Like I'd always had these grand visions of work-life balance. I loved the idea of laying around and reading a book but if I ever did it before, my brain would go insane it’d constantly be like we can't do this now, there's so much to do. The kids are young, right? Let's just wait. Maybe later once everything is figured out and I have everything under control and I get to some magical land, like that's what we're waiting for.

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Hello my friends, welcome to Lessons From a Quitter. I'm so excited to have you back for another amazing and very frustrating episode for me, I'm gonna explain, but I love this topic. So we're going to talk about work life balance today. And it's interesting that this is the topic and recording this episode has been a nightmare for me. So I, if you know me, I have a hard time scheduling things in advance and batching content, which is what they call like, you know, when you do let's say a month's worth of podcasts in one day. It's like the ideal way of doing it. But my brain doesn't work that way. One day it'll get there. I look forward to that day but uh today's not that day. So I've been trying though there's certain times where I have to batch content because I'm going to be out of the office, so to speak. And so I can't really do the episode like the week before but I generally do like doing episodes like close to when I'm going to publish them because there's something that comes up in a coaching call, I like to talk about it like right then or I come up with an idea that people want help with right then. And so it's hard for me to really plan out like two months in advance. Anyways, that's all to say that last week, if you listened, I was at a Mastermind event, a business like conference in Cabo, which was amazing. And I'm really upleveling. I'm really glad I went but because I was going to be gone a couple of weeks ago, I was so great about planning out my podcast episodes, outlining them and I recorded three weeks in a row, including last week’s and this week’s because I knew I was going to get back on Saturday. I wasn't going to have the podcast in time to my podcast editor and ready to be on this Tuesday, the 17th. So I had everything planned out and I recorded everything. And then I had everything submitted like the good CEO of my company that I want to become. And if you listen to last week and the intro from the week before you might've noticed that the sound quality wasn't great, it wasn't like what the other episodes are like. And so we went through and published them. And then for this week, my amazing podcast editor, shout out to Carrie who is the best, messaged me when I was in Mexico and was like we can't use this episode. It sounds terrible. You're going to have to re-record. And I was like well I'm in Mexico. I can't re-record until I get back Saturday night or Sunday morning. And she's like that's fine, I can get it back to you fast like just re-record it. And I was like, so I got back on Saturday and I was exhausted Saturday night. So I get up Sunday morning, yesterday morning and I rerecorded for 45 minutes the whole episode. Okay and it's funny cause I talked a lot about my thoughts around work-life balance and having to do this episode on a Sunday morning when I just got back from leaving my children for five days. So I'll talk about that too today but that's not where it ends. I was like alright, we did it. But I come to find out today's Monday at two o'clock in the afternoon and we publish on Tuesdays and I get an email. Apparently I missed Carrie's last email. And she's like nothing uploaded, like the one you uploaded is only seven minutes and I'm like you're mistaken, what is happening Carrie? I've already done this twice. You're not making me do this again. And yet here we are because that episode didn’t record. Y'all I've been doing this for 160 some odd episodes and I've never had this happen ever. So I don't know what it is about work-life balance that's going to make me really work for it. But here we are the day before the episode has to get out, the way I probably normally would have done it, not batched. And we're going to talk about work life balance. And I think that it is an interesting episode for this to happen to because I think a lot of what I talk about here, you're going to see why, you know, I joke but I'm actually not freaking out about this at all. And we're going to just get it done and move on with our lives. Okay. So let's jump in to the often misunderstood quest for work-life balance, this myth that everybody is after. And apparently nobody can figure out. Cause I think we get a very integral part of this equation wrong. So the question I get from a lot of people that come to me is like how do I find more work-life balance? How do I find balance in my life? And we come at it from this perspective of like how do I get the right number of hours that I should be spending between work and home and fun, relationships, cleaning, exercise, whatever the things are you want to put in your little wheel of life. How do I come up with the exact balance that's going to make me feel wonderful and rejuvenated and motivated and, you know, in a way that I can do everything I need to do. And so we run around and we change all of our circumstances. We think like well clearly I need another job that I work less hours so I can be home more or I need more help at home or whatever the thing is. I need more time if I just had more time to rest and I don't know, read or do something fun then I would feel more rejuvenated when it's time to go back to work. So I just need to find more time. I need to find time in different areas to put in so that this balance so I can recalibrate. And here is the reason that most of us keep failing at this and we keep falling short or we think we're falling short of like quote unquote balance. And what most of us are not understanding is