wrong, right? It's about training your attention to land on what's right as well, right? Both can be true at the same time. 

 

But most of us have spent years practicing just looking at what's wrong and the progress we haven't made and how we've let someone down. And the 20% that is a little bit off instead of focusing on the 80% that is right and is going well. 

 

You Cannot Be Present in a Life That You Are Mentally Leaving 

And here's why I think this matters when it comes to talking about presence. You cannot be present in a life that you are mentally leaving. 

 

If part of you is always chasing the next version, the calmer version, the more balanced life, the more successful version, right? Or the one where things finally settle down, right? And it's not so hard, then you're never gonna be fully here. 

 

And here's what the research made me feel so clear on, right? The women who said that they wanted a different feeling in their life, not a different life, but a different feeling, they were telling me that their life was never really the problem. 

 

And this is really the heart of what I believe around sustainable work-life balance. It's what I teach, right? 

 

Work-Life Balance Is a Feeling, Not a Set of Circumstances 

Balance is a feeling, not a set of circumstances. You don't arrive at feeling balanced by arranging your circumstances perfectly. And then you get to arrive there, right? You get to more sustainable balance by anchoring into the life that you have right now and building that feeling right here in the present. 

 

And again, let me be clear about this as well. Anchoring into the life that you have today, sort of doubling down on it, being exactly where you're supposed to be, it doesn't mean that everything has to stay the same, right? That nothing needs to be changed or optimized, or you get to optimize your life from a place of appreciation, from a place of gratitude, from a place of feeling anchored in rightness as someone who loves their life and just wants to feel more of it, instead of from a place of deficiency as someone who's trying to fix a life that isn't good enough yet. See the difference? 

 

Two Daily Mindset Practices to Help Working Moms Feel More Present and Balanced 

I have two practices that I do every day, and I like to think of them as bookends, and these are exactly the same two practices I have all of my clients do that join my Ambitious and Balanced cohort program. 

 

Literally, this is their homework every single day, is to get in a habit of doing one morning practice and then one kind of afternoon practice to anchor their life in presence. 

 

The first practice, I call it the Daily Kickstart. The Daily Kickstart is a mindset practice where you think on purpose about how you wanna think about that day and how you wanna think about yourself that day, right? 

 

Beliefs like, "I am enough, I'm good enough, I'm exactly where I wanna be, I have a life I've dreamed of." I have you practice those thoughts and those mindsets on purpose using the Daily Kickstart so that you really start your day in an optimized glass-half-full type of mindset. 

 

If you have never downloaded the Daily Kickstart, that's actually available to you to download for free. It's a, again, it's a practice that I would say my clients lean into the most and tell me when they've really learned how to make this a habit, this is the one that changed everything for them in creating a more balanced life. 

 

And so I wanna offer it to everyone out there for free. And so it's called the Daily Kickstart. There will be a link in the show notes to that. 

 

Don't forget, you can also download the State of the Working Mom Report when you're in the show notes as well. But that practice really gets your day into a place of feeling present and grounded and excited and successful right at the beginning. 

 

The Work-to-Home Transition: How Working Moms Can Leave Work Stress Behind and Be Present With Their Families 

And the second practice that I have all my clients lean into in the Ambitious and Balanced program, again, because it is literally your anchor for your afternoon, it's the Work-to-Home Transition. 

 

Now, this is a short routine, 10 to 15 minutes, and it sort of sits in that in-between space between work and family. And let me tell you why this practice matters so much. 

 

Many of us who are ambitious and high achievers tend to go all in at work. And then when we get home, our family sort of gets the leftovers. And yet we say that everything that we do is really for our family, right? Our family matters more than anything. And yet they aren't getting the best of us. 

 

And so what happens when you don't have a really intentional sort of handoff between work and home, the workday, and the emotions of the workday, and the overwhelm, and the stress, and the anxiety, and the feeling of behind, right? That just sort of crashes straight into your evening, into your family time, right? 

 

It doesn't stay at the door, it walks right in with you. 

 

And so the Work-to-Home Transition, in the way that I teach it, is really unique because it allows you to truly shut down and kind of put a period to the end of your workday so you feel anchored, you feel successful, you feel ready for tomorrow, which then helps you to feel present the moment you walk in the door to be with your kids. 

 

And so that practice is something that I teach and is really only available to my clients inside my Ambitious and Balanced program. However, I have had a couple of podcast episodes where I describe it, I talk a little bit about it, so I'm gonna link to those in the show notes for you as well. So many good resources in the show notes today for this episode. 

 

So again, I wanna come back to why are we talking about this? We're talking about the Daily Kickstart, the Work-to-Home Transition, right? These are practices to help you optimize a life that is already amazing. These are practices that are gonna help you to love your life right now, feel anchored into the life that you've created because you literally once were dreaming about the life that you have today. 

 

How Working Moms Can Set Phone Boundaries and Protect Their Presence 

Now, I wanna talk about our phones for a moment because a lot of women in these research interviews, they named it, right? And I think we all kind of know why our phones sort of rob us of our presence, right? 

 

And I'm not gonna tell you to go throw your phone in a lake, right? I want you to really think about that mom at the baseball game, right? She didn't want to be on her phone, she just couldn't figure out how to stop. 

 

And when that's the situation, right? Willpower in that moment is a really hard strategy to use. What works better is making a few decisions ahead of time so that you don't have to decide in that moment. 

 

So here's a couple of tweaks I wanna invite you to try. Download an app that helps you block social media or your email apps or whatever it might be at the times that you most want to protect your presence. 

