Nicky Lowe [00:00:06]:

Hi. I’m Nikki Lowe, and welcome to the Wisdom for Working Women’s podcast show where I share insights and interviews that support women to combine their family, work and life in a more successful and sustainable way. Welcome to this episode. I’m your host Nikilo, Executive And Leadership Coach. And in today’s episode, I’m gonna be diving in to a common question that we get asked as working mothers. The question is, how do you do it all? That juggling act of balancing work, family, and your personal life, but it’s a tricky question to explore because it can be a loaded question And I know that there will be some people listening that just don’t like the question because it’s not a question that men get asked, and it’s certainly not a question that working fathers get asked. probably because traditionally, the answer for most men on how they’ve managed it all would be that they had a wife at home doing everything, and their wife would be holding — the emotional and mental load of the family and the home for them, but I think it’s an important question for us to ask our fellow working moms because with more mothers working than ever, how we balance our work and home responsibilities is still a sticking point for so many of us. and asking the question makes the invisible visible.

Nicky Lowe [00:01:29]:

It’s almost like seeing how we each navigate the invisible load, either normalizing that it’s not easy or learning from each other, but I do understand that for some, it can be triggering it can feel like we’re stereotyping that the mother is carrying the invisible load, and they meant that might not be the case. It can also feel like there’s an implicit judgment behind the question or that someone has gotta justify their choices or prove their ability which is not my reason for asking it here, or the question kind of perpetuates the notion that women are primary responsible for managing both their careers and families. and asking the question can seem to almost reinforce that gender stereotype, which again, is not my intention for exploring it. I’m approaching this question from the perspective that if most working moms are still carrying the majority of the family and domestic responsibilities, How do we navigate our careers in a way that supports us to thrive? And I know from my work with a global leadership well-being solutions team, where we measure the well-being of executives using the global leadership well-being survey across the globe. We get to see the data trends on well-being around the world, and a trend that is still very prevalent is that women experience greater work life conflict We’re less comfortable with the amount of time we spend working, and our workdays feel like a race, at greater risk of burnout compared to males. and we’re more likely to report that family responsibilities and personal matters can spill over negatively impact us while we’re at work. And women report that we are significantly more likely to experience tensions and challenges with juggling the volume of personal commitments and responsibilities. Sound familiar? I know it does for me.

Nicky Lowe [00:03:20]:

You know, as I’ve recorded this episode and I reflect on the last week, It’s the summer school holidays. I’ve been juggling the kids’ activities with 2 different age children. So their kind of camps and activities haven’t aligned while also trying to do that with my work, we organize trip to London for my daughter’s birthday earlier in the year. She wanted to go and see Frozen in the musical, and we’ve been organizing that. I’d booked the train but the train got canceled at the last minute due to industrial strikes. So I’ve been having to arrange all the new travel arrangements. And we’ve got two puppies, so I’d organize for them to go to the dog sitters while we went to London, but my one dog has come into season for the cert first time. And as the dog sitters got a male dog that hasn’t been muted, I’ve had to arrange at the last minute kind of where that puppy’s gonna go.

Nicky Lowe [00:04:09]:

I’ve been planning for the return to school uniform. I’ve been organizing for a nest in the garden to be removed. It’s been my mother-in-law’s birthday. So I’d be unorganized in a present and then mail out for the family. And each time I’ve had a window to complete my work, a domestic thought or responsibility has been hijacking that time, and I felt like my irritation levels go up It’s because I’m multitasking. I’m feeling that erosion of boundaries between my work and my life, and I felt pulled in all those different directions. And it’s interesting. I’ve recently been reading a book called fed up by the journalist, Gemma Hartley, and it’s all about the emotional labor that women carry in their families and home.

Nicky Lowe [00:04:48]:

and she came to write this book after an article she wrote, that kind of just got went viral because she was talking about Women aren’t nagging. We’re just fed up. And in the book, she talks about the deep social expectation that women will shoulder the exhausting mental and emotional work at home. A type of labor that goes largely unnoticed by those it benefits most has made all too easy for such insidious expectations to follow us into the world as we step gingerly through a culture that’s left this little choice in the matter. And for many of the women I speak to, this is their illiquid experience too that work, family, and life integration isn’t easy. Now there isn’t a magic wand to all of this. For many women, there are psychosocial factors at play, meaning the systemic cultural in grain factors that aren’t, or within our control. As Judith Schultz, Fred, and her New York Times are call on the mental and an emotional load for mothers, whether a woman loves or hates worry work as she calls it, It can scatter her focus on what she does for pay and knock her partway or clean my offer career path.