that the secret to all of it, you ready for this? Is your brain. I know, you're shocked. If you're a longtime listener to this podcast, you never saw that coming. No, but in all seriousness, I'm going to explain to you why you can change everything else around you but if you don't change your brain, you will always feel imbalanced. Now there's a couple of reasons: first, with your brain, I think for a lot of us, is this internalized idea that we can just excel at everything. It's so amazing for me to watch in personal development or just goal setting and stuff where it's how can I balance everything? How can I do it all, right? How can I exercise a certain amount of time every week and be fully present at home with my kids and also be a rock star at work and organize everything and never let any balls drop and clean my own house and do all the things all the time, right? There's this like perfectionist like fantasy that one day we're gonna wake up and have everything together. And I think maybe intellectually, we understand that that's never going to happen. It just never is. Because as soon as we start doing better in one area, we just add more things. It's like well now I should also have more hobbies. Now that I have some time I should maybe, you know, start baking organic goods from scratch or whatever the thing is. And so we keep adding to it. So we're always going to be failing. I mean, that's one thing to notice is just like where am I creating this kind of fantasy life that's never gonna happen? And when can I start being a little bit more okay with dropping some balls? But the real reason that it's all our mind is because I want you to think about what happens when whatever the thing is you want to do, like let's say it's a weekend and you want more rest. You want more balance in your life. You are committed to not working as much. You are committed to being present with your kids or whatever the thing is like you've decided. And then the weekend comes around and maybe you do stick to the idea of not working this weekend. But then what happens? I want you to think about what happens to you as soon as like the weekend, you're in whatever it is you're supposed to be doing. You start thinking and worrying about the stuff that you're supposed to be doing next week. You're constantly thinking like I should be getting a jumpstart on that presentation. If I started now then I would have a leg up. I would be sure that I could get it done. Otherwise I'm just gonna sit here and worry about it. Or what happens, let's say you want to rest. I hear this all the time. Every, like so many of my clients want more rest in their life. And then if I give them assignment of like just lay down for 30 minutes in the middle of the day and watch what your brain does. We all know, you already know what's going to happen. You're going to go lay down in the middle of the day and your brain is going to be on fire. Okay, it's going to be losing it. Like get up, we have so many things to do, right? We have this huge to-do list. The house is dirty. The dishes aren't done. You can’t just lay around. And so you don't get to rest. Even if you force yourself. A lot of times, like what's funny is people will tell me, like they force themselves to like stop working at a certain time but they haven't dealt with their thoughts. So they feel guilty the whole time. So it's not like they're resting. It's not like they're present with their children because they're feeling guilty that like I really should be sending those emails. I really should be responding cause my boss is waiting. And so it ruins the time that they're at home too. I think for a lot of people, we actually have a good amount of hours. Like even people that are working, you know, a nine to five and they're not working insane hours, don't feel like they have balance because your thoughts are constantly engulfed in everything that you're not doing ,everything you should be doing. All of this shame and blame and guilt about like the fact that when you're at work, you're thinking about your kids and how you're not with them. And when you're with your kids, you're thinking about how you should be working more or getting ahead or there's always the to-do list. There's always a million things to do on the weekend. And when you haven't learned to manage your mind and decide like no, we've decided today we're not going to do any to-do’s, we're going to rest. And I want to feel super grateful and proud of myself for just laying here reading. I don't have to do laundry. I don't have to get up and do this or that like this is all I'm going to do. Until you can do that, you never really gained the benefit of that rest. Right. I was thinking about this recently, when we went on vacation a couple of months ago, we rented an Airbnb somewhere not far off, right? Like two hour drive with a couple of our friends. And it was a very similar house to my house. Right. I mean it had a pool so there was that like, there definitely had some more fun elements, but it wasn't some like spectacular, magical, you know, resort land or anything. It was a house. We rented a house and I realized that all of a sudden my thoughts changed. Like I walk into this vortex and I've just decided myself that like when you enter this house, everything's changed because it's called a vacation house. Okay. I didn't check my email on my phone. I laid around and I let my kids do whatever the heck they wanted to do. Like I didn't care about how much they were on their screens. I didn't care what they ate whether it was like a lot of junk food or whether they were actually eating every meal or whatever. I let myself just lay around and go to the pool all weekend and read and not feel the need to constantly get up and fix things. And obviously I felt very relaxed but only because I made up this rule that in the confines of these three days and in this house, I'm allowed to not do anything.

