In this podcast episode, I am discussing running our careers as business women and/or moms, like successful, efficient and effective businesses. I chat about three(3) principles from accounting that can help us manage our own careers, and empower ourselves to make the best work, and by extension, life decisions.
Take a listen!
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Also, leave me a review for the TCS podcast on Apple Podcasts !
What do the most successful businesses have in common? They’re run efficiently like well-oiled machines. Most importantly, they use systems and processes to create efficiencies and minimize time waste. As busy working women and moms, whose most precious commodity is time, that sounds pretty appealing.
At some point in your career as a working woman and/or mom, you may start asking yourself what the most efficient ways of running your career and life are. You also may begin to wonder how to get the most return out of the time, energy and resources you invest in your work. You’re not alone, I certainly did and still do every day to keep my various life and work ducks in a row. As an accountant by trade, I’ve had the opportunity to study and see what differentiates successful businesses from unsuccessful ones, and have thought of the many ways the same principles can be applied to our careers as business working women and moms.
After all, running our careers in the midst of all our other commitments and duties, from motherhood, marriage or partnership, to household management and relationships, is no easy feat. As work is an important part of our life, it becomes so important to set the appropriate foundation and systems to be successful on our own terms, without jeopardizing or sacrificing the rest of our lives.
In my experience, and from the strong tenets of managerial accounting (who knew you could mention accounting in your day-to-day life), here are three principles that may help:
Plan: Have a vision for your career
Successful businesses have one thing in common. They plan, and they plan well! This means having a solid, effective and feasible vision for the future. The same can be done in our work. How many of us begin careers without a solid plan, out of a vague belief that we may be successful at it, or at least make enough money to pay the bills? Without vision, our careers are doomed to fail, or at the very least fall short of our expectations.
What is the vision for your career for the next month, quarter, year or even a decade? Where do you see yourself in five years? How can you align this vision with your life?
Another thing effective businesses have in common, is the ability to monitor their progress and adjust as needed over time. Too often unfortunately, especially as busy working women and moms, we allow our careers to passively drift along, as we desperately try to pull the various pieces of our lives together. Ultimately, this makes up for growing dissatisfaction and even resentment in our work. Having checkpoints that go beyond performance reviews, such as personal self-evaluations, for instance, can help.
Do you monitor your career progress every so often? What are the career checkpoints you keep an eye for? What are your non-negotiables and other parameters you measure your career progress against?
Make the optimal decisions for your career
Last but not least, running your career effectively also requires you to make the optimal decisions for it. This means switching from a passive professional stance to a more active one, where you take control of your work and decide what is best for you. Too many working women and moms allow society, organizations, institutions or self-deprecating beliefs to take this power from them and make decisions on their behalf. These decisions can range from where to work, to the amount of flexibility you need, to even whether or not it’s time to change the course of your career.
Are you empowered to make the optimal decisions for your career? What are the best choices you can make for yourself when it comes to your work?
Overall, for working women and moms, running our careers as efficiently and effectively as possible is not an indulgence, but a necessity. To this end, having a solid career vision, monitoring your progress (or lack thereof), and being empowered enough to make the best decisions for yourself, are essential.
Are you running your career like a successful business?
In this episode, I’m discussing steering away from the hustle in our careers as working women and moms, and instead towards more alignment in the work we do and by extension in the lives we live.
In the episode, I also discuss how this requires us to be self-aware and being willing to show as who we are.
Listen in!
Thanks for Listening!
Thanks so much for tuning in and listening to this week’s episode! If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please share it by using the social media at the bottom of this post!
Also, leave me a review for the TCS podcast on Apple Podcasts !
Have you ever hit a wall in your career where you were just too exhausted to keep going?
Have you ever wondered how to create more hours in the day to get all your work done?
Have you tried many different ways to get more done and have come up with abysmal results?
