Despite fervent wishing, we secretly know it doesn’t exist. But that’s okay. I’ve redefined Work-Life Balance in a way that doesn’t make me feel like ass, and you can too.
When I share what I’m doing with this podcast with people for the first time, inevitably they are captivated by the idea that I have some magical elixir for work-life balance.
But here’s the thing: I do not believe in work-life balance.
I have never experienced a season in my life where everything was getting equal attention. I started my own business four months into my fourth pregnancy: in that season, I was primarily focused on growing my business. When my daughter was born in November, I slowed down on the business front and focused more on Marlowe, my big kids, and making sure we were all healthy. And now that Marlowe is out of what my husband calls the “useless baby phase”, guess what? I’m going hard, working to build my career further as a speaker and a writer, while maintaining happy kids at home and the existing business I’ve built.
The point is, there are seasons in your life where your work or career will demand more of you. Balance implies an even distribution of your time and effort, and that isn’t realistic. Many of us are beating ourselves up over not achieving something that I really don’t believe exists.
In the last seven years of my life and career I have redefined work-life balance for myself and that is the last and most important lesson I want to share in this series:
BE 100% PRESENT.
I do my best to be 100% present and give 100% effort. These all-in, Give It 100 spurts of effort make an enormous impact on the project, my relationships, the effectiveness of my work.
Go all in on whatever the task at hand is, whether it is showing up for a job you aren’t inherently passionate about , staying home with sick kids, staying home to raise your kids, taking time off work to help your parents move into an assisted living facility, taking time off work to move your youngest kid into their dorm room.
Be 100% present. Show up well. Give focus and attention and energy to the thing that is right in front of you, instead of worrying about all the other things you have in that magnificent care-taker brain of yours.
The first thing I want to do with you to help this stick is to help you create a trigger.
There is a place in your life you are currently phoning in a little bit. Maybe it’s your relationship. Maybe it’s keeping in touch with friends or family. Wherever that area is I want you to identify something about that experience you can use as a trigger. For me, it was seeing my son’s art on the wall, but for you, it could be a feeling, or a word that gets used often in your company meetings, or sitting down in your desk chair. It’s like a drinking game for FEELINGS!
Choose your trigger and create a reminder for yourself – if it is a location you can even plug it into your PHONE as a reminder. Mine is Give it 100 (you know, the little emoji 100 sideways thing). You’re in this moment. Give it 100. This is your only life! Give it 100. That relationship is worth fighting for! Give it 100.
So we now have a way to snap out of it when we’re dragging or losing focus on what’s important in life, but I also want to share a productivity hack that helped me in my career ENORMOUSLY.
When I started my business in June of 2018, I had an ambitious goal: to replace the income that I had been making as the vice president of an email marketing agency within the first year. Now, my older kids were in a daycare at the time, and neither of them relied on food I make with my BODY in order to survive, but that was all about to change. I had FIVE months to work on building my business before our daughter Marlowe arrived, and then BAM, I was working at home with a baby AGAIN. Here’s what I did to get work done with an infant, and I PROMISE you this will help you be more productive AND more effective in your work.
Who here has heard of the Pomodoro method? It’s essentially 25 minutes of focused work, followed by 5 minutes of rest. I would make sure Marlowe had everything she needed – a clean diaper, a full belly, a pacifier, a functioning bouncy chair, whatever. And then I would set a timer for 25 minutes and I would say “I am going to get _______ accomplished in 25 minutes.”
70% of the time, I got the whole 25 minutes before Marlowe needed something from me.
Stop saying, “I’ll work on my side hustle after the kids go to bed.” Replace that with “I have two 25 minute chunks during nap time and in those two chunks of time, I will do X and Y to advance this goal. It could be exercising. It could be clearing ONE SHELF of your closet. It could be writing the outline for your blog post, or one page of your business plan.
This also works in your personal life, but in a different way. If you only have a few hours between getting off work and going to bed, how do you want to spend those hours? Too many of us are mindlessly scrolling social media, or binging on Netflix, and NOT BY CHOICE! All of these things are FINE if you are intending to do them. But how many of us complain that we have no time to go back to school or work on writing that book or taking that course at the community college, but dump hours into things like social media? SET intention for your personal time.
So the first challenge I gave you was to set a trigger- a place, a time of day, a word or phrase you hear often or SAY often – and that trigger will help you snap back and be present in whatever way you need to be. But I also want you to experiment with the newborn Pomodoro method. For the next week, try and set a timer and an intention for each 25-minute chunk of time in your workday, or in your personal time, or both. And as always, we’re going to be connecting over this on the Instagram @workhardmomharder – follow me there and check in on my stories for additional challenges and prompts to help this stick for you!
Over the course of the last three weeks, we’ve covered three life lessons that I’ve learned through my MOM HARDER journey. I’ve told some stories about Anson, and Maddox, and Marlowe. But if you listened to the pilot, you know the BIGGEST reason this mission is on my heart: Hudson Ruth Walter.
Our first baby, Hudson, only lived for three days. The moments we spent at Sacred Heart, surrounded by our friends and family and medical professionals who fought hard to keep our baby alive? THREE DAYS was all we got with our first baby.
Having a child die will make you take a hard look at life.
How fleeting it is. How miraculous. How quickly it can end. How miraculous the lives of those around you are.
The year after Hudson died was the darkest year of my life. Losing a child is not a situation where “Everything happens for a reason” is a very useful statement, and I allowed myself full permission to wallow in the darkest parts of my grief. I did it a lot in that first year. I still do it a little today. She would have been 7 years old in July.
When you lose a child, it’s hard to see possibility in anything. It’s a disaster. But I want to have a beautiful, magnificent, happy life.
What would it look like, to create a life where I have both?
When you lose a child, it’s terrifying to think of attempting that process again. Try fear + a million percent because since her death, Hudson has gotten three siblings and now my heart goes walking around outside of my body and I will probably be worried for the rest of my life just a little bit. But I got braver, and stronger, as we grew our family.
When we lost Hudson, we were slapped in the face with the cliched realization that life is too short. And yet, one life can make a tremendous impact in a short amount of time. Three days was all Hudson needed to completely change my life. What can I do GIVING IT 100, and being present, and setting intention for the years I have left?
What will you do with 36, or 72, or 99?
You have this one chance to do life.
Don’t wait for a disaster to knock you down before you’ll choose to make this life magnificent. SEE POSSIBILITY IN EVERYTHING – use your imagination today to create a win-win way forward. GO TO BAT FOR YOURSELF the way you do for the people you care about, work hard for and settle for nothing less than the treatment you deserve. And BE 100% PRESENT – give it 100, set intention for the time you spend every day in whatever you pursue.
Accept the challenge!
Work Hard. Mom Harder. LOVE HARDEST and go change the world.