And I was realizing like I could do the same thing at my house. I could decide on a Saturday, which by the way, this is what I have started doing, just decided certain days are not for running through my to-do list of everything I have to do. Now, I understand, I know, I can already hear the objections like but well the laundry has to get done. I have to get groceries. Sure. There's always going to be things to do. Okay. And now you have to start figuring out like when does that happen? I outsource a lot more. Now when I realized like I really want to protect at least a one day of my weekend to having fun and resting and relaxing and not pushing myself. So what does that mean for me? Maybe it means outsourcing more. Right? I buy my groceries now almost exclusively through these delivery apps because I'm willing to pay a little bit more. It's not a ton more so I can put groceries in my car at 10:00 PM at night without having to get up and spend an hour and a half going to the grocery store, shopping for everything, bringing it back. I ask for a lot more help now, like I said, I let go of a lot of that perfectionist fantasy that I have to do everything and I'm the only one and I have to be in control. And if I'm a good mother and a wife then that means everything is on me. And so I asked for help from my husband, from my mother-in-law, from my mother, from people around, I don't feel guilty when I get the help. And I'm not saying you have to do this stuff. I'm not saying you have to delegate or you have to pay for things. I'm just saying like start realizing like what would you need to do in order to protect some time when you want to rest and like actually let yourself rest?

So for me now, on a Saturday, if I want to do nothing and lay around and read a book, I know that that's my day for doing it. And it's funny because like I’d always had these like grand visions of work-life balance. I loved the idea of laying around and reading a book but if I ever did it before my brain would go insane it’d constantly be like we can't do this now, there's so much to do. The kids are young, right? Let's just wait. Maybe later, once everything is figured out and I have everything under control and I get to some magical land where I can now decide it's okay for me to lay down and read a book. Like that's what we're waiting for. And I realized that day's not going to come. That day’s today. That's just me deciding, it doesn't have to be the whole day, but can I give myself an hour on a Saturday? Can I decide like when my daughter is napping, I'm not going to get up and clean the house? Like my house is just going to be a little bit messy. Can I be okay with that? Can my thoughts be okay? That like yeah, maybe someone's going to come over and see that my house is lived in and messy. And again, it's to each person, this is going to be a personal question, right? For some of you, like a messy house is what's going to make you go insane. So you want to clean it, fine. But I would just like I would really question it. I would question even why that makes you go insane. Because oftentimes, even under that, underlying those thoughts is some thoughts that like if your office is messy, that means you're a bad fill in the blank. Mom, dad, human, whatever, that like you're not put together. You're, I don't know, lazy, whatever the thought is, I would figure out like what's behind it. Why do I have such a problem with like not doing all the laundry today or washing all of the dishes or whatever the thing is in order to give myself some time to lay around. And I see this all the time with people that come to me for coaching. I get so many people who take time off work. So they'll come and they'll tell me like I'm going to take a sabbatical for a year or I'm going to quit. I'm going to quit. And I have no idea what else I'm going to do. I've saved up my money. My finances are in order. I've given myself a year to explore. And they're so excited. I can't tell you how many people I have in my groups that do this.