I remember staring at my to-do list, and feeling a sense of mixed dread and anticipated disappointment at the thought of not even being able to get through the first half of it. As the archetypal overachiever, of course I wanted to do it all, and… of course, I’d come up short every time! As the accountant I was trained to be, my math was definitely not working…Too much to do, too few hours in the day…
Talking to fellow working women and moms, I quickly realized I was far from being the only one in this predicament. Combining motherhood, household duties, work, social relationships, and everything in between, has been mission impossible for most women for the longest time. Despite the many attempts at increasing gender equity in and outside of the household, as well as in the workplace, the reality is change, real change, is going to take some time…In the meantime, most of us still don’t have a choice in the matter. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do, which means creating and implementing solutions to the problems we face day in and day out, including facing our to-do list every day…
This is nothing new…Women have for the longest time pondered the question, as to how to do more with less. More with less time. More with less money. More with less resources. And they certainly have managed to do so, often at their own purpose’s, sanity’s and fulfillment’s expense.
However, for me, as for most working women and moms, the COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point. All around the world, working women and mothers hit a wall, as their already meager resources and insufficient time were drastically depleted to make up for a dire lack of parental, economic, political and social support. And again, as always, women turned a disastrous situation into opportunities for change, rethinking the way they work, mother, lead and care for themselves and others into a not-so-quiet feminine revolution of our modern times…
Part of this revolution has been around re-conceptualizing what work means to us, and how we can better do it for the good of all. In the advent of remote work and digital nomadism, many women are reinventing the meaning and context of work. At the heart of this re-invention, is the vibrant heart cry to reclaim women’s time, so precious a commodity that’s been taken for granted, interrupted, used and mis-used with too little care and too much abuse.
As I’ve been reflecting on this in my own work, I have resorted back to my business training to find solutions to this age-old, yet currently so urgent problem. After staring at death in the face for over two years of pandemic, doing the impossible as mothers, wives and women in general, how can we manage to create the systems and processes that will help us work less, yet achieve more in our careers, and by extension in our lives? When I say “working less”, I’m certainly not appealing to the lazy, comfort-seeking side in all of us, but rather to the self-preserving, wiser side that cautions us against expanding too much of our precious resources without regard for ourselves, others and our future.
To me, it means starting to look at our careers as businesses, and ourselves as entrepreneurs in our work. Most importantly, it means looking at our time as our most precious commodity, and always keeping in mind ways to spend it in the most impactful manner. Here are a few ways to do this:
The Impact Principle: Make a mental shift from doing to impacting
One of the first changes I’ve had to do was to consider how I was thinking about work. Rather than seeing it as a series of to-do’s, work became about impact. Who could I impact the most through my work? How could my work, even in the most mundane of its aspects, impact my department, division, company? Most importantly, how could it impact my purpose, my sense of fulfillment, my growth and evolution?
Shifting from a to-do perspective, to an impact perspective, helped me regain a sense of purpose and engagement in my work. I was no longer just there to do a job, I was there to make an impact. This thinking expanded to how I tackled my daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly planning. I switched from pretty planners to intentional ones, which allow me to think in terms of impact and structure my to-do list accordingly.
The System Principle : Create and document your own system
It took me a long time to learn the power of having your own work system. Like many other working women, I wanted to do it all, perfectly, all the time. Except I did not have a system of my own…
Each one of us has our own way of processing and managing our work. As women, we process information and approach tasks in a different manner than our male counterparts. As such, having a system of our own allows us to apply our own, optimal way of working to our career, while setting up and improving over time a process that is uniquely ours.
I’m a writer, teacher and researcher, who works best in outlines and themes. This is also how I structure my system and processes, from my career to my family and home life. What is your system?
The Repurposing Principle : Harnessing the power of templates
There is nothing new under the sun. Pretty much everything is an iteration or improvement from a prior version. Hence, the power of repurposing. I went from trying to do everything from scratch, to purposely finding or creating templates. This also meant spending more time upfront setting up and updating these templates, from emails to meeting agendas and calendars.
As an educator, I use and re-use templates, which also allows me to improve them over time, saving me significant time and effort in the process so I can focus on more impactful tasks. I also bring this approach to my family and home life with planning, calendar and other administrative templates.
