How many times have you started your week overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work staring you in the face? From your professional to your personal responsibilities, your schedule can easily have you going insane before you even begin your day, especially as a working woman and mom. Even worse, it can make or break your productivity and efficiency, and even alter your mental state in too many negative ways to count. As a recovering perfectionist working mom on the mend, I know all too well the toll that overcommitting yourself can take on anyone. Regardless of how competent, energetic, or indefatigable you may be, spreading yourself too thin is the perfect recipe for overwhelm, exhaustion and ultimately burnout.
There are many reasons why working women, especially overachieving ones, tend to overcommit in their families, careers and even friendships and other relationships. The root cause stems from an inability or difficulty to set appropriate limits and boundaries. For most, it even goes back to childhood, as girls are generally socialized to be accommodating, helpful and polite, often to avoid appearing selfish, self-centered or uncaring. This in turn breeds endless guilt on the part of women who cannot seem to say no. In many instances, over-commitment in overachieving women can stem from insecurity or pride.
If any of the above sounds familiar, you are certainly not alone. A 2019 study from leadership training company VitalSmarts finds 3 out of 5 individuals agree to do more than they can actually achieve in their available time. 1 in 5 people admits to have reached their limit in terms of commitments. Side effects reported as a result of over-commitment range from acute stress, anxity and worry, to draining feelings of defeat and overwhelm. Even more concerning yet, 44% of this study’s participants confess to not being fully present with their loved ones half of the time, with 37% admitting to being rarely if ever present. In the case of working women, this over-commitment is rarely ever truly rewarded, just by the sheet weight of breadth of expectations and demands on their time and energy.
How to do you keep then from overcommitting yourself when demands and expectations pile up? It’s a question that like so many working women and moms, I’ve struggled with and still wrestle with regularly. Like so many, I’ve tried it all, from attempting to delegate more, to building a not-to-do list, to even attending productivity workshops. Many of the techniques advertised out there would work for some time, until I would revert back to my packed to-do lists and compulsive “yes” habits.
When I read about the rule of 3, which basically consists in using 3 words as a figure of speech to communicate an idea, reflecting a rhetorical technique from ancient Greece, I started applying it to various areas of my work. It wasn’t until a while later that I started applying it to my own schedule, using these 3 guiding steps:
Identify 3 areas of Purpose
This first step requires much introspection and reflection before even engaging in it. If you take a look at your to-do list, you may notice that it runs the gamut, from picking up the dry cleaning to finishing the quarterly financial presentation. This can make it hard to focus on what is most important and most impactful. Notice I didn’t mention “most urgent”. In the times we live in, everything is mistakenly deemed to be urgent, from picking up a random phone call to having your brain “picked” at the drop of a dime.
This is where the “Rule of 3” comes in. After much reflection and self-audit, can you consolidate your commitments into 3 main areas? These are what I call the three areas of Purpose. These are intentional areas regrouping your most important and most impactful commitments. If you work as an auditor with a side consulting practice, your three areas of Purpose may be Audit, Consulting and Personal, for instance. My three areas of Purpose are Teaching, Writing and what I call my Sacred Zone, which includes my spiritual, personal and family commitments. What are your three areas of Purpose?
Streamline 3 main goals per area per day and/or week
If you look at your daily to-do list and you have upwards of 15 commitments to uphold, you may be burning yourself out. As a matter of fact, at any given moment, you may not even remember what those are. Instead, streamlining your commitments by area of Purpose, and limiting them to three per area of Purpose can help you accomplish more, minus the overwhelm and stress eating.
What are three main goals you can tackle today in each one of your areas of Purpose? If consulting with clients is one of your Purpose areas, then Mondays may be dedicated to planning, email and administrative tasks, while Tuesdays may be focused on client calls, meetings and networking, for instance. Picking a theme under which to place each day’s commitments may also help in this streamlining process.
Use the AIR criteria:
The following three crtieria and questions, can help to identify and confirm your areas of Purpose and commitments within each area:
Alignment: Is this area or commitment aligned with my role, skills and sense of Purpose?
Impact: Does this area and/or commitment create the most desired impact?
Real Growth: Is this area and/or commitment contributing to my growth?
Last but not least, keep in mind this is a growing, living, breathing process. The most important metric to consider here is progress, which makes it important to review your process daily. I’m constantly looking at better ways to streamline my commitments and areas of Purpose to create more impact, but also to achieve the ultimate freedom, that is time freedom.