And then I want to give myself some time, especially a lot of my lawyer friends, that come to me and they've worked like insane hours. They've worked for like years at 80, 90 hours a week and they're burned out and they want rest. And they want to give themselves some time to like recuperate and figure out what they enjoy. I'm always like uh oh, here we go alright. I'm so excited for you but like let's be prepared because I give you two weeks of doing that before your brain goes literally insane. And most of them don't even make it two days where it's like, as soon as they try to rest, all of the thoughts come flooding in. All of the monkey mind that's trained to think that your productivity is directly attached to your worth. And for so long you didn't have to deal with it because you were so productive. You now have to start dealing with the thoughts of like I'm just wasting time. I have nothing to show for it. I'm being so lazy. What if I never want to get up? What if this is forever? All of these like insane things. And I start watching them like having to make their rest productive. It's the most amazing thing to see where it's like okay well I've taken this time off and I'm going to try to squeeze as many things as possible into every day. Like I have to get up and I'm gonna have to meditate and then I want to read. I want to go for a walk with my dogs and then I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna bake something for my kids. And then my kids are gonna come home. And I'm like you're defeating the entire purpose of giving yourself space. And it's because we're so deeply uncomfortable with letting ourselves rest. And this is why people don't find balance because like when we have been raised in a society where our entire worth is attached to what we produce, any type of rest will trigger that guilt that you have internalized. And so, I mean, I see that it's like clockwork. And so every time I was seeing a client tells me they're taking time off I'm worried for them. I'm like alright let's just be prepared for what's about to happen. It's gonna be a lot of crazy going on. And I want you to understand what's going on in the brain, right? Because you think it sounds so glorious. So many people tell me like I wish I could take a year off. I'm like I don't think it's as great as you think it is. Because you're going to have to deal with the other thoughts. Like there's one set of thoughts you're going to have to deal with if you're working and you're trying to build something on the side and there's a whole nother set of thoughts that you're going to have to deal with when you try to take some time off. Now, I think if you, it's to your benefit to deal with those thoughts, I think every one of us has a reckoning to do with these thoughts about rest. And the sooner we do it, the better off we are for the rest of our life. I think we need to get back to this like core understanding that as human beings, as an animal, we deserve rest, we cannot be on every season of our life. What we've created as our society is not only untenable but unnatural. And that it doesn't mean anything about us if we take some time off.

But like all of that requires for you to really face your thoughts of what it means to just lay around. And I'm telling you this, like this is exactly what happened to me. And you guys, if you listened to the podcast, know that like one of my big stories in my whole life, my big limiting kind of belief about myself was that I'm lazy. So you would think that I would love a year off. And yet when I first quit, I quit because I had my son and I look back and I'm like I did not use that year to be a loving, doting first-time mother who spent all my time enjoying my son and resting and letting my body recuperate. No, I literally spent that time hating myself and raking myself over the coals, constantly telling myself how much I was dropping the ball. How other mothers were building their empires during nap time. Why couldn't I just start this business? How lazy I was or whatever. I literally lost it for awhile. And I made myself so miserable that year. I wish I could go back and calm myself down and let myself know there's time to do all of this stuff. And it's okay to just take a year to be with your newborn and relax and bond and take care of that baby. Now I didn't know this stuff now. I didn't have these tools then I so wish I did. And that's why I feel like I'm the messenger here for you to help you understand that like beyond the different seasons in your life, I want you to just know that it's okay for you to take an hour and do nothing. For you to take time to rest. And you don't always have to be checking off something off that to do list or doing something for work. And as an assignment this week, I want you to just try it, try taking one hour to do nothing. And I mean nothing, I'm not talking about like finishing up a project in the house you've wanted to finish up. I mean nothing, like laying around and not scrolling on your phone. Okay. That is a distraction. And this is the funny thing is like we talk about how we don't have like time for rest. And so we're constantly pushing ourselves. And that brings up a lot of negative emotion which causes us to procrastinate which causes a lot of us, the form of procrastination is scrolling Instagram. So we are actually doing nothing but we're not enjoying it and we're not resting. And we're not like doing something that's going to fill us up.