 

So for me, I use an app called Freedom, and it blocks all my social media use starting at 8:30 PM every single night. That way, I cannot log on and scroll social media right before bedtime because that gets in the way of my sleep and my rest. And then I wake up tired the next day. 

 

So I have learned that it is so much easier to put on an app blocker than it is on sheer willpower to never check my social media at that time. 

 

Similarly, I use the Freedom app on my computer so I can have focused, very present times at work. Things that are where I just need to double down on a project or make progress on something, or I wanna be extremely present in a meeting that I'm having virtually or something like that. 

 

I'll use the Freedom app to prevent me from being able to check my email, being able to get on the internet, and all the other things that might distract me along the way. 

 

There are so many things that you could do to choose to help yourself be present and not just lean into like, "I hope today I won't be like scrolling social media," or "I hope today I won't check my email hanging out there with my kids," right? 

 

We don't want to rely on hope as a strategy to prevent you from checking social media at times that you don't want to, or scrolling, or emailing, or whatever it might be. 

 

This is one of those conversations that my cohorts tend to have where we crowdsource ideas on how do you prevent yourself from checking email? When do you stop yourself from checking email or messages or scrolling? What could we do to help support each other and make it easier on each other? 

 

That's what, like, the magic of being in a cohort program like this is, is we're not reinventing the wheel. All of us have made a little bit of progress in this way in learning how to manage our phone usage and be more present. But now we just get to talk about it as a cohort and really support each other in making those decisions on a regular basis. 

 

Joy Can Only Be Found in Presence: Why Being Present Matters for Working Moms 

Now, again, I want to take the angle here that we're talking about limiting phone usage because it gets in the way of your presence, not because you're doing something wrong, but because you have an amazing life that you want to actually be in, that you want to be present for. 

 

I like to tell my clients, joy can only be found in presence. We don't tend to feel joyful after the fact, we tend to feel it in the moment. 

 

But if we're always skirting through the moment or trying to optimize the moment because we're in a deficit and we're trying to always push through to the other side, then we're never really going to feel the good and the joy and the wonder of life. 

 

Presence is our greatest currency as working moms. Being more present and focused in the moment is what's going to help you be more productive and successful at your job. And it's going to make you feel like a way better mom. 

 

And both of those things are important if you're going to live a successful and sustainably balanced life. 

 

How to Build a More Present and Balanced Life, One Small Habit at a Time 

So the question I want to leave you with, or really the commitment I want you to make, is to pick one thing, small or big, that would make a really big difference in you being present in the life that you already have. 

 

Maybe it's something around your phone, maybe it's the Work-to-Home Transition or getting in the right mindset in the morning. It might be the way you're talking to yourself throughout the day, right? Pick one thing that you want to double down on this week that would help you increase your presence in your life. 

 

And I'll be honest with you, changing how you see your life, like choosing the glass-half-full kind of lens at looking at life and building practices that support that, it's not something you can just do once, right? 

 

This is something we have to practice and rehearse over and over and over again to create a habit on a different way of thinking, a different way of behaving. And that gets so much easier when you are alongside other women who are doing the same thing, right? 

 

That's a big part of what we do inside the Ambitious and Balanced cohort program. I'm opening up the next cohort in January, and I am filling it right now. 

 

So if this episode has made you think, man, I just really could use the support and the accountability and the researched practices that really work, then I would love to connect with you on a strategy call where we can talk about your vision for a balanced life. 

 

And I can answer all your questions around if this cohort program is right for you and give you the information on how to join. 

 

If you're interested in a strategy call, there's a link to that in the show notes, again, along with the Daily Kickstart and along with the State of the Working Moms Report. So many good resources for you right there in the show notes. 

 

Stop Chasing a Different Life and Start Being Present in the One You Already Have 

So friends, here's what I want you to take with you this week. You are not asking for a different life. You're actually asking to be in this one. In the life you already have, that's not a radical request. 

 

Presence is not a personality trait or a circumstance. It's a resource, and you can protect that resource with how you start your day, the mindset you use, the handoff transition between work and home, right? A few decisions around how you use your phone and your phone usage. 

 

This is the life that you dreamed of. You're not that far from it. So I want you to stop chasing something different and anchor yourself into the life that you already have. 

 

Next week, we're gonna be talking about another theme that came out of the Working Mom Report, State of the Working Mom Report. It's around our village and how so many of us are missing the village. 

 

So until next week. Let's get to it. 

 

The State of the Working Mom 2026: The Truth About What Working Moms Are Carrying  

Okay. I really need you to actually do this, like right now. Go download the full report of my 2026 interviews, the State of the Working Mom.  

  

Here's why. I sat down with working moms and I asked them to just tell me the truth about their lives. I told them I was a filter, no highlight reel, and what came back cracked something open in me.  

  

One woman told me she hadn't had a thought that was just hers in years because every single thought loops back to something she has to remember or someone she has to take care of.  

  

Another said she gave her best hours to work and her kids get whatever's left, and most nights that's not very much. That's not a confession. That's like an average Tuesday for a lot of you that's listening right now.  

  

If you've ever sat in your car for an extra two minutes before walking inside because you just need one second where nobody needs anything from you, then this report is going to feel like someone finally said it out loud.  

  

And here's the thing I want you to hear before you even open it. You're not doing anything wrong. You are doing all of it inside a life that was never really built to hold everything you're carrying.  

  

That's not an excuse. That's the truth. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.  

  

Go get your report for free by going to the show notes, clicking on www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/research-guide  

  

And keep listening because everything that's in that report is exactly what's going to shape the upcoming Ambitious and Balanced cohort that starts in January 2027. You're not going to want to miss it. All right. See you next week. 

 

 

Rebecca Olson