By Toronto Life & Mindset Alignment Coach Stephanie J. Marshall

It Feels Impossible

If you’re exhausted, it’s way harder to figure out work-life balance because you need to give all of your energy to just getting things done. Trying to compartmentalize parts of your life and turn them on or off on a schedule just adds work.

You feel guilty thinking about your family when working and feel equally lousy working when you’re with your family. You want to be present and engaged on all fronts, but you can’t see a way out of this chaos without disappointing everyone who is counting on you, and letting people down is off the table.

So how do you get out of the cycle without being reckless?

*Spoiler: It’s not a quick fix, you already knew that, but you can get meaningful results fast.

Judging and Catastrophizing Don’t Help

You need to stop the self-judgement math that you are doing every day in order to make decisions that you will be able to follow through on from a different place.

For lasting change, the decisions must be based on the outcomes you want, not as a result of feeling guilty or stressed.

You need to manage your thoughts and stop catastrophizing because assuming the worst-case scenario keeps you stuck by skewing your judgement about what’s possible. It’s about experimenting with small shifts, learning, and taking it a step further.

This probably sounds“nice in theory,” but you might be thinking of all of the reasons why this is impossible for your specific situation. That’s absolutely normal.

There Will Be Resistance

Recognizing and accepting that you will have resistance makes it easier to dig into what’s working and what’s not to solve this in a way that works for you.

In Kickstartology, we learn to get really good at finding where our feelings are getting in the way to manage our minds better. If you’re coming from a place of guilt, exhaustion, and resistance to change (even though you know things need to change), this is your starting point. If you’re terrified of letting someone down or disappointing someone and it’s causing you to feel anxious, this needs to be factored in. If you ignore those feelings, you will try to white-knuckle your way through some plan, and it will fail as soon as life gets in the way.

Our Alignment Framework will help you untangle all of the pieces contributing to the problem to simplify your approach. 

We will help you look at the situation and find a new perspective without the crushing weight of guilt and expectations. From there, you will be able to reconnect to what matters and make adjustments. And small actions often have a huge ripple effect that makes it easier as you go.

It Will Get Easier

Doing things differently may feel very uncomfortable at first, but you will have confidence in your decisions. You will learn to master managing your thoughts and feelings. You will have certainty about the direction you are going in. That part will feel amazing!

As you move into this way of making decisions, no matter what comes up you will feel more at ease and more in control. You will procrastinate less, and feel more engaged in what you are doing.

And you will have more time. Some of the time will come from feeling more energized instead of depleted, and some of it is time saved once you let go of the spinning thoughts of self-judgement and “chasing done”.

P.S. Find out how to work with me if you're ready to break the patterns keeping you stuck and get out of your own way: Let's talk.

Book a free coaching exploration call and I will tell you everything you need to know and what results you can expect with my group coaching program for women or 1-on-1 coaching.

Free: Get unstuck with our mini starter course:

KICKSTART: THE FIRST STEP

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