So I want you to try this week like not on your phone, not watching Netflix, just an hour of laying around, maybe reading a book, see what your brain does because it's either going to be trying to like get you to do the millions of to-dos like either do work or whatever. Or it’s going to try to get you to be productive with your fun and squeeze in. Well it’s a Saturday, we should be taking the kids to the park to go on their scooters, we should take them to the pool or I should play a game with them. Or I dunno the millions of other things I should be doing. And we're gonna spend the whole time thinking of everything else that I didn't do and why I'm terrible. I'm going to ruin that hour for myself. And so I want you to think about that too, with both work too, this week, when you're at work and when you come home, a lot of us, I guess I'd set boundaries. We might say like okay, I'm done working at five or six or seven or whatever, or I'm not going to work on the weekend but I want you to think about how much of your thoughts are consumed with work when you come home. How much of the worry of the future? Worry of planning, all that stuff when you're not at work. We realize that's where the balance comes in, right? That's where the imbalance comes in. That's where most of us feel really imbalanced and why we feel so exhausted. Most of us aren't exhausted from physical exertion. We're exhausted from mental exertion. Like our mind is constantly running and it's constantly worrying about so many things that we're not even engaged in. So when we're at work or feeling guilty about our kids and not being there enough and not playing with them enough and not going on enough vacations or whatever it is, not being on the PTA and making the organic cupcakes, whatever we've decided we have to do. And then we're at home or thinking about how we didn't get enough done at work today. And then tomorrow is going to be insane and the presentation that we have to do next week. And so you're not enjoying any of it. Now I do want to give a caveat here, I'm not saying that it's all in your head, okay? I'm not saying that, you know, for my lawyer friends and other friends who work in professions that have insane hours, you're going to have to have a reckoning with that, right? That's a circumstance but it obviously is a circumstance that can affect any free time that you have. So if you're working 80 or 90 hours a week, it's going to be really difficult for you to come home and not be exhausted to do anything else. Now, I'm not saying it's not possible, like right now I could work in my business probably 15 hours a day and love it still because I have different thoughts about it. And I love my business and I choose not to because I also find it important to be with my family. But I'm not saying that like it can't happen. I do think that there's times where maybe the balance needs to be recalibrated. But the reason I say it is I've also had a ton of clients who quit and go to jobs that, you know, they take pay cuts. They go to jobs where they're going to work less hours because they think that's what they need to feel more balanced. And then the same thing happens. They go to that new job and they're still a people-pleaser. So they're still worried about everybody liking them. So they still don't put up any boundaries. And they're constantly saying yes to all these projects and then they're overwhelmed and they have too much to do. And they come home again and they're bringing all their work home and it doesn't matter what the hours were.

