Have you ever felt absolutely exhausted, even after getting a full night’s sleep? Do you feel like you can’t quite seem to recharge your batteries, no matter how many #selfcare threads you post on social media? Has the pandemic made it even worse, especially as a working mom juggling working from home, childcare and household chores? Not to mention new COVID strains, vaccine rollouts and an overall stressful “new normal”…
I was recently both surprised and relieved to discover we need more than a full night’s rest to actually recharge. While the common misconception around rest revolves around sleep, it’s a relief to learn there are other ways to recuperate from the strain and stress of daily life, especially as working women and moms during this pandemic.
If you’ve wondered about getting more quality rest, you may want to consider these seven types of rest:
If you happen to constantly juggle a flurry of thoughts in your mind, you may need more than just a good night’s sleep. You may also need some serious mental rest. Developing the habit to take short breaks throughout the day can go a long way toward helping you to recharge mentally.
I’ve learnt to take mental breaks throughout the day, and rewarding myself with a special treat such as a delicious cup of Simplicity tea.
Sensory Rest
If the COVID-19 pandemic has stolen one thing from us, it’s definitely our ability to get as much sensory rest as we need. Working from home and homeschooling kids has forced most of us into a daily habit of staring at screens, thus putting our senses at work constantly. Just allowing ourselves to close our eyes for a few moments every day can help.
After so much time spent in front of electronic devices during the pandemic, I’ve started shutting down and banning all laptops and phones at a specific time every day.
Creative Rest
Creativity is an amazing gift, but it also requires significant amounts of energy, which can leave us depleted and drained. Remembering to take a pause and doing absolutely nothing at times can not only provide us with the creative rest we need, but it can also let ideas marinate and mature.
Sundays are my creative rest days, when I try to do the least possible intellectual work and instead let my brain observe a break.
Emotional Rest
Emotions can be powerful. Yet, most of the time as working women and moms, we’re so accustomed to being strong that we fail to acknowledge the way we feel. As a result, we end up exhausted as we strive to wear a mask of perfectionism and constant self-reliance. Giving ourselves the space and time to take off the “strong woman” mask” and show up in our vulnerable authenticity can go a long way towards helping us feel more rested.
For me, getting some emotional rest has been using therapy as a healing and self-development tool, and allowing myself to rely on a group of trusted friends.
Social Rest
Social life is both fulfilling and draining. This is especially true for working women and moms who act as caretakers, and wear so many social hats. With the advent of social media, our social life has expanded into virtual spaces that pull us down into abysses of extra busyness and over-stimulation. This is where taking a break from social activities and social media is a powerful self-care and healing tool.
As an introvert, the need to take serious social breaks is very real. Cultivating relationships and developing a schedule that welcome these breaks has been key.
Spiritual Rest
Last but not least, we all need to be connected to something larger than us. Something that makes this life meaningful, and provides us with a deeper sense of purpose. As such, it’s crucial that we find time, in the midst of our busy everyday lives, to keep this spiritual connection alive. It may be through a walk in nature, a meditation practice, or just a few minutes of quiet every day.
Prayer is my favorite way to get some much-needed spiritual rest every day. Making it an integral part of my schedule has been instrumental to not losing touch with my spiritual side.
As working women and moms, unexplained exhaustion does not have to be our normal. Instead, better understanding the types of rest we need can help us acquire and practice the right habits to gain our energy, strength and motivation back.
Could you identify with any of the types of rest listed above? What can you do to increase the amount and type of rest you get?
How do you teach confidence when you have to learn it yourself?
How do you show up confidently in your personal life, especially as a mother, when you struggle with confidence in your career?
What do you do to fill up the gap between being your most confident self and teaching your kids to be confident as a working mom?
If you’re a working mom who’s ever struggled with a lack of confidence, you may have asked yourself one, or many, of these questions. You may especially be asking yourself these questions during current times plagued with a global pandemic, social justice and racial discrimination concerns. As a minority mom, modeling self-esteem can be even more of a process, as you’re trying to heal from the trauma of racial events happening across the world.
As a minority working woman, becoming a mom not only exposed me to my own lack of confidence at the time, but also encouraged me to address and work on it. Over the years, it has become a blessing in disguise, as I have had the opportunity to learn more about confidence, so I could in turn teach and pass it on to my own children.
Through my conversations with other working women and moms who have also struggled with confidence in and outside of work, as well as my own experience, here are 7 tips to teach confidence to kids as a working woman, even if you’re working on your confidence:
Be self-aware
Being self-aware is the first step to building and teaching confidence, especially to children. Children can see right through the human façade, which makes it even more important to better know yourself.
Work on your own mental health
Beyond being self-aware, working on one’s mental health and sense of self-esteem is crucial to building, and modeling a growing sense of confidence. From prioritizing self-care to investing in therapy, protecting and enhancing one’s mental health is central to raising confident and healthy children.
