 Have you ever helped a friend by watching their child for an afternoon? If the child was under the age of 5, you would have given them your full attention. (In other words, no multi-tasking!) In the span of an afternoon, you could play with blocks, dolls, color, have a snack, go on a walk, read books and more. When the afternoon was over, did you feel like time passed slowly or quickly? I’m guessing you’d say the time passed slowly.
Why is it that when we spend time like the example above, time moves slowly, almost at a crawl? (Similarly, if your child is sick or you watch them practice a sport or musical instrument, the time feels like it goes on forever.) It’s as if in these situations, we have all the time we need. Yet, if we spend the same afternoon with our daily to do list, we feel like we don’t have enough time. How is that possible? Every day has the same number of hours, but depending on what you are doing, the perception having enough, or not enough, time is so different. Why the discrepancy on our perception of time? What would happen if we woke up thinking I have plenty of time today, instead of I am so busy? Or if we told ourselves, whatever we can get done today is just fine, instead of there’s no way I’ll be able to get everything done? Who is defining what you need to do vs. what you want to do? Are they different? Are they the same? Sometimes there is this sense of guilt on a weekend afternoon you are sitting in your house doing “nothing” like watching a movie, reading a book or just spending unscheduled time. Why do we think we must be busy throughout the day otherwise we’ll miss out on something important we should be doing? Now in the interest of time, I’m going to keep this short – I’m sure there is something else you have to run off to do (or maybe are in the middle of doing it right now). But before you jump to the next, take a deep breath and think about the time that lies in front of you right now. Ask yourself, how would I feel if I knew I had enough time to get everything done? Would my attitude and anxiety change? Set a reminder for yourself on your phone to go off in two hours. When the alarm goes off, check in with yourself – are you still feeling calm and peaceful knowing everything that needs to get done today will get done? If not, then pause and remind yourself you have plenty of time today. Set another reminder to go off in another two hours and check in with yourself again. At the end of the day, look back and ask yourself did the day seem to go faster or slower? Did you get more done or less or did it even matter? You have plenty of time. Instead of rushing from one thing to the next today, enjoy where you are at every step of the way. Be grateful for the ability to spend this time today however you choose. Heart-FULLy Yours, Kacey Are you a working mom struggling to define what “having it all” means to you? I want to talk to you! Comment below or send me an email and we’ll schedule a time to talk. Come join our Facebook group Balanced Heart Moms and join a supportive community of women who share their stories and lift each other up.
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 Before kids, our work took up a major part of our lives. It was easy to throw yourself into your work. You could get in early, work through lunch and stay as late as you needed to complete a project. You could go to client dinners, head out of town for important presentations and bond with your co-workers over happy hour. You could shift and mold your time (for the most part) around what was needed to get your job done. You did so willingly and with great return as you established yourself in a career you found rewarding and enjoyable. (And if you didn’t, you could easily find a new job or company to pursue something you would enjoy more.)
However, once you have a child, the way you approach your career shifts. The way you did things before are no longer be possible. For example an out-of-town business trip now requires a coordination of multiple people’s schedules. Your time management skills are on overdrive and completing the tasks of your job are the same, but your approach to your career as a whole may need to shift. We all know that working moms are short on time, so I’ve boiled it down to what I think are 3 Steps to Achieving Career Success.
There is no one blueprint on how to be a successful working mom. Millions of moms are figuring it out as they go, but struggle in the process because they are using the same strategies they used to achieve success when they were single. Working moms shouldn’t let their added responsibilities deter them, by shifting their strategies and perspectives, working moms can continue to achieve the success in their career they desire. Heart-FULLy Yours, Kacey Are you a working mom who needs help redefining success and how to get there? I want to talk to you! Comment below or send me an email and we’ll schedule a time to talk. Come join our Facebook group Balanced Heart Moms and join a supportive community of women who share their stories and lift each other up.  A mom recently shared this with me in my Facebook moms group:
“I think there's so much work guilt in going to the ball games/school events. There's a lot of pressure to excel at your job, but how can you excel and go on a class field trip? Because of this, the school events get missed. I also think part of that guilt is which identity do you want to please? the ME part or the MOM part.” I would bet 100% of working moms have felt this way. The struggle is real and for some reason, it’s a struggle seldom talked about before you have kids. Before you have kids, you talk about how you are going to juggle the schedules, caregiving and all the things that you have to do. You seldom talk about the emotional tug-o-war that occurs between your career and your role as mother. The result is that no matter what side “wins”, you are left with a feeling of guilt for not doing enough for the “losing” side. As mothers, whether we have a career or not, we all feel guilty at some point about the job we’re doing. It’s a major topic, Google “mom guilt” and you’ll get thousands of results. Look at the New York Times Bestseller list and you’re bound to see the topic there too. In her book, The Year of Yes, Shonda Rimes decided that if her young daughters asked her to play with them, she would stop whatever she is doing and play. One night this involved getting down on the floor in a designer dress and playing with her girls before heading out to a fancy event. In times past, Shonda would have rushed out the door, afraid she would be “late”. But the practice of saying yes allowed her to value the time with her daughters, knowing they would soon grow out of this type of play time. It also showed her that stopping to play only took a few minutes before her daughter would move onto the next thing. Her perception of the time impact of stopping to play was a lot longer than the actual time she spent on the floor. Julie Lythcott-Haimes takes a different approach with her older children in her book How to Raise an Adult. She sits down with her kids at the beginning of every season/school year. She explains she will not be able to be at every practice, game or performance and together they decide which events are most important. Those go on her calendar and she schedules all meetings and travel