Nicky Lowe [00:06:01]:

This distracting grind of apprehension and organisation may be one of the least movable obstacles to women’s equality in the workplace. And the irony is not lost on me that as I’m recording this episode, it’s an inset day at my children’s school, and one of my children has come in and interrupted me. So I’m living this in real time. So what can we do about this? We can’t shift society, our culture, and our lived experience on our own and all at once, but we can take responsibility for the kind of life we wanna lead and what are the factors that are within our control and that we can do something about and our ability to thrive as working mothers lies in that intricate balance and often very complex ways in which we combine all those various demands that are placed on us in all aspects of our lives is what we call in the global leadership well-being survey, ban and boundaries. So how do we combine living well and working well? And if you’re someone who is highly conscientious, someone who feels overly responsible and is hyper independent. It’s likely you’re trying to do it all. Do it all without help and do it all perfectly. And you don’t need me to tell you what that is a recipe for.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:19]:

but sometimes just remembering that our tendencies can trip us up gives us more choices on how we navigate this stuff. you know, over the years, I’ve learned to let go of being so hyper independent, and I ask for more help. I’ve also started to push back on the gender norms that me and my husband unconsciously fell into, and it’s still work in progress. So here’s how I manage it all. Yeah. I work flexibly around my kids. I run my own business. So one of the the the benefits of that is I get more flexibility.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:53]:

So sometimes I’m I’m an early morning person, so sometimes I’m at my best working early in the morning. And it means that I kind of carry on working after I collected them from after school club. I have a cleaner, a gardener, a window cleaner to help me round the house, And I also have a small team in my business that supports me to to do all the stuff, like an amazing, John edits my podcast, amazing Laura. He’s my podcast manager that helps me get this out into the world. I also have a mother-in-law, and although she’s in her early eighties, If I need to, she is amazing to help me with the after school clubs if I need to. I have a husband who manages the evening kids activities. I batch cook because it’s the only way I can feed my family in a healthy kind of way without losing my sanity after school. And my kids probably have more screen time than I’m happy with sometimes if I have work to do.

Nicky Lowe [00:08:44]:

And I book in regular self care because if it’s not booked in, I don’t do it. I have a personal trainer. I have monthly reflexology, and I have to take time to seize my nervous system because if I don’t, I get caught up in fight and flight. I get rigid. I become hyper independent, and I fall into all those unhelpful tendencies. So soothing my nervous system helps me create, like, psychological flexibility so I don’t get too stressed out and irritated. And this is an important conversation to have and one that I love that National Worklife week that’s coming up at the beginning of October is addressing too. If you’ve not come across National Work Life Week, it’s an annual campaign run by the charity working families, and it gets both employers and employees talking about well-being at work and work life balance.

Nicky Lowe [00:09:35]:

And this is now more important than ever because there’s a rising, kind of, research, like, the data of research that’s coming out post pandemic, because we know that the pandemic was brutal for working parents, but one of the positive outcomes was the change in working patterns. The company said that, you know, work couldn’t be flexible or remote. realized that it had to be and could be. So we’ve seen a huge rise in flexible working, remote working, and hybrid working, But these changes in our work life blending have offered, like, real significant benefits to working parents, and I know many of you listening would have felt there the increased flexibility, the improvement in well-being, and more time with our family and friends, combined with the productivity and cost savings for organizations, However, as I say, there’s this merging kind of body of research that’s suggesting that these benefits are also shared with a more unhelpful reality and some of our pandemic era expectations and habits aren’t necessarily serving working parents well. and some are actually less than helpful. And that’s why I’m collaborating with the brilliant Anita clear of depositing parenting project. to address this. We’re hosting a webinar called supporting work working parents insights for the post pandemic era.

Nicky Lowe [00:10:57]:

And as the rewriting of these work patterns progresses, we’ll be sharing insights into how we support working parents so they can benefit from the is these ways of working whilst avoiding the potential pitfalls. And during this online webinar, which is absolutely free, you’ll learn evidence based insights on the impact of the post pandemic working patterns on working parents. You’ll gain clarity on the questions you need to consider to be or long term success for post pandemic working patterns, and we’ll explore strategies for supporting working parents to make it a win win for both employees and organizations. And you can join us for what I know is gonna be a really thought provoking discussion. You’ll get to learn, interact, and share with other organizations. And as I say, it’s completely free. It’s taking place on Tuesday, 26th September, 2023, at 12:30 British Lemus time. And you can show it, find all the details and the link for it in the show notes to this podcast episode.

Nicky Lowe [00:11:56]:

If you head over to wisdom4workingmums.co.uk, forward slash 117 because this is episode 117 at the podcast. So it’s wisdomforworkingmums.co.ukforward/ 117. And if you’ve not yet come across Anita and her work, I think you’re gonna love her. So Anita Claire is a parenting writer, speaker, and coach, She’s the author of the work parent switch, how to parent smarter, not hire harder, which is also known as the working parent survivor guide in the US. She writes the thinking parents advice blog and is director of the positive parenting project. And honestly, the work that she’s putting into the world for working on how we parent in the most positive way. It’s just brilliant. So I hope this episode has been useful — one where I’ve kind of shared insights into making the invisible visible as a working mom is really important, one where I’ve shared insights into how I manage it all, And I’d love to hear from you.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:55]:

How do you do it all? Maybe you’re just surviving and hearing that others struggle too just helps to normalize it and take away the guilt or in shame you might be feeling about not having it altogether, or maybe you’ve developed strategies that help you manage the invisible load and you’d like share so others can learn from you on how you manage it all. So do get in touch as I’m always keen to share real life stories and experiences with my audience. And as always, thanks for being here with me. I never take your time for granted. And until next time. Take care. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Wisdom for Working Moms, please share it on social media and with your friends and family. I’d love to connect with you too.

Nicky Lowe [00:13:36]:

So if you head over to wizdomfortworkingmums.co.uk, you’ll find a link on how to do this and if you look the show and really want to support it, please go to iTunes, write a review, and subscribe. You’ll be helping another working run, find this resource too. Thanks so much for listening.