You're listening to episode 48 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 MBA certified feminist coach and corporate warrior, Shawna Samuel.

If you tuned in last week, we talked about goals for this year and how to attain them. Today we're talking about pacing and why it's so important as you think about how to approach your year. Stay tuned. Hi Offloaders, This is Shawna Samuel. I am the host of the Mental Offload Podcast, and we're going to talk about a side of goal attainment that's really important today. It's pacing. Now I was talking to a client recently who has a toddler at home and we were talking about gaming out her next professional step. And she said to me, you know, Shawna, I'm not sure that this is a growth year for me. I really just kind of want to feel a bit more solid in my life before I go hard in my career again. Is that bad? It was clear if she felt a bit conflicted about that desire because in her mind this represented stepping off the career treadmill, the idea that this wasn't going to be a growth here for her. I was thinking about how many of us have this vision of career advancement that's very linear, very steady, an unchanging pace. It's almost like we don't have control of the speed of the treadmill. It's like it's set. I just get on that treadmill and I better keep running because if I slow down, I'm going to get thrown off. And I think that's quite normal to think that because if you read the business press or even meet up with your B school colleagues, much of what we see and hear out there reinforces this view that it's all about keeping up the pace growth year after growth, year after growth year.

But when you think about the lives of actual women, I'll just pick out a couple who have been in the public sphere. Careers are rarely totally linear. I think about Colette the author, for example. She didn't even write her first book until she was in her 30s, and then she went through various more or less prolific periods as a writer. And it's not just in creative fields. Think about Madeleine Albright, famous former Secretary of State. She took about 13 years, I think, to get her PhD, as she was basically working nights on her dissertation and balancing days with young kids at home. And she largely avoided more demanding roles until she was in her 50s and her children were largely grown. More recently, I think about Michelle Obama. Started her career as a very high-powered lawyer at a top tier law firm, then moved into a leadership role in a hospital, also a very prestigious role. But as she writes about it, she made that choice for hours and balance. Then she moved into a position as first lady, after which she took another period of downtime and then went out on a worldwide record shattering book tour. Now all of these women have been very successful in their domains, and yet I don't think any of us would say that they took a linear path or went growth year after growth year consistently for all of their working lives.

This idea that a career needs to be linear, needs to have a steady pace even it seems really tidy. It's a neat way to conceive of our career growth, but it's not necessary in order to be successful. So in addition to your goals that we talked about last week, I want you to think about your pace for the year. When I'm working with clients, I think about dividing these into three kinds of years. 1 is a growth year, one's a balance year and 1 is a pivot year. So a growth year is a year where you're going hard after a big goal. Maybe it's a promotion or maybe it's a significant stretch assignment that's an internal hurdle to promotion. It might be a change of field or a significant new skill. At one point in my career, I took a role that was technically a lateral move, but it had a huge external facing component to it. Adding that skill to my belt required significant growth.

It was a major investment in myself and my skills, but I also did that knowing that it would open doors for me to move upward. So growth can take a number of forms. What's common in a growth year is that it typically requires a significant investment of your time and energy as you are growing, whether it's upwards, whether it's adding skills, and you're probably going to spend the next 6 to 12 months putting in the reps needed to grow. Being in a growth year, it is a choice to step out of your comfort zone. It's a choice to pursue discomfort intentionally. This is also the kind of pace that's socially and professionally sanctioned. It really dovetails with what we think of as how successful people operate. And while that's not totally false, we do need growth years if we're going to propel ourselves into bigger things. As we've just talked about, it's not the only option. As you think about your career, some years you may want to pursue a balance year.

A balance year is 1 where you're really focused on maintaining position, But I don't think of it at all as a year where you're quote UN quote, phoning it in. Usually in a balance year, even though you're focused on maintaining position, a good balance year actually involves lots of incremental tweaks. It's usually a year where you're putting new systems in place that are going to allow you to operate more effectively, or you're potentially focused on producing the same results, the same end goal, but just doing it quicker and with less effort. So, for example, when I was coming back from my first maternity leave, I told my boss I wanted to come back into a job that I knew how to do really well. I did that because I wanted to focus on how to do what I did so well in fewer hours and on less sleep. That was a balance here. Some people derisively call a balance here coasting. I think that's a total misnomer. I grew up in the music world and so even professional musicians usually start their practice with scales or an easy piece because this really allows them to focus on doing the reps, ironing out those small issues with like a bow technique or a tricky shift in a passage that might derail them if they go right into a piece that's more of a stretch. You might have heard that phrase. Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast and that's really what it's about in a balance.

