If you’re like me, you know how difficult it can be to be consistent, whether at work or in life. For many, if not most of us, it can be so easy to set new goals and objectives in our minds, whether it’s being more productive at work or setting a regular gym routine.
As a working woman and mom juggling many balls in the air, I know I’ve certainly struggled with being and staying consistent with my goals and habits. As women set goals differently than men, favoring more private, less competitive goals encompassing both their personal and professional lives, one can argue that women tend to also approach being consistent in a different manner than their male counterparts. What if, as often busy and overburdened working women and moms, we could devise our own approach to being more consistent in our work and lives in general? This is certainly a question I’ve asked myself year after year, as I kept experiencing the same challenges with establishing long-term consistency in my work and life…
What I have discovered in my own journey with consistency, is that as working women and moms, we’re already dealing with inconsistency on a day-to-day basis. After all, the very nature of our lives as women and mothers can be rather unpredictable. From facing the unpredictable threat of gender stereotypes, to withstanding the various seasons of our lives from marriage to motherhood to menopause just to cite a few, as women we deal with constantly having to adapt, stretch, reach, and overcome the numerous obstacles on our way. It then becomes extremely challenging to establish constant consistency in our work and lives. How do we consistently hit the gym at the same time every day when the needs of our kids may change from day to day, especially given that moms usually carry the brunt of caregiving at home? How can we consistently maintain the same rhythm at work with minimal, sometimes even non-existent, childcare and household support at home and in society?
Despite the numerous books and articles written on the topic of consistency, especially as related to goal-setting, not enough is being said about what it would mean for women. After all, most of the advice out there is geared at men, who most often benefit from societal support as well as that of the women who make up the backbone of families and communities. What this means for us as women and mothers, is that we must learn to redefine what consistency means to us, and how to best apply it in the context of our lives and work.
From mine and that of many other women and mothers, here are some tips that may begin this process:
Look within first:
Research has shown women tend to favor more private, as opposed to public, goals and intentions. The same can be said of choosing to become more consistent in our goals and habits. Being self-aware in the process of deciding to be more consistent is the first step. This entails having a clear vision of who we are, what lights us up, what truly matters to us first. Without this vision, without this sense of who we are in whatever season of our lives we’re in, it can be daunting to set the priorities that would require us to be more consistent in the first place.
Who are you in this season of your life? What matters to you? What no longer does?
Start with what fulfills you
Studies have shown women are more attracted to life goals that promote self-fulfillment, than plain work goals. This is why we often tend to tie our professional goals with our life goals. Besides, given the many facets of our lives and the many hats we wear, compartmentalizing the various areas of our lives is next to impossible. The reality is, at any point in time, we are all of our identities at once, the woman, the mother, the sister, the friend, etc, even to the point of commingling our different identities.
As self-fulfillment is then so much more important to us as women, starting with what fills us up makes sense. Whenever I try to be more consistent in one area or another in my life, beginning with what matters to me is crucial. It’s this fulfillment that can keep me going when the going gets rough and time seems to dwindle to nothing.
What fulfills you? What are the habits and goals that would bring you the most joy? Start with those to build consistency.
Now create your own version of consistency
As you become clearer about the vision for your life, and you can more clearly identify those areas of your life that truly bring fulfillment to you, then you can start building your own version of consistency. This version will look different from that of another woman, who may be in a different phase or season of life, and who may have a different vision than yours. This version may certainly not be perfect, or tied to a rigid schedule. Yet, it may just be the version that works best for you.
For me, it’s been a matter of honoring my capacity, and building the consistent habits that fit in my own life. It’s been about integrating the various areas of my schedule, work and life, to make it all work as best as possible. That means going to the gym after dropping off the kids to school because I’m already out and I can carve some extra time in the gap. It also means waking earlier to meditate, read and write, so I can be available when the rest of the family is up. It means focusing on my teaching when it’s time to do so and not try to fit in anything else.
Some of the tools I’ve been using in the process include life planners, to help me plan my goals according to my particular schedule.
Last but not least, it means giving myself grace when my best efforts don’t work, when I can’t make it to the gym or be fully present, knowing that tomorrow is another day and I’ll give it another short…
What does consistency look like for you? How can you make it fit and work in your own life and career?
With Gratitude,
The Corporate Sis.
Disclaimer: Please note some of the links in this article are affiliate links.
As layoffs have been sweeping the business and corporate landscape recently in areas such as tech for instance, many have been directly or indirectly impacted by it. Many working women and/or their partners are currently dealing with layoffs, and having to adjust to an uncertain economic outlook. For many, it’s also been an unplanned crisis they were not prepared for.
Even when women are not directly impacted, their partners may be, this disrupting the balance of the household from various perspectives, including an economic one.
