The world of a working mom can be a whirlwind – between the demands of our family, friends and neighbors and the demands of building a business. So often we feel pressured to take on more, do more, be more. In essence, we feel like we need to be a Supermom with a capital S.
Being a Supermom isn’t a realistic or sustainable goal. Every day you must make conscious choices about what you want in your life by saying no to those things that aren’t serving you and saying YES to slowing down to the pace of fulfillment and joy – the keys to living your best life.
3 Must-Do Steps to Save your Sanity
#1: Focus
Today it is truly impossible for an individual brain to keep up with every last thing that’s going on. This is hard to face—especially for a passionate student of life. I am an information sponge. I live to learn and learn to teach. You likely do your own version of learning and teaching every day.
Although my husband and I often playfully say to our kids as we drop them off to school, “Remember, you’re a sponge!” (a favorite line from Finding Nemo), we adults need to accept that being a sponge isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days that you could wrap your brain around everything that comes your way.
Shift to being the person that holds the sponge and consciously decide what it’s going to do for you and how it’s going to do it. Now more than ever, it’s essential that you first determine what you want and how to get there and allow this to drive the information you allow in.
#2: Unplug
Technology fueled connections are available to us around the clock. Trying to plug into all that is going on all day everyday can quickly drain your energy. When you walk around with a constant attachment to a cell phone or social media network, you are allowing the slow and constant bleeding of energy. Your best life needs clear boundaries.
Time-outs are not just for kids. Simply sitting in silence on a regular basis brings tremendous mental, physical, emotional and spiritual benefits. It improves your memory and strengthens your mind’s ability to focus and pay attention while slowing your heart rate and lowering your blood pressure. It restores calm.
Turn off all technology and go put yourself in the corner. Start with 5-10 minutes every morning and evening. Focus on your breathing. As your mind wanders off (and it will), gently bring it back to your breath. Within a couple weeks of adding this simple practice to your day, you will noticeably improve your focus, attention, and memory.
#3: Just say “No!”
The world won’t stop knocking on your door. Other people want YOU to make THEIR life easier. Repeated requests are the name of the game as marketers work harder than ever to cut through the noise to separate you from your money and/or your time.
We are conditioned to say yes from a very early age. One study observing parent-child interactions in a grocery store found that parents said “no” to a child’s request 400 times more often than they said “yes”. These interactions leave deep tracks in our mind.
When you were a toddler, there was a joy in screaming “No!” It is likely that the moment you learned to say it, everyone around you who was bigger (which was practically everybody) immediately rushed in to provide positive reinforcement when you changed your answer to “Yes.”
Guess what? It’s time to head back to the “terrible twos”—not the screaming, rage-driven, primal tantrum, but the informed, civilized, simple, and grownup “No.” You are now big enough to say yes to things that delight and energize you and no to things that don’t serve you…and not have others bully you into saying yes.
The bottom line is this: to bring more order to your days, you must remember that you are the gate keeper. You get to say what comes in and what doesn’t. Saying no to stimuli or bright shiny objects that result in you being inattentive, scattered, or wasting your days on non-productive busyness is central to your peace of mind and success.
Want more help recovering your sanity and living your BEST life? Join Dr. Mollie Marti at her Make an IMPACT Live event!
6 Comments
HI Dr. Mollie,
While I appreciate all your advice, I’d like to argue that we are all super moms for even having businesses and taking care of the kids. It is all a matter of finding balance. Though you can not do it all, you can do something for each aspect. You don’t need to be perfect, but you definitely are super for taking it on. Of course, I am slightly biased as I am the co-founder of the Super Mom Entrepreneur Conference & Expo, which btw, Carla is slated to speak at next year. My partner Lucinda Cross does a presentation called Balancing the Supermom act, which discusses how we can be supermoms, without being perfect moms. At our conference, we want to teach moms how to do things more efficiently so that they can have more time with their kids and bring in more money to sustain this lifestyle. I think what we need to avoid is the Perfect Mom Syndrome.