And this is why I always tout like doing mindset work before changing your circumstances. I talk a lot with my group about not quitting before you can get a handle on yourself and you're managing your mind at the job that you're at because if you're going to take that same brain that constantly thinks that you're falling short and you should be doing X, Y, and Z, you're going to take that same brain to a new job. So it's not about recalibrating the hours. Like if I just had a couple more hours with my kids. No, because when you're with your kids, you're still thinking about work. So does it matter if it's two hours or 10 hours with your children? And so when you can learn to manage your mind that's where you can come from a place of figuring out what that balance looks like. But until you can do that, it doesn't matter what the hours are. And this is even true with like burnout, right burnout, and really not having that balance. It's not about the number of hours. There's tons of people who get burned out any nine to five job or even less because burnout comes from your thoughts because when you are constantly trying to please everybody and be a perfectionist and make sure everything is great and always feeling like you're falling short and doing everything for everyone and then getting resentful because they don't appreciate it enough or they don't see how what you're working or you're not getting the raise or whatever. That's what leads to the exhaustion to the point where you're like I can't do this anymore. And oftentimes it doesn't require changing the job, just requires changing your thoughts to understand that like you don't need to be liked by everybody. You don't need to be the teacher's pet. You don't need to like go above and beyond for every single person and do every project at 110%. Like that's what leads to getting over burnout and finding that balance. And so it all starts with reprogramming your brain. And I think a great place to start is just observing all of the times that you're feeling guilty. I talked about this on the last episode about mom guilt but with a wonderful way to start thinking is like any time you hear the word should in your brain, it's usually a lie. And I know this is a hard concept for a lot of people to understand but there's nothing that you quote unquote should be doing. And I mean nothing. And I'm not saying it in the sense of like you know what, it's like, you don't have to do it, you get to do it. And so like you should be grateful. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just saying like you legitimately get to decide. You don't have to clean your house. There's a lot of people who don't. You don't have to do laundry, whatever. You can figure out another way, you could just not do it. Now there's consequences to that. Obviously none of us want to like smell and wear a smelly clothing. But once you realize like there's nothing that I have to do. And a lot of the stuff that we add morality to is not a moral issue. Right. So think about this like I want you to think about cleaning your house, right? What are your thoughts? There's no moral value in having a clean house. It does not make you a better or a worse person. And yet many of us believe that it does or let's say cooking dinner for yourself or for your kid, that doesn't automatically make you a better or worse mother. There is zero morality. It's a neutral fact, do you want to cook dinner or do you want to get it from out? Do you wanna have it ordered in? Do you wanna buy it frozen? Who cares? You're feeding your children, which way do you want to do it? And yet we've all like adopted all of these like made-up rules about like what makes us good and really undoing those rules is like the first step. I mean, in the last episode I talked about how with mom guilt, like feeling like leaving my kids is what makes me a bad mom. That is absolutely untrue. And I can see it for other people. It's just this like made up rule I made for myself because of like society and the things I see. And I have to work to undo that. And so many of us have to start by just questioning: what am I feeling guilty for? Is it really worse to order food out than to make it at home? Now you can decide like it's cheaper. Okay. Or I want to eat healthier meals. I want my kids to eat healthier meals. Great, fine. You can cook. Nothing, you don't have to do it. I'm just saying there's no morality in it. So if you decide okay, hey, this week, I need to order dinner twice in the week. Think about what your brain does in that situation. Does it guilt you? Does it shame you into thinking you somehow failed? Instead of thinking like look at me problem solving, I had work to do this week. I couldn't make dinner so I ordered food in like the boss I am because I make sure everybody in my family is getting fed. Both of those are perfectly legitimate thoughts and you get to choose which one you want to think. And yet most of us are just constantly telling ourselves that we failed at everything or that we're not good because we've created some like random moral standards. So I want you to just start thinking about like what all of the things you think you quote unquote should be doing. Where are you should-ing all over yourself? Right. I should cook more. I should clean more. I should play with my kids more. That's the signal. That's what you want to look out for. And you want to start questioning why. The wonderful place to just start observing like why should I be doing this? I was here. This one, like I should play with my kids more. Why? Who said who