Would you or are you using the Rule of Three to streamline your schedule?
Have you ever stood at the door of an incredible opportunity, and wanted nothing less than to run the other way? How many times have you anticipated with dread the possibility that you may actually win? Have you ever feared actually making it, rather than failing at it? That strange feeling in the pit of your stomach, that peculiar mix of joy and dread, is actually the fear of success so many women experience, especially in a professional context.
Fear of success for women is actually a theory developed by Matina Horner, as part of her graduate dissertation back in 1968. In her study and dissertation at the more than 30 years ago, Dr. Horner asked asked an audience of college students to respond to a scenario-based case in which a male, represented by “John”, or a female, represented by “Anne”, is at their medical class’s top. As a result of the negative responses by students to “Anne” being at the top of her medical class, the research concluded women experience a fear of success. As such, females anticipate negative repercussions for succeeding or even participating in male domains.
What Dr. Horner also discovered is the more women’s ability increases, the more their fear of success increases. This in turn negatively impacts their ability to compete with their male counterparts. Fear of success was also found to be correlated with women’s progress in school, where they tend to switch more “traditionally feminine” domains. It was also tied to society’s attitudes in general.
Fear of success can manifest in various ways, including procrastination, avoidance, low self-esteem, intimidation, fear of speaking up, among others. Many women will deliberately lower or hinder their own performance in order to avoid success. There are many reasons for this, from the fear of being cast out and rejected, to the torture of not belonging and losing social and emotional support, especially as nurturers. This also explains why despite the rising number of educated women, the representation of women at higher professional levels is still limited.
This fear of success in women is costing us valuable resources, innovation, and advances that remain buried in the unproductive soil of negative societal pressure. Beyond the most visible economic and financial argument, is also that of the personal limitations and even decay, imposed by restrictive gender roles that are frankly no longer aligned or adapted to our modern society, if they ever were.
In many cases, what is construed as being a fear of failure really hides a terrifying fear of success for working women. One we must first understand in order to deconstruct and challenge in the professional, personal and social contexts. One we must learn to honestly diagnose in ourselves and others, in order to limit and eventually stop its destructive consequences for all of society. It’s a challenge that must be undertaken on a personal and communal level, at the academic level, in professional organizations and teams, all the way to the highest governmental spheres, if we want women’s potential not to remain untapped for much longer.
If you are a working mom yourself, the mental load involved in running a household and caring for children is no surprise to you by now. Truth is, many working moms feel quite alone carrying this invisible load, as their partner and society at large are often blissfully unaware, or unwilling to acknowledge, the strain they are under on a near-constant basis.
What does this invisible mental load look like? On any day, it may go from having to remember the kids’ doctor appointments, activities, grocery lists, clean (or not so clean) laundry, to having to improvise when a child is sick or an emergency presents itself. This is on top of holding a full-time job, trying to advance one’s career, caring for family and relatives, and attempting to be a decent human being overall. No wonder so many working moms end up feeling drained, exhausted, and resentful at the end of the day…
This mental load is also part of the reason why many working moms are not able to achieve their full potential, losing the race towards their purpose before it even starts. It also certainly has contributed to the working mom exodus we’ve witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The unequal distribution of this mental load, along with its physical baggage of household chores, childcare and elderly care, is no longer sustainable in families increasingly relying on two incomes. Neither is it sustainable in a society where women constitute half or more of the population, and play a crucial role at all levels, including socially, economically, and politically.
Protecting working moms and their potential then requires equalizing the mental load between household partners. This is no easy feat, as the structural, societal, political and economical structures we’ve been socialized in, and are still living, heavily contribute in perpetuating it. In some instances, crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic tend to even accentuate it. There is no doubt then that equalizing the mental load between partners is more of a process of undoing archaic systems, beliefs and behaviors ingrained in individuals, communities and organizations for centuries. These are antiquated systems even we, as working moms, still adhere to and often unconsciously co-sign and perpetuate to our own detriment. However, it’s also a process that can reap so much fruitful progress, finally opening the door to working moms’ potential, and changing the narrative for so many little girls and boys watching their own mothers for cues for the future.
Here are a few ways to get started:
Acknowledge your own invisible mental load and beliefs
Many, if not most working moms do not acknowledge their invisible mental load until it’s almost too late and they’re too angry to get past it. Don’t get me wrong, in most instances, the anger is justified. So is the sheer exhaustion and pain hiding behind it. This is where acknowledging in an honest, concrete and pragmatic way the actual weight, impact and effect of this load come into play.
