You're listening to episode 1 of the Mental Offload podcast.

Welcome to the Mental Offload Podcast where we talk about women balancing work and life. It's the podcast that combines leadership, feminism, and coaching tools so you can tackle it all with more confidence and less stress. Here's your host Ivy League NBA certified feminist coach and corporate warrior, Shawna Samuel.

Hello and welcome to the first episode of the Mental Offload Podcast. I'm so excited to have you here and to record this very first episode and share it with you. I really want this to feel like a conversation between us, between smart women who are doing big things in their lives and careers and trying to do that while also raising families. I'm Shawna Samuel, I am the host of this podcast and the founder of The Mental Offload, which is my executive coaching program for high achieving women.

I really wanted to start out by tackling a light subject, the concept of having it all and whether that even is possible. So I grew up in the 80s and it was a time of a lot of change for women and their roles, at least in the US. In other countries too, I think we were raised with this narrative that women could really have it all. And I think there was a desire, a dream to be able to play all our various roles and do them effectively and effortlessly.

So the idea was go to a great school, do really well, get an amazing job, continue to move up in your career, and oh, by the way, add some kids along the way and raise a beautiful, perfect family. I think Michelle Obama so nicely put this in her first book, this concept of being the box checker. I related to that so much. The idea that, you know, we're kind of given a list of boxes that we're supposed to check to be successful.

And certainly for high achieving women, we take that list as our recipe for success and we go after it hard, right? It's just like check each box 1 after the other and don't let up. But as we have more and more roles to play in our lives from career woman to wife to mother, I think the question comes up of how to fit everything in and still do it well. And that desire to fit it all in and and make it fit in in a way that feels good in our life.

Some people call it work life balance, others call it integration, some call it harmony. I think it's less about what you call it than how you approach it. And we're going to dive into that today because I think there is a lot of advice around about having it all and whether that's even possible. I think one of the biggest things that we hear is that there's no such thing as having it all.

It's not even possible. Another piece of advice that you hear as the counterpoint is, oh, you can have it all, just not all at once. Or some people put it, well, there's a season for everything and you just need to choose what season you're in. I hate all of these pieces of advice and that's really why I started this podcast.

I think the advice out there for women who are trying to excel in demanding careers and as mothers is sorely lacking. It's not even advice so much as a collective. Like throwing up of hands. Like Oh well, this is impossible, you might as well not even try.

I don't subscribe to that. Let me be clear. Is having it all easy? No, absolutely not, but it is possible and I'm going to give you some ways to think about it and approach it today that I think are going to be really transformational for you.

I'm also going to share today some hard won wisdom from women who are successful in this domain. So what's true in the advice that's out there is that there are a lot of obstacles in the path to having it all. And I don't think that we can have this conversation without talking about the obstacles. The obstacles really fall into 3 categories, cultural, structural, and internal.

I won't have time to go deep into each of these areas. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to touch on each of these, what they are and how they come together in ways that end up tanking our sense of balance. So we can't talk about having it all without talking about the cultural trends. These are the things that often shape how we think about what's desirable, what's possible in our lives and the culture in which we grow up really shapes how we think about working, motherhood and how we even define having it all.

If you look at the history of the US, the desirability of women working outside the home has really changed over time. If you think about the Victorian era through approximately World War 2, the idea of women staying in the home and being focused on motherhood, that was really the ideal that was put on a pedestal. Starting in World War 2, that shifted dramatically. Men were out fighting in wars and women were needed to work in factories and basically do the economic work that normally was falling to men.

So you get this rush of women into the workplace and the country really promoting that as part of the war effort. That all took a 180. Coming out of World War 2. A lot of women felt pushed back into the home, giving rise to a whole wave of feminist thinking and writing.

In the 70s we saw culture shift again, powerful push of feminism, working moms coming back into the forefront. In the 80s you started to see a backlash. Now today, the majority of moms are working outside the home. And that having been said, there's also some deep ambivalence in the US culture about whether or not that's desirable.

And you can see that down to the lack of social supports there for working women. We still

don't have high quality daycare. We still don't have a lot of financial or concrete support for women in the workplace. We still don't have paid maternity leave in the US, so that having been said, US culture is not monolithic.

So what I just described is largely the lens of how white women have experienced the cultural pressures of motherhood. Those cultural forces look different through the lens of women of color, many of whom worked out of the home over time, going back many decades out of economic necessity or cultural ideals that encouraged working outside of the home. But if we want to talk about the larger cultural ideal, what many people aspire to in US culture is largely either a mom who doesn't have to work, or who works in a flexible role that allows her to be primarily available as caretaker of kids in home. The idea is that her working life should be secondary to her responsibilities as a mother.

And what was so interesting to me is that about 10 years ago, I moved to France with my family. That's where I currently live, and the cultural ideals here in France are very different. And I didn't realize how much is shaped by culture until I changed the culture in which I was living. The cultural ideal here in France is a mom who works outside of the home, to the point where you sometimes see moms who stay at home who feel apologetic and even sometimes ashamed about that choice.