Thinking in terms of impact, leveraging the power of systems, and repurposing through templates, have helped me achieve more in less time and with less resources, from going back to school as a working mom to making a career change a few years back . Most importantly, it’s helped me put my own stamp on the work I do, while being more intentional about the impact and the purpose I desire to achieve.
Can you change your mindset from doing to impacting?
Can you create your own system?
Lastly, how can you repurpose all the hard work you already do through templates?
If you’ve ever felt trapped by motherhood, somewhere between unloading the umpteenth load of laundry and answering the last email of the day on the kitchen table, you may have also felt like you should have never felt that way. You may have experienced such strong sense of guilt at the very thought of it that you may instead have sought to bury it in the deepest recesses of your mind, and never let anyone know you ever had this thought. After all, we live in a society where motherhood is revered, celebrated and embellished in all ways possible. All you have to do is click on your social media app to encounter loads of filtered, blissfully happy working family photos in picturesque backgrounds of all sorts…Yet, like many working moms at one point or another of their parenting journey, feeling stuck in a circumstantial prison of some sorts is common and nothing to be ashamed of…
In a society still reeling from the deep wounds of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with an ongoing political, economic and social latent crisis, working moms are at an all time high disadvantage. From dealing with the compounding weight of childcare, eldercare and household responsibilities, to facing the heavy toll of disproportionately lagging gender equity in the workplace, not to mention the increasingly restrictive laws against women, many, if not most working mothers are at a loss.
When there are no viable alternatives between home and work, feeling trapped is the inevitable result for too many working moms. Often, this presents itself as seemingly impossible dilemmas requiring us to make drastic, difficult choices between work and family, and even give up on our own fulfillment and purpose in a sacrificial manner.
So what can we do as working mothers to disentangle ourselves from these types of dilemmas? The answer is by creating more freedom in your motherhood process. Wherever you are in your mothering process, you don’t have to feel stuck, even if and when external circumstances tell you the very opposite.
Here are some tips that may help:
Start with your mindset
If you’ve been feeling “stuck” as a working mom, chances are your mindset has something to do with it. Thoughts such as “I don’t have a choice”, or “I’m a mother, so I can’t do this or that”, are the same thoughts that may keep you in a vicious cycle of disempowerment and self-victimization.
Changing the way you think of your circumstances can go a long way towards not only changing your attitude, but creating better opportunities. Replacing old, negative thought patterns with new ones by seeing opportunity instead of lack is key. Where you may think you have no choice but to leave your current role in order to care for your children, there may be an opportunity to start that online business you’ve been thinking about. Where you may feel like you can’t afford to apply for a more advanced position at work, there may very well be a chance to ask for a schedule more suited to your needs. Opportunity is everywhere!
Be clear about your brand of motherhood
Very often, we feel trapped because we’re applying someone else’s rules or version of what should be to our own lives and careers. Taking the time to gain clarity around who we are in every season of our work and life, helps us reframe our own brand of motherhood.
When we own who we are as working moms, we’re better able to navigate our circumstances in a more forward-looking and positive manner. What this also allows us to do is to adapt our choice of careers, businesses and schedules, to our own optimal brand of motherhood.
Streamline and prioritize!
Changing your mindset and gaining clarity about your own brand of motherhood allows you, in turn, to streamline and prioritize. This means eliminating what does no longer align with who we are and the kind of mothers we truly want to be.
When we’re not filling our minds, emotions and calendars with false beliefs, expectations and commitments that are not in alignment with our true selves, we’re better able to streamline our schedules, careers and lives by eliminating what no longer fits. We’re also able to prioritize what truly matters, thus creating more space and freedom as working moms.
All in all, feeling trapped by motherhood as a working mom is far from being uncommon. It is a reality so many working mothers face day in and day out. However, it doesn’t have to be a permanent situation, and can be alleviated by changing our mindsets, being clear about our own brand of motherhood, and streamlining our schedules, work and lives.