It’s hard to understand the true extent and impact of it until one takes a good, hard look at what life really is like on a day-to-day basis. It may be a matter of making a list of all the demands on one’s time on a day-to-day basis, and concretely make an honest assessment. The latter also requires honestly assessing the role one plays in carrying, even hoarding this mental load, as we often unconsciously subject ourselves to it for fear of stepping away from the “norm” as we’ve always known it.
Have an honest conversation with your partner
This may be the most challenging part by far in this process of equalizing the invisible mental load in one’s partnership. Making someone else see and perceive the heaviness of your experience, especially the parts of it that are not readily apparent to others, is no easy feat. Considering how traditional gender roles have been constructed over time, it can be even harder to challenge the status quo and preconceived notions.
Implement a process
The most effective way to tackle equalizing the invisible mental load as partners is to implement a proactive, concrete plan. Just talking about it is barely enough. Instead, getting deep into the nitty-gritty of daily tasks, concerns and questions is crucial. This may be a matter of designating who’s responsible for making and keeping appointments, who makes the phone calls, or who picks up and drops off on what days…Ideally, the distribution of tasks and responsibilities would align with each partner’s areas of strength and what they enjoy doing, so they can actually keep doing it for as long as possible.
Check in and recalibrate periodically
Processes are not infallible. Processes that challenge what most of us have been accustomed to from infancy are even less infallible. So many working moms report attempting to equalize the invisible mental load with their partners, only for things to return to the unsustainable normal it was before. This is why it’s so important to check in with each other, and re-calibrate as often as possible.
All in all, equalizing the invisible mental load for working moms is not only necessary, but it should be a priority for working moms, partnerships, and society in general to thrive. As life gets increasingly complex, it’s becoming a matter of survival for families, and an imperative in raising well-balanced children.
As a small business owner, you may have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. You are certainly not alone. While countless businesses have literally sunk under the economic, societal and political effects of the pandemic, small business have suffered the most under the pressure. Most of these small businesses are also owned by minorities, including women and African-Americans, worsening the socio-economic impact of an already devastating crisis. Of these struggling minority businesses, a majority is women-owned and has registered a 13 point drop in overall health in July 2020, as compared to a five point drop for male-owned businesses, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
As vaccines are getting distributed more widely and the next normal is slowly setting in, a reset is imposing itself for most companies. From the way they operate, to their employees’ schedules, not to mention their very revenue-generating activities, companies have been gearing up for significant changes. Despite being provided some assistance relief, these changes are still spelling doom for many. Yet for most, these are necessary changes carrying with them incredible lessons of resilience, adaptability and growth.
At the end of the day, the main, and most resounding concern small business owners have, is around resetting their organizations for the best after the pandemic. The main question, however, is how.
How do you change and adapt at the same time? How do you create opportunity out of apparent scarcity? How do you manufacture the next normal in an uncertain landscape still ridden with crisis?
Get re-acquainted with your “why”
Crisis are excellent opportunities to reconsider the “why” behind our motives, projects and organizations. As a small business owner, a crisis of such a magnitude as the pandemic we all faced, may have put everything you thought you knew back in question, especially when faced with the horrid prospect of life or death, of survival or destruction.
While there are many mechanical, financial and tactical concerns that may appear to rule the existence of a successful business, its main driver really is its “why”. All systems, processes and people ought to rally around a strong sense of identity of the business. This sense of identity may have been altered or reinforced by the recent crisis, or may have been even reinforced. Whatever the case is, re-evaluating your business’ why is indispensable to moving forward and resetting as a small business owner after the pandemic.
How can you adapt your business to the current business landscape
One thing that has been made even more constant by the recent pandemic is change. As individuals, we’ve changed the way we related to each other, the way we live, the way we parent, and definitely the way we work and do business. More than ever, our adaptability and resilience skills are needed to help us understand, manage and overcome the onslaught of change we’re now facing. Our organizations and businesses especially are grappling with these drastic changes in unprecedented ways.
As a small business owner, what this may mean for you could be to reconsider the environment your business is currently in. Is your business adapted to the new online trends that have prevailed as a result of the pandemic’s physical distancing? Are you prepared to restructure the way you manage your employees? Is your organization open to upcoming economic changes? These are just a few of the questions that come to mind when considering where your business currently is, as opposed to where it is supposed to operate.