around them to make sure she is at those events. We could sit here and read suggestion after suggestion on how to get rid of mom guilt, but it would still be with us. Why is it so hard to get rid of? It doesn’t just magically go away, you don’t just wake up one morning guilt-free. You need to take some time to reflect, dig deep as to what is important to you and possibly make some hard decisions. If you’re ready to break down your guilt, I’ve created 5 G.U.I.L.T. steps to get you started. Pull out your journal and write down your answers/thoughts on the following: G stands for Get Clear. What am I doing that is making me feel guilty? Why am I doing (or not doing) this right now? U stands for Understand the Trade-offs. When you decide to do one thing, you are also choosing to not do another. What is the consequence of this decision in terms of career? In terms of family? Is it a long term or short-term consequence? If you are struggling to decide between the two, ask yourself why do you think you need both? I stands for I matter. Chances are when you were answering the first two questions, you were very concerned about how the answers impacted everyone else. In this step, accept that what I want matters and just because I consider my feelings, does not make me a “bad mom”. Ask yourself “what do I see as the ideal solution to this decision?” Write out as many details as possible, then within the details pick out one or two things you can implement. L stands for Let it Go. What is one thing you can let go of that causes you guilt? Do you really need to do it? For example, making the beds – maybe you were raised that you have to make your bed every day, but if it’s one more thing you don’t have time for before you walk out the door, then don’t worry about it. No guilt. Let it go also applies to all the guilt you are still holding onto for something that happened yesterday, or last week or last month. There’s nothing you can do to change it now, so stop beating yourself up. Focus on what can you do today to be the best mom/career person you can be. T stands for being Thankful. We live in a time of great abundance yet spend a lot of time focused on what we don’t have. Appreciate the quiet times of getting to tuck your child into bed (one day they will be too old for you to do that). Or see the joy in the small moments like when they are singing a song on the radio after you pick them up from school or when you are watching the same TV show for the 100th time. Our guilt comes when we want more, we lose sight that we already have what we need. Mom guilt isn’t something I can get rid of in one blog post, but hopefully this exercise can help you lessen its impact. And if all else fails remember this “the days are long but the years are short”. When we are in the middle of it, it’s easy to feel like this time will last forever, but in the blink of an eye another year goes by and your little, isn’t so little any more. Heart-FULLy Yours, Kacey The Year of Yes and How to Raise an Adult are on sale today for less than $5 on Amazon, you don’t want to miss out on these books!  Claire Huxtable was a successful lawyer. Elyse Keaton ran her own architecture firm from home (she was really ahead of her time). Angela Bower was an advertising executive in New York and Maggie Malone Seaver was a reporter. Many of the sitcoms I grew up watching had moms in the workplace. They did it with such ease. And except for Angela Bower, a single mom with one son, all these working moms had at least 3 kids! How did they do it? According to the U.S. Department of Labor Blog, 70% of mothers with children under 18 participate in the work force, and of those, over 75% employed full-time. Wow, that’s a lot of us. But, is it really a surprise? We were the generation that followed the 70’s feminist movement. We were told from a young age that we could “have it all” - the career, the family and the house. And we had the role models on TV to showing it was possible. Claire Huxtable was often in the kitchen making breakfast or dinner, she made it look effortless. In fact, according to a 2013 survey by Entrepreneur magazine, 74% of women believe they can “have it all”, defined as fulfilling career, relationships, and children. No pressure. I was definitely among the 74% when I first became a mom. I didn’t give it a second thought, of course I would have a career and a family. The physical, time-based arrangements are demanding but possible to work through. Who’s going to pick up and drop off? Who can run to the store for more diapers/wiped/etc? (You never realize what a luxury grocery shopping after work is until you have kids.) How do we fit in enough time for dinner, playtime and bath? When you think about being a working mom it’s these scheduling details that you think of first, and rightly so, because in order to “have it all”, we must be able to do it all. This is the part we anticipate. We build our village to prepare for this part of being a working mom. Sure, many days it’s exhausting, but we’re doing it! For some working moms, mastering the scheduling of it all may be their biggest challenge. But there is another part we haven’t talked about, within the definition of “having it all” is the word fulfilling, a fulfilling career, relationships and family. It’s easy to talk about choosing the right daycare, getting into a routine and doing things in your new role as mommy, but no one ever talks about the shift that occurs in your old role as career woman….. What is a fulfilling career? Has your definition changed now that you are a mom? In my experience most moms feel the pressure to keep pushing their career. They are on auto-pilot to keep striving for the career they started before becoming a mom. There is little time for self-reflection or questioning. Bosses aren’t trained on how to coach working moms through this, so it’s up to us to find our tribe and help each other through. Can a working mom “have it all”? Maybe, but it depends on your definition. There are still only 24 hours in a day. Juggling priorities as a working mom demands thoughtful intention, selectiveness and a strong support system. It means checking in with yourself and making sure you are spending time on the things that are most important to you. It is also realizing what is important today, could shift tomorrow or next week/month/year. Nothing is ever set in stone. I don’t know if all working mom’s can “have it all”, but I do know that everything is possible. Heart-FULLy Yours, Kacey Are you a working mom struggling to define what “having it all” means to you? I want to talk to you! Comment below or send me an email and we’ll schedule a time to talk. Come join our Facebook group Balanced Heart Moms and join a supportive community of women who share their stories and lift each other up. |
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AuthorI started writing this blog because I wanted to have deeper conversations beyond "How are you?", "Busy", with other parents. Over the years I've shared personal stories, articles, authors and topics to facilitate conversations with parents about the joys and the challenges of parenting. |
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© 2021 Balanced Heart Coaching
Disclaimer: I may receive affiliate compensation from the resources and websites mentioned on this website.
© 2021 Balanced Heart Coaching