So how does one deal with layoffs, whether directly or indirectly? Here are a few tips that may help:
Processing emotions is important
Being let go is emotionally painful. From feeling devalued to a sense of guilt and worthlessness, one can experience many negative emotions from the experience. However, too often, in attempts to show strength or simply because we’re too overwhelmed, many don’t take time to acknowledge theirs or others’ emotions when faced with layoffs. Yet, this is an important part of the process.
Processing emotions related to layoffs includes addressing the negative internal backlash fueled by anger, guilt, and other self-deprecating feelings. It’s a matter of acknowledging where we are mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, in order to move forward in the most effective manner.
Apart from addressing the emotional impact that comes with layoffs, dealing with the financial consequences is also key. Losing part or the entirety of one’s household income, especially in times of general economic hardship, can have monumental effects.
This is where making a financial plan, including reducing expenses, finding ways to create supplemental income, and re-evaluating one’s money mindset, comes into play.
Last but not least, layoffs, as painful and destabilizing as they may be, are also opportunities to revisit and re-evaluate one’s career plans. For many, it has meant going back to achieving old objectives and goals, such as going back to school, starting a business, or even taking some time off to regroup and start again. For others, it’s meant considering a drastic change in careers and long-term plans.
The reality is, disruption is more often than not a chance to begin again, however traumatic and unplanned they may be. Layoffs are certainly no exception…
All in all, dealing with layoffs, whether directly or indirectly, is far from easy. However, with trust in the process, a solid financial plan and the courage to re-evaluate prior career plans, they can also be the gateway to new opportunities and fresh beginnings.
How many times as a working mom have you felt a wave of resentment come up at the thought of everything you have to do day in and day out?
And how many times has this resentment made you feel guilty as a result?
Further, let me ask you, how many times have you even dared talking about this feeling of resentment to anyone for fear of being negatively judged?
If you’re nodding at any of these questions, you’re certainly not alone.
Resentment is one of the best well-kept secrets about and among working moms. As working mothers are hailed, praised, and kept, by society as “sheroes”, they’re also not allowed to show weakness, and certainly not resentment. Instead, they are expected to hold up the sacred veil of motherhood, bravely (and flawlessly) handling all the responsibilities assigned to them without a complaint, murmur or negative feeling. Being resentful as a working mom is perceived as a threat to this picture-perfect idealization of womanhood, and as such, is considered a big no-no for many, if not most, working women.
Yet, the reality is, as we pick up dirty socks off the floor, wash dishes, run from work to kids’ activities, forgetting to fill this or that form, it’s virtually impossible for many, if not most working moms, to experience if only a touch of resentment at some point or another. This is especially true when there is a lack of gender equity in the home and at work, and women have to face a staggering lack of resources and support, from childcare to work flexibility.
So what do you do when resentment rears its ugly head in the midst of your unending to-do list and tired self? How do you address the subtle anger rising up in you as you consider one obstacle after another standing before you? Here are some tips that may help:
Stop and reflect!
Resentment is a clear indicator that there is a lack of balance somewhere. I’ve found over the years that our bodies and minds will give us distress signals. However, too often, we fail to listen. This is where pausing to listen to ourselves is important.
Why am I feeling so resentful? What is creating this feeling in me?
Identifying the root cause of resentment can go a long way towards addressing what the real issue is. Oftentimes, we feel resentful because of false beliefs, or because we’ve taken on too much, or we feel unappreciated in one or many areas of our lives and work.
What is making you feel resentful as a working mom?
Resentment is not a dirty secret to lug around and hide from everyone around us. Neither does it make us bad mothers. It simply makes us human, and allows us to heal what is festering inside us. This is where communication, effective communication that is, comes in handy.
Communicating how you feel, in a non-blaming way, whether it is to your partner, family or friends, can help them better understand where you’re coming from. It can also help in solving the imbalance you may be experiencing, whether it’s related to the lack of equity at home, or the stress in your career and/or relationships.
Who can you trust to talk it out and communicate how you’re feeling?
Readjust
Last but not least, while reflection and communication are important, action is indispensable to readjust the lack of balance causing the resentment you’re feeling. It may be readjusting the distribution of responsibilities and chores in the household, or looking to make positive changes in your career, or asking for more support in your relationships. It’s often also a matter of re-centering yourself and taking better care of yourself through self-care. Whatever the need may be, taking action on it can help reduce the feelings of resentment you’re experiencing.
How can you readjust your schedule, work and life to feel less resentful?
In conclusion, feeling resentful as a working mom is not a sign to blame yourself or others. It’s a powerful signal to re-establish more balance, joy and health in your work and life. Pausing to reflect, talking it out and readjusting as needed are three effective steps that can help tremendously in the process.
How are you dealing with feeling resentful as a working mom?
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.