Allow your kids to be who they are
Being confident also means accepting yourself as you grow and evolve. It also means teaching our children to be exactly who they are instead of boxing them into an idea of who we want them to be.
Make love and acceptance the center
Modeling love and acceptance by accepting ourselves first, is at the center of educating children into being more confident. Motherhood is a road paved with mistakes, do-overs, failures, but also with incredibly fulfilling and rewarding opportunities to grow, learn and evolve.
Embrace imperfection
Through our own journey of motherhood, imperfection is par for the course. Embracing this imperfection, both on our part and that of our children, is key to passing along the message that the goal is not perfection but progress.
Show don’t tell
We teach our children confidence by modeling it, rather than telling them about. It’s through our actions, more than our words, than kids learn. Doing the work that allows us to show up as our most authentic selves is also the most effective, and powerful, way to teach our children to trust and esteem themselves.
Follow your own motherhood path
As working women often subject to society’s sexist and often antiquated messaging, learning to truly know, appreciate and trust ourselves is a process. It’s one that requires shedding many of the layers of conformism imposed by societal groups and the environments we are exposed to.
Overall, teaching confidence to our children starts with doing the work ourselves, and modeling it in the best way possible, especially when still struggling with it.
How are you managing to teach confidence to kids as a working mom still learning to be confident?
As I was preparing for a presentation on women at work , one of the recurring questions that came forth was: “Will this career allow me to be a mom and have work-life balance?” First, the term itself, work-life balance makes me cringe at every turn. In a modern society and at a time where the lines between work and life have been so blurred, especially during a pandemic with a predominantly virtual “new normal”, where is the balance to be found? Second, the mere consideration of women weighing motherhood against work is upsetting enough to take yet another coffee break. Truth is, working moms have been trapped by the false idea of work-life balance. And it’s high time it stopped…
As a working mom, like most, many, if not most of my career decisions have been shaped by motherhood. From transitioning careers, to letting go of travel and certain aspects of work not compatible with motherhood, it’s meant making choices that others did not have to make. What it also means is that these choices, and the doors they lead to, are predicated upon such a natural and human occurrence as becoming a mother. In the tight space between these difficult choices and motherhood, lies the dilemma of so many working moms being told to strive for an elusive work-life balance…As a result, young women are entering careers that are neither aligned with nor fulfilling to their purpose. Mid-career women are having to leave a part of their identity through work, having no choice but to save their families as caretakers. More experienced career women are being victims to even more false misconceptions, including ageism.
While the boundaries between life and work have become increasingly blurred, more and more working women are getting clearer about their priorities. As the resulting health, economic and mental crisis as disproportionately affected working women by shifting the caretaking and household burden almost exclusively on them, it also allowed for a reckoning of the issues faced by women. As such, it is also making the conversation around women and work, including work-life balance, louder and hopefully more constructive and conducive to real solutions:
Work-life balance is elusive
While the term work-life balance has been thrown around left and right for the longest time, the concept behind it is quite elusive in practice. How do you establish a balance between overlapping areas such as life and work? As a working mom, being at work inevitably means missing out on precious moments as a mother and caretaker. Conversely, stepping down from or reducing work obligations to devote more time to caretaking activities can be rewarding, yet it can also translate into lost dreams and delayed aspirations. There’s really no win-win here, and no true sense of balance…
Find what matters to you
At the end of the day, it’s less about establishing an artificial sense of balance and equilibrium, than it is about pursuing your own path and purpose. What matters to you may be insignificant or irrelevant to someone else, yet it may truly define what you are about. Identifying what truly matters to you and makes a real impact for you and others is key to escape the entrapment of a traditional work-life balance, and live life on your own terms.
Prioritize your well-being
The relentless search for work-life balance can often lead to exhaustion, as you strive to juggle the personal and professional in an endless quest for the perfect equilibrium. In all the loud arguments for and against work-life balance, true well-being may be left out of the loop. Each individual’s need for and understanding of their own well-being does not necessarily fit into the neatly folded corners of work-life balance. It’s often tucked somewhere in between moments of extreme busyness and eerie calm, or can be found in the exhilaration of goals accomplished or the tugging call of transitions. Whatever it is, and wherever it may be found, it is infinitely more important than a carefully studied idea of balance.
It is high time that the concept of work-life balance not only be re-visited, but even most importantly, held against the light of modern reality for working women and moms. If its goal was to help make the latter’s lives and work easier, then it should never become a prison of expectation and performance.
Have you ever thought of being successful and then got scared of it all at once? Does the prospect of success fill you with both excitement and dread? Do you look at other successful women wondering what it would feel like to reach your dreams but not quite daring to dream that big?
If you’ve nodded while reading any of the above questions, you’re not alone. As a matter of fact, you’re probably joining the ranks of a majority of brilliant, competent, working women who work hard to make it, yet are well…terrified of succeeding. Counter-intuitive much?
