216: Breaking Free from the Mental Load and Finding Balance

Welcome to the She Thinks Big! Podcast. Get ready to level up your thinking and expand your horizons. I’m your host, Andrea Liebross, your guide on this journey of big ideas and bold moves. I am the best-selling author of She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary.

I support women like you with the insights and mindset you need to think bigger and the strategies and systems you need to turn that thinking into action and make it all a reality. Are you ready to stop thinking small and start thinking big? Let’s dive in.

Hello out there. How are you? Are you in your car? Are you on your way to pick up groceries? Are you folding laundry while mentally going through all of your email? Or maybe you are thinking about what's for dinner or at my house, when my kids were here, they would ask me a hundred times, “What's for dinner?” That was a question I hated more than any other question in the world, “What's for dinner?” I don't know why that always bothered me.

Or maybe you are trying to squeeze in that last call before you have to pick someone up, before bedtime, who knows? All right, does that all sound familiar? Because it probably does if you are listening to this podcast because you're probably a listener and I know my listeners. I want to talk to you directly today because I know how heavy the mental load is, how heavy it can feel.

You are juggling what feels like four completely separate shifts. Actually, I'm going to side note here. I have a client and her business name is Juggling Act Mama. She is a food blogger who works or who speaks to moms who need to get dinner on the table. If you are a mom juggling the four shifts here that we're going to talk about, go check out Juggling Act Mama. It's on the side note, but do it.

I hear from my clients and I see this sometimes in myself and I see it probably in you, if you and I were besties sitting next to each other having lunch, you feel like there are four shifts in your day. You're waking up as morning mom, morning dog walker, morning woman, rushing through the breakfast chaos or getting your kids out the door for school.

Then the second shift comes, you switch into business mode and you try to make the most out of the work hours while your inbox keeps reminding you of all the undone things. Then late afternoon, you shift back into being a mom or dog walker. You're juggling the sports practices, the homework help, finding a moment to breathe.

Then finally, the fourth act, the fourth shift, when the day winds down, you've got evening shift, you work the night shift, and you try to catch up on everything that didn't get done during the first three shifts. You're wondering, in all of this, when are you supposed to have time for yourself? I know this is happening because I get emails from you at 4:32 AM or at 11:07 PM or at 6:28 AM. I don't really get a lot of emails from people at one o'clock in the afternoon.

Now I want you to know something important. It doesn't have to be this way, this is a secret. It doesn't have to be this way. You don't have to live these segmented disconnected shifts. There is a way better way. That is what I want to talk to you about today. I want to talk about why this kind of thinking pattern, really, which is what it is, happens, why this is not good for you, why it is holding you back, and most importantly, how you can change it.

Client story. I love picking names for the client stories, by the way. If you want me to use your name, then just message me and I'm going to use your name. But I'm going to tell you about Jodi. There is no Jodi in real life. I have a person that I'm thinking about, but her name is not Jodi, but we're going to call her Jodi. When she first came to me, her life was, admittedly, she would say, complete chaos.

She owned a booming furniture boutique. She made multiple six figures. She had a steady stream of customers that was not something we were working on, the customer stream, but she just didn't feel “successful.” In her business, she was juggling all the things, the marketing, the bookkeeping, the purchasing, the managing of her staff.

Then she would come home to a never-ending to-do list as mom and wife and daughter. Her parents were like in that sandwich generation, she's in that sandwich generation kind of thing. Her husband traveled a lot for work. So even with the child care help that she had, because she did have child care help, the day-to-day responsibilities really landed on her shoulders, squarely on her shoulders.

That's true that, all that's truth. I don't want to make light of that. It's all truth. But what this meant is that she felt like and she told me, “I feel like I am running four lives. I have four lives like the cat with nine lives. I have four lives. I'm failing it all four of the lives.”

So her vision of Being a business owner and a present mom and a happy fulfilled person, it felt impossible and maybe that's how you feel too. But here is what Jodi discovered, we had to do a lot of work on this, but here's what she discovered. The problem was not her business or her family or the fact that her husband traveled or her packed schedule, the problem was the story she was telling herself, that she had to do it all perfectly in these separate shifts during her day.

You're going to ask, “Andrea, how did Jodi turn this all around?” Well, she started with three shifts, for lack of a better word, three ways she turned the dial a bit in her mindset and in her approach, and these are the shifts, I’m going to share these three things with you today.

Number one, stop dividing your life into separate buckets. You're not four different people. You're one person with skills, with strengths that you can use in all of the parts of your life. You might think you're a pretty good leader in your business because you actually are pretty good at delegating tasks. But at home, you could also be a good leader.