Check your systems
If the “why” and the adaptability of businesses are the heart of a business, its systems are its limbs. These systems and processes are the very mechanisms , from accounting to financial, that keep the business functioning to its optimal capacity. In times of crisis, these mechanisms can unfortunately doom an organization to utter failure.
Are your accounting systems adapted to the nature and type of products or services you sell? Is the way you’re structuring your finances adequate for your type of business? If your business is currently changing, are your systems also being adapted to these changes?
Overall, as a small business owner, changes are more than ever needed to recover, and strive through the aftermath of this and any crisis. Resetting priorities, motives, skills and systems is then no longer a luxury, but an ever-present requirement.
How are you re-setting your business as a small business owner?
There are moments as a working mom when overwhelm just takes over, and you realize the boundaries between work and life have been significantly blurred. While work-life balance is but an elusive ideal, unclear or blurred boundaries between your career and life can spell havoc over your entire existence. This is when resetting your work-life boundaries is absolutely necessary.
For most working women, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a significant turning point in their careers and lives. I know it has definitely been for me…Plagued with the brunt of the pandemic’s weight in terms of household chores and work demands, overcome with the mental weight of a global human and economic crisis, mothers have had to (and still have to) pay a dear price. As a matter of fact, close to five million jobs were lost to American women back in December 2020out of sheer overwhelm and the need to care for their families and loved ones. Now more than ever, work-life boundaries are not only essential, they’re indispensable for working mothers.
Yet, what does re-setting your boundaries, any boundaries at all for that matter, look like in a constantly evolving world with an uncertain future? What does it look like to draw a line in the sand when you’re a working mother juggling s many drawing sticks in the air? Which one do you put down? Which one do you pick up? Where do you draw the line? This is the incessant, heavy dilemma so many moms deal with, aggravated by the advent of a reformative pandemic and a shifting world. This is also where traditional, time-oriented, rigid boundaries, no longer work. Instead, the next normal we’re stepping into is requiring flexible, adaptive boundaries with the potential of shifting and expanding us, rather than constricting, limiting separating walls ridden with the anxiety and the frustration of motherly guilt:
Set a strong intention first.
The process of setting boundaries is usually approached merely as a mechanical endeavor consisting of separating tasks, obligations and commitments. Often, this is done without much thought or appreciation for the genuine intention (or the lack thereof) behind it. As a result, similar to New Year’s resolutions, these boundaries end up only surviving for a limited time, quickly replaced by the status quo in one way or another. Setting a strong intention by questioning the “why” of your decision first can instead create a longer lasting impact, turning an otherwise mechanical process into a flexible and malleable concept filled with meaning and purpose.
Define what your own work-life boundaries look like
So much has been said and written about the proverbial “work-life balance” that it has come to represent a blanket set of ideas around what work-life boundaries truly are. However, the reality is, every working mother’s work-life boundaries are unique. As each working mom has her own vision of living, parenting and working, this vision permeates the very meaning, extent and impact of her own boundaries. This is especially relevant in this post-pandemic era when many, if not most women are redefining what their lives and work mean, and what success, fulfillment and happiness look like to them on a daily basis. This is why subscribing to a general and falsely popular idea of work-life boundaries or balance can be detrimental. Instead, taking some time to reflect on what your ideal day, life and work look like, can prompt you to define the best, clearest and most practical boundaries for yourself and your environment.
Create a flexible routine of your own
This is where action meets intention, and where the true challenge of setting boundaries lie. It’s in the implementation and enforcing of one’s boundaries that many obstacles and challenges come to the forefront, highlighting areas to work on and constant improvements to be made. Working mothers, more than anyone else, are keenly aware of the beautiful pressure of juggling life and work, career and parenting, reports and laundry. This is where not just creating a routine, but crafting an adaptive, flexible approach, can pay immense dividends over time. For some, it may mean a different allocation of time and space. For others, it may entail hard conversations, difficult decisions, and renewed commitments. For most, it’s a hodgepodge of personal, professional, spiritual, and psychological elements, presenting new, exhilarating discoveries about oneself and one’s environment, highlighting new challenges, and overall creating new opportunities to grow and evolve.
All in all, being a working mother is a beautiful journey of becoming, growing, and juggling. It’s also one whose very beauty and integrity lie in the in-between creases of life, work and everything in between. The work then, the challenging yet uplifting work, is in constantly ironing these creases, setting and re-setting the boundaries that keep us thriving, growing and evolving in the fullness of all we are.