In her famous doctoral studies, Dr. Matina Horner showed the astounding impact of the fear of success on women’s careers (Horner, 1972). Horner describes the motive to avoid success for women within the expectancy-value theory of motivation, as the social stereotype according to which independence, competence, intellectual achievement and competence are viewed as positively related to masculinity and not femininity. As such, there is an expectancy that achievement-related success will arouse negative outcomes for women.
Fear of success is one of the psychological factors that most affects women’s career development (Komalasari, Supartha, Rahyuda, & Dewi, 2017), and discourages them from going after achievements and opportunities. This fear of success in women has been demonstrated in numerous studies (Hoffman, 1974), showing how the threat of affiliative loss affects women’s motivation and attainment of goals. This fear of success is even more acute in non-gender appropriate conditions, such as in professions typically reserved for men (Cherry & Deaux, 1978).
For so many women, success is appealing, yet terrifying. It simultaneously crowns their efforts with both the recognition finally deserved, and the negative perceptions, often leading to rejection and communal disempowerment so feared by women, precisely because of their nurturing and community-oriented nature. This fear manifests itself in commonly known yet not as often suspected forms such as procrastination or self-sabotage.
So how do you fight this so often inherent fear of success as a working woman? Frankly speaking, it’s easier said than done. The fear of success is often ingrained in women as early as in their childhood, along with societal and communal expectations of who and what a woman should be and do. Pushing past these expectations and the related mindsets and self-destructing behaviors requires an intentional decision and journey into understanding oneself, and making peace with one’s purpose and personal path.
If this is a journey you’ve been thinking about, or are currently on, here are a few tips to get you started or to continue on your way to ridding yourself of the fear of being successful:
Change your mind!
Literally! After years of social conditioning and messages all around us about the place and role of women, we seldom realize how much we tend to work against ourselves. Changing your mind to embrace your true desires has to become a constant process of identifying your own negative and self-defeating patterns, and replace them with positive ones.
Normalize defining success on your own terms
What is success, really? My favorite quote about success is from Dr. Maya Angelou: “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” After years of subscribing to other well-intentioned people’s definition of success, it took me a long while to discover what success truly meant for me. Once I did, I was no longer afraid of someone else’s ethereal, impersonal definition of success. Rather, I started feeling emboldened to bring my own vision of success to life.
Practice being unapologetic about what you want
I used to want to apologize for literally taking space, as if my achieving anything made me indebted to others. With the guilt of achievement, often comes the urge to apologize for simply being there. It takes the conscious realization of this, as well as the intentional decision to refrain from being apologetic about what you want.
Grieve the loss of prior expectations
However, with normalizing success as a working woman, also comes the death of prior expectations from society. These are usually communal expectations of what a “feminine” woman looks like, that have been deeply embedded in the collective psyche over time, such as “girls should be seen and not heard”, or that female success equates the loss of all femininity and societal acceptance. These are also expectations that at some point or another, you may have carried with you, and that you must now allow yourself to grieve.
Commit to your own personal journey of growth
Last but not least, fighting the fear of success and building confidence as a working woman is not an overnight affair. It’s the journey of a lifetime, one that requires commitment, devotion and most importantly, the blood and sweat of your legacy.
Are you afraid of achieving success as a working woman?
Dear Working Mom is our periodic love and encouragement letter to working moms everywhere…
Dear Working Mom,
Remember that time, a long while back, maybe so far back that you may not even remember, when you promised yourself never to lose yourself? Never to lose that spark, that creativity, that spunk, that pep in your step, no matter what?
It’s been a while and life certainly has happened since then, taking over like a rushing wind of commitments, duties, and obligations of all kinds. And maybe one morning you may have woken up to realize that you can’t remember the last time you rode a bike, or read a book from cover to cover, or dug out your favorite dance shoes out of your closet to practice some of your old steps… Maybe someone asked you what you like to do, and you couldn’t come up with anything outside of going to work, picking up the kids, cooking, cleaning or your favorite brand of laundry detergent…
There are so many ways that, as modern moms, we can lose ourselves in the beautifully messy whirlwind of motherhood,marriage, partnership and life in general. We blink and it’s been a month, a year, a decade of beautiful, busy, often challenging but oh so rewarding moments. But we also blink and it may have been a month, a year, a decade, of forgetting a little bit of who we are, a little bit at a time…And you’ll know it too… You’ll know it by the way you feel a little off-center, a little off-balance, a little not like yourself…It’ll show up in the restlessness in your body, the raciness in your thoughts, the unexplainable jitters followed by a frustrating lethargy, the unanticipated moodiness…
And when you start noticing your soul wandering in exhaustion, it may be the sign, dear Working Mom, to return to yourself. To get back to those things that truly bring you joy, to make time for those old passions, even if only for a fraction of your day…
Because you never have to lose yourself, not through your work, not through your marriage or partnership, not through your relationships, not through anyone or anything…You never have to lose yourself, because those who love you need all of you…
Because your children need the spark in your eyes, the joy in your laughter, the energy in your step, and all the parts of you that make you…
Because the world needs the entirety of who you are, and so do you…