You can let go of managing every detail and you can start seeing your family as a team. Do you think of your family as a team? I'm curious, do you delegate things to them or do you feel like no one's just going to do it the way you want to do it or it's really ultimately your responsibility so it would be mean of you to delegate it to a kid? Jodi started thinking about her family as a team, and she started to think about how she actually was pretty good at delegating at work.

She told me later when she did that, she stopped feeling like she was living separate lives. She just started being her everywhere. That's one shift you can make. What are you really good at in one part of your life? Then how do you translate that into other parts?

Number one, use one calendar for everything. Use one calendar for everything. Jodi used to have sticky notes for family commitments, apps for work meetings, and mental reminders for everything else. No wonder she felt overwhelmed. When we worked together, I had her create one calendar for everything.

Now, I'm going to use one calendar loosely, one way in which she could view all her calendars together. I do think you should have separate calendars for work and even a calendar. I have calendars for each of my kids, a calendar for my husband, a calendar for my husband and I together, a calendar for our family, but I can see them all together.

It’s like your whole life at a glance. This simple change of helping so many clients really helps you make more intentional decisions about your time and energy because you can see all the things that are happening. Instead of rushing from one place to another, task to task, you can start designing your life and your days with more purpose.

You can see how much energy things are going to take in making choices around that. Third thing you can do. You gotta redefine what success looks like for you. For Jodi, this success concept meant that she had to be the best at everything. The best mom, best boss, best friend, best present giver, most fun on a girl's night out.

But when she sort of recalibrated and redefined success as just feeling good about how she spent her time, it changed everything. She started to ask herself, "Does this align with the life I want to create?" If the answer was no, she let it go.

I will tell you a story. The other night, I went to a friend's house. She has started to organize Euchre night. If you are not from the Midwest, you may not know what the card game Euchre is. I didn't know what it was until we moved to Indiana. But it's a card game that a lot of people in the Midwest play, and she has Euchre night, and she's got about 20 women over.

It was 9:30 PM. Actually, it was 9:00 PM. We were about to start another round. I made this declaration that I was leaving at 9:30 PM, even though probably this thing was going till 10:00 PM. I just decided that staying till 10:00 PM on a Wednesday night was not going to feel good for me so I just left at 9:30 PM.

I didn't feel guilty about it because leaving at 9:30 PM aligns with who I want to be, which is a person who gets seven hours of sleep and wakes up in the morning to work out. If I was going to do all those things, I had to be the person that left at 9:30 PM. That was fine.

I was integrating my girl's night out with the person I wanted to be in the morning, and that worked. What would happen to you if you stopped trying to live these four separate lives? What would it feel like to see your life as one cohesive whole where everything you do feeds into your greater purpose?

The truth is you don't need to do more. You just need to think differently. Start with just one of the shifts that we talked about today. Stop dividing your life into buckets. Use one calendar view. Redefine what success looks like for you and it might mean to just feel good.

Pick one of those strategies and just try it this week. Just try it. Now, if what we talked about today resonates with you, I want you to know you're not alone. You can break free from these four thinking about how you work shifts just like Jodi did. If you want support doing this, it's out there.

This is hard to do, my friends. This is hard for you to do. Reach out. This is what I do for work. I help women like you move from that messy middle into this extraordinary life that feels as good as it looks. So thank you today for spending part of one of your shifts or part of your day with me, driving, flying, folding laundry, on a walk, whatever we're doing together. Thank you for being here.

This is really a good episode actually to share with people in all parts of your life. This is an episode you can share with friends who don't even own businesses because even though they don't own a business, they probably feel like this in some capacity. This is a great episode to share with them or share it with your employees.

No matter how old they are, they probably feel like this. Even my daughter who’s almost 21 sometimes feels like this and she doesn't even have kids and doesn't even own a business, but she feels like this. We've been talking about how to integrate everything and be that same person in all the places.

All right, I'll see you next week. I will admit that this is the fourth of four episodes that I was going to record today. I'm batch recording, so I'm glad it's over. I'll see you next time that I batch record, but I'm here with you in your ears wherever you're going. Go level up. See you next time.

Thanks for tuning into the She Thinks Big! Podcast. If you're ready to learn the secret to unleashing your full potential, don't forget to grab a copy of my book, She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary. It's available on Amazon and at your favorite bookstore.

And while you're there, grab a copy for a friend. Inside, you'll both find actionable strategies and empowering insights to help you navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship and life, and step confidently into your extraordinary future.

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