said that you have to want to play Legos with a five-year-old? What's funny to me is I feel like people aren't just like I should play with my kids more but like I should want to play with my kids more. Like there's something wrong with me for not wanting to be entertained by a four year old for six hours straight. It's like we all have our strengths. Okay. And some are good. Some are bad, whatever. And it's okay. A great example is me and my husband in this situation like he's fantastic at playing with children. I mean, a literal superpower of his, we call him the Manny because wherever we go, children gravitate to him and he genuinely enjoys playing with them. And it's his strong suit. Wonderful. Definitely not my strong suit. Like I don't enjoy it. I can enjoy it for a little bit. Okay. You got like a good 15 minutes in me. I can short burst. We could play some hide and seek. We can play a board game. I do like board games. That's about it. That's all I got. I don't make any qualms about it. I don't make it mean anything about me. Just like listen, sitting and playing with Barbies or Legos or anything. Not something I like, that's not my strong suit. And so me and my husband split up our duties along those lines. Like typically he plays with the kids while I make dinner and clean it up. And I'm totally happy with that because it works for both of us. I would rather like listen to a podcast and wash the dishes. And I know for a lot of people that might be like oh my God, why is she admitting that? It's so bad that she would rather wash the dishes then play with her kids. Hey, I'm okay with it. I'm just not the person that really enjoyed that. It's okay. I can do it for like 15 minutes. And then I figure out other ways, I think like, okay, I don't like this so if I want more connection with my kids, what are activities I do enjoy doing with them? I love reading books. I do love doing puzzles and board games like I said. I like maybe going for a walk with them, doing arts and crafts, baking, you know, like making cookies with them. We can do all those things. I don't want to sit and play Barbies. And until I gave up the should, like I should I should really be playing with them more and figuring out like why am I constantly distracting myself? Or why am I constantly thinking about work? Because I'm doing something I don't want to be doing. Then it allowed me to start figuring out like oh okay, I don't like this. If I don't guilt and shame myself, what are the things I like doing and how can I do more of that? And that's where balance comes from, right? When you start figuring out what are the things I don't like doing? What can I outsource? What can I delegate? What can I just not do and not make myself feel crappy about.?Then you can start figuring out like how do you do more at some of the things that you do like doing? And I see this a lot with women with like domestic help. So many thoughts, so much morality about whether like you get your laundry done by somebody or whether someone comes and cleans your house. And again, you can like say financially, it doesn't make sense. Totally fine. But I know a lot of people that can financially handle it and just don't do it because they think that they're going to be bad or it makes them not as good of a mom or whatever. And so then they like wear themselves out, not from just not delegating, but from that thought of like I have to be the one that does all of this. It's just a good thing to explore. Like why do you have to be the one? Who said? What are you making it mean about you? Like could you spend that time on self-care, relaxation or doing what you want or whatever, instead of doing it, feeling exhausted and resentful because you have to do something you don't want to be doing. That's why you're feeling out of balance. And so I want you to get clear on like why you're doing the things that you're doing. Obviously, we all do things we don't want to do like half the time. And it's just important to understand why you're doing it. Like there could be legitimate reasons. Like I said, again, like financially, does it make sense for us to outsource this? Or like it's healthier for me to cook at home. Totally fine reasons. As opposed to like I'm a bad mom if I don't do this. I'm a bad dad if I don't do this. Same thing with the work, right? Like why are you going above and beyond and coming home and doing work? Is it because like you absolutely, like you were supposed to get something done, like you have to get it done, fine. Is it because you want your boss to like you and you're still uncomfortable with not being like the teacher's pet quote unquote at work. That might be something you want to look into. Like why does that need to be liked really overtaking everything that you're doing at work? Maybe you can just decide that it's okay if you're not the favorite person and you still get to leave at five o'clock at night or it's okay if you're not the one making organic cupcakes for the PTA, you can just buy them from Ralph’s. I don't know if everybody has Ralph’s grocery stores. There's no mortality in being liked. There's no morality in being like the star parent. There's no reward for that stuff but there is a ton of reward for learning how to balance your life. And when you take that morality out, that's when you can start asking for help. That's when you can see if there's ways to delegate but you can't do that until you start taking the morality out of it, till you start taking the shame and guilt out of it. And then you can start fine tuning, right? You can decide like okay, I