Now, I'm not suggesting that that should be the ideal. I think we don't want moms living in shame either way as a stay at home mom or as a working mom. But what I do think is so interesting is that as a culture in France, there's much more support for working mothers. High quality daycare, universal preschool, monetary aid, you name it.

It's not perfect, but you can tell that the society is putting concrete support behind allowing women to work outside the home. So as we consider the idea of having it all, it's really important to take a look at how much of that is actually shaped by the culture in which we've been raised or socialized. A second area that really impacts our experience of being able to have it all are structural trends. One that I think is super important to talk about is the idea of greedy work.

And greedy work is a term that was coined by the economist Claudia Golden at Harvard. And the idea here is that workplaces have really ramped up their expectations of what they want from their most highly paid employees. So the expectation of my parents generation was that as you were starting out in the workplace, you were paying your dues. That was the time when you were typically not paid very well and had the biggest expectations on your time and on your output.

And as you proved yourself in your role, as you moved up, you were getting better paid while having to work less. And in many cases, the idea was that the people at the very top of the organization had some of the cushiest employment, right? They were getting really well paid and had a lot of people to really carry out the work, if you will. Those expectations have

been changing over time, so it's a structural phenomenon about how we work and who gets rewarded.

Today, workplaces expect the people at the top are going to do a lot of work. They'll get outsized pay but have huge expectations on them in many cases. And this is a phenomenon that is particularly detrimental to working women and working moms in particular. Because, again, right, if the ideal for women, especially in the US, is a mom whose flexibility can primarily be available for needs of caretaking, then it's women who feel most shut out of these highly paid, highly rewarded roles.

So if the system is rigged, where does that leave us? So let's acknowledge that there are some real structural, cultural obstacles that can get in the way of our having it all. But this episode would be incomplete if I didn't talk about the third obstacle, which is internal. So what I see out there and what I lived myself are really high achieving women trying to hustle their way out of this problem by doing it all right.

It starts very early in the morning when we get up at the crack of dawn. We've got our morning routine planned down to the minute so that we get everyone out the door on time, dropped off to their daycares and their schools, and then we show up at work. We've got a day stacked with meetings that we're running from meeting to meeting. At the end of the day, we finally need to then start getting the real work done.

And we're rushing to get home and rushing to get dinner on the table and getting everyone fed and put to bed and then logging back online and trying to find the energy to get up and do it all again the next day. It's a recipe for being overwhelmed and overworked, exhausted and anxious. I think so many women think that the only alternative to that is to leave. This is what happens when you're trying to do it all.

I kind of, I almost think of it right now. I'm I'm recording this episode as the the World Cup soccer is going on. And I think of this the way I think about a soccer team. So imagine that you're playing soccer and you feel like you've to play all the positions, you're the goalie and you're trying to run the ball up the court and you're trying to shoot the goals.

It's exhausting. And I think so many of us conceive of the playing field this way. We've got a ball, we've got an objective, and we have to play all the roles and play them all really well against a a full team opposing us. This is not a recipe for success.

And I speak from my personal experience here, confuse doing it all with having it all. So we set up these internal obstacles to our own success when we forget that there are a lot of variables that we can actually control. Thinking about soccer, we control what kind of field we want to play on. We can control how many additional players we're bringing onto our team with us.

We can even control whether or not we call a time out. The biggest difference between women who are successful in managing these pressures at a very high level, successful in having it all if you will, is that they think about their role as I get to direct the game. So I'm set up for success versus I'm 100% responsible for everything. When you're thinking I get to direct the game, then you are making decisions that put you in the position to really have it all.

When you're thinking I'm responsible for everything, then you end up doing it all and not having it all. So success in having it all really requires us to change the way we think about ourselves, seeing ourselves more as the CEO of our own lives rather than as merely a household employee. And it also requires us to learn how to manage our own minds, unwind some of the really unhelpful cultural narratives, and get very skilled in creating and enforcing our own boundaries in the face of structural trends that want us to be more and more 24/7 present in the workplace. And the starting point for that is really to stop confusing doing it all with having it all.

So I don't think it really matters whether you call it work life, balance, integration, harmony. It's less important what you call it and more important how you're executing it. And as we talked about today, we really must stop confusing having it all with doing it all. They're not the same.

And one will advance you and your career, and the other will keep you stuck doing it all and feeling exhausted. So I really hope that you leave here today convinced that it is perfectly possible to do all of these roles and do them well. And it's also totally OK if you don't have all the skills yet to do that because no one is teaching that to us. And that is exactly what we're going to dive into over the course of this podcast.

We've got a ton of amazing episodes coming up for you. And so I can't wait to talk to you again next week. If you're looking for better balance, you have to learn to create boundaries with your time. I teach you how in my free mini class.

This class was designed for busy working moms, so it's only 15 minutes long, but it is packed with amazing strategies that you can use today. So go get the class at www.thementaloffload.com/TMO Mini. That's www.thementaloffload.com slash T. That's T as in the M as in mental, O as in offload mini all one word.

When you have time boundaries, you save time, feel more relaxed, and you're able to start creating the balance you want in life. Go get the time boundaries mini class now.