Here you are doing those reps that are going to build muscle memory so that what's currently hard, what's currently a bit of a stretch, is going to become easier and easier. Balance years are really about making what's currently uncomfortable more comfortable, right? So whereas growth years are about deliberately pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, balance years are really about expanding your comfort zone. A balance year, when done well, really enables you to enter a growth year from a very solid foundation, right? You're getting everything in place and working like clockwork in a balance year so that the following year you've got a great solid springboard to jump off of. Balance years can also enable you to take on growth in a non professional area. Like if this is the year you're adding a child into the mix, that may be your growth or maybe you've decided you're going to start a side hustle, that may be your growth. So it doesn't mean that every single part of your life has to be a balance year if you're thinking about that from a professional standpoint. The thing about a balance year is that it doesn't necessarily come with the same external validation, but there is no shame in deciding upfront that you want to have more of a balance here. That's what you want to pursue. In fact, some of my clients really find that a balance here is exactly the time that they need to work with someone like me because they don't want to waste time trying a bunch of stuff and figuring out what systems are actually going to work. They want to get back into their comfort zone and start expanding that really quickly and efficiently.

In fact, some of my clients find that a balance here is exactly the time that they need to work with someone like me because they don't want to waste time trying a bunch of stuff that doesn't work. They want to be experimenting with a whole bunch of new systems. They want to quickly figure out what works and what's going to be efficient so that they can expand their comfort zone most efficiently and effectively. But sometimes you will decide that you are in a pivot year. Now. A pivot year is a year where you're focused on making a big reorientation. You've decided the current situation is not working and change is needed pronto. Maybe you've decided that it's time to get out of your organization, or maybe your organization is not giving you a choice. You've been laid off. You've been forced out. You've been fired. Sometimes pivot here happens at home. You're sick of being the default parent and being constantly overstretched, and you're like, pivot Now when you're going into a pivot year, you're often starting by feeling like you've lost ground, like you're in a little bit of a hole and you're trying to claw your way out. And so pivot years are often deeply uncomfortable because rather than a growth year where you feel like you're moving ahead, pivot years, they're also growth in their own way. But it may feel like you're trying to make up lost ground or get back to a stable place. And for that reason, pivot years can be hard, emotionally taxing work. That's really good to know going in because then you can set your expectations accordingly. Like this is going to be 6 months of deep work. And again, it usually comes without any external validation while you are in the thick of that pivot. Like people will congratulate you when you're on the other side of the pivot. When you put out that post on LinkedIn, that's like, I'm proud to be starting day one at my new firm. You're going to get all the congratulatory messages. But the six months of work that you put in to get there while you're really in the thick of it, that can feel lonely. It can feel like you're climbing uphill.

Because what's super important in a pivot year is not getting so drained that you cannot continue. That's what happens in so many cases. Women get so emotionally drained trying to make a pivot that they burn out and then they need to take significant time off to recover. And so instead of having a pivot year, it starts to become several years, it starts to derail them personally or professionally. So what I want you to know is pivot years do require you to dig deep, but they don't have to be emotionally draining. And this is where you really need to lean on your personal board of advisors and usually rebalance your time diet as well so that you're including more play and more rest so that you're not getting drained down. If you missed the episode where I talked about personal board of advisors back in episode 8, I think you should go back to that one and really listen in on how you can use a personal board of advisors. Same with the episode on balanced time Diet. Think that's episode 33. I will link to both of those in the show notes so that you can go back and listen to that content if you feel like you are going into a pivot year.

So again, not every year has to be a growth year. Not every year should be a growth year. That's not always the point. Even if we live in a culture that tries to say yes, that's very much the point, we need to lose that narrative that says we always need to be going hard. You get to determine your pace, whether it's a growth year, a balance year, or a pivot year. But I think that framing is super helpful for you to decide going in what kind of year am I planning to have? What kind of pacing do I want to set? It's important to choose that pace with intention, understanding the trade-offs, planning for the obstacles that come with each one of these kinds of years. Whether you're going for growth or balance or pivot in the year ahead, you can still have an exceptional transformational year. And if you choose your pace wisely, you can sustain and support yourself going forward and build an extremely solid foundation for future growth. So consider this your permission to pace yourself and I'll talk to you next week.

Are you ready to step into a life? For success at work. And success at home go hand in hand. Then it's time for the mental offloads shut down ritual. It's a. Proven practical method to help you log off and leave work behind. You can own your evenings and be present with the people you love and the shutdown ritual. Makes it easy gain the power to truly. Walk away from work and be present with the. People. Who matter most to you? It's just what you need if you want to achieve big things in the. World without. Losing your mind Ready to reclaim your time and your Peace of Mind? Go to WWW. Dot the mental offload.com/shutdown. And get your. Free download of the shutdown ritual. That's www.the. Mentaloffload.com/shutdown and join me next week for the next episode of the Mental Offload Podcast.