need to be more present at home. Or I need to be more present at work and not feel guilty and either way and not shame myself and like be okay with it. And then I can keep rearranging. I can fine tune. I can realize like maybe this week I work too much and I want to work a little less. Great. I'd like to have more time at home. Wonderful. Like am I being really present at home without letting all the guilt and shame from work spill over? And when you can do that, you can start learning and tweaking and changing the circumstances, right? Maybe you do want to get a job with less hours. Okay? Maybe you need more time for self care. You need more time for rest. Great. But you can't really do that until you can stop shaming yourself, until you can start really getting clear about what it is that you want to be doing, until you can start figuring out like with self-compassion, how you want to create a life that works for you. What do you need in order to recharge? What do you need your weekends to look like, to really feel rested and having the fun and present with your kids? How much time do you really need to work on your job? If it's not only because you want everybody to like you, if it's really just to get the facts like how to actually get the job done. I've been doing a lot of this work myself again, because it's funny, I love my work now. I used to never be a workaholic. I didn't understand how people were workaholics because I hated what I was doing as a lawyer. So I always wanted to find time to get away. And now that I love what I'm doing, I always want to find time to work. And I even found that being like okay because my thoughts were my my business should be further along. I haven't done everything yet. I should have more done. I should have more prepared. I should have more batched. And that was, it was growing. And I was, it was getting bigger. There was more and more shoulds. I should be more organized. I should delegate. I should hire. And it was really like me thinking about all of these shoulds and slowing myself down and be like, I shouldn't be doing any of it. It's growing just fine, as quickly as it wants to grow. In the way that I'm going to do it. What do I need to feel rested now? Not in the future when I have some big business that I think is going to then finally afford me time to rest. Right now, what do I need to feel connected to my kids right now? What do I need to grow the business in a sustainable way? How do I have more fun in my life? Like I definitely that's a big priority for me. And so what does that mean on the weekends? Maybe that means not spending my weekends doing a million things and shopping for groceries and going to birthday parties and like saying no more. And it definitely means saying no to a business that I love doing because there's no should, it doesn't need to be any bigger. I have to question that thought and I don't need to do with the millions of house projects that I have because they're never going to end when I can decide like oh no, what I need right now is more rest. Okay, great. So how am I going to give myself that? When my daughter is napping, I'm going to sit and read a book instead of cleaning my house. Cause that's going to feel a lot better and I'm going to manage my mind around that. I'm going to be proud of myself for doing that, for putting myself first, instead of constantly berating myself for not getting everything done. And once I could start doing that, I could start like fine tuning. I started really realizing like oh, I need this much time to feel rested. I need at least one day where I'm not, you know, engulfed in a to-do list for me to feel like I have enough fun and and not enough rest. I need like this much time during the week to really feel like I can connect with my kids because it became the quality, not the quantity. And I was realizing this and not bringing it back full circle to this episode. What was funny is when I rerecorded it on Sunday morning, it's like, normally if I had normally done that, I already had the mom guilt for going for five days away. And I came back on Saturday. And if I had to send the kids normally with my husband to go play outside so I could rerecord this, I would have been racked with guilt because I would have been thinking thoughts like I just got back. I can't ask him to watch them again. What's wrong with me? I'm working too much. This is getting in the way and I didn't do it. And I was like yeah, I gotta focus on this podcast for 30 minutes and record it. And then I'm gonna spend the rest of the day playing with my kids, which is what I did. And now again today, I'm managing my thoughts around the fact like hey, I got to record it for a third time. That's okay. And when it's done, I'm finished the rest of my work. Even though this is going to set back a lot of the stuff I was going to do today. Okay, I'll do that tomorrow. You know what I mean? It's like once I can take the mental energy that I would spend shaming myself, making myself feel horrible, it makes it a lot easier. Kind of go with the flow to figure out what I need to fix things when I need them and be more present. And so the more permission you can give yourself to do the things you want, not the things that you should do, I promise you'll magically find a lot more work life balance. Alright my friends, hopefully third time's the charm. And this episode goes out at the appropriate time. Thanks for hanging out with me. I hope this was helpful and I will see you next week for another episode.

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