At the risk of being uninvited to speak at your conference, I will confess that the Supermom Syndrome in the title was my addition with Dr. Mollie’s permission as a way to summing up the pressure we place on ourselves as mom entrepreneurs.
There is a huge difference between being a super mom and trying to be Supermom. The first being a quality attributed to moms for all the special and loving things that they do for their children and the latter the attempt to demonstrate superhero-like qualities by being everything and doing everything.
It sounds like we are arguing the same point – only with different language. In fact, I recall an interview with Lucinda that had her giggling and nodding her head where I described my failed attempt to be a Supermom, which resulted in me losing it while grinding my own baby food after a full day of working and caring for my infant daughter.
We are saying the same thing – working moms are in a class of their own (SuperMoms) AND that striving for unrealistic standards of perfectionism will undermine everything that we truly are seeking to create for ourselves and our families.
Each day, we have hundreds of choices in front of us. Some women will opt for success at work while closing the book, day after day, on “important” things they left undone … while others throw up their hands at advancing themselves because they opt to spend their days caring for others at the expense of any personal development or stepping into their life’s biggest calling.
Super Moms openly wrestle with and find peace with the reality that we can’t even come close to getting it all done and that most days figuring out what we will do and what we will leave undone can be a very messy process. I believe that life is an intricate juggling act that cannot be balanced. There are too many moving parts and trying to counter-balance pieces can lead to settling in a way that doesn’t serve the whole of our life. We must integrate all aspects of our life to create greater and greater periods of inner peace, calm and self power. And this is not easy.
It is ESSENTIAL for each of us to have a clear idea of what success looks like for us. Otherwise we spend our days reacting and living in a state of less. Who and what matters to you? What makes your heart sing? What do you really, really, really want? What are you so tired of that you could scream…and you are no longer going to tolerate?
Super Moms refuse to settle. They refuse to choose numbness over LIVING. They understand that as calming song as the Numb Yourself temptress some days sings, it comes at a price. An enormous price — to our bodies, our kids, our relationships, and our lives. A price that is felt to the depths of our despairing soul. And so we pick ourselves up, time and time again, to fight the good fight. We do this as a role model for our kids but most importantly for our Self.
Here’s to clarity and a passion-filled life that fuels ourselves, our families, and those we were put on this earth to serve.
I agree that you are both arguing the same point but just using a different language – Supermom vs. Perfect Mom. We are all Supermoms because of all that we do – no doubt about that! The issue is when we take on too much. I think as moms, what is key is to recognize when we have stretched ourselves too thin and what we need to do to come back to our centre. Dr. Mollie Martie gives us some great advice on how to do that because the resulting “Burn-Out Mom Syndrome” does not benefit anyone, especially ourselves!
Well, you always can tell a HOT topic by the comments on a post, so… well done, Carla in naming this piece as such! And Dr. Mollie, well done in executing a great piece. I completely see (and raise my glass) to all of the points being made here. We all can be super moms and we all need to be careful not to strive for being the perfect mom. On top of that, we do need resources and tools (and VAs) to be more productive so we can spend less time working and more time being with our families. I definitely agree.
As far as the post itself, Dr. Mollie… I have the worst time unplugging! And when I do it feels soooooo good, but it is sooooo hard! I am on a meditation schedule, so I am breathing… but my iPhone MUST be next to my bed at night and I MUST check Twitter at least once a day. (lol, once a day on Twitter, ya right). As Carla knows, my family literally sat me down for a ‘technology intervention’ and I had to put major boundaries up. But my point is… I still have a really hard time unplugging! What is normal in terms of device usage?
(Carla, I think I smell a post on this topic, unless you have one already?…)
The tips you just mentioned made huge sense to me. I never tried saying no because I feel like it is my duty to say yes all the time. Now I know it should not be the case. Thanks for the wonderful post 😀