Episode #452 – How to Grow Your Career and Family Without Losing Yourself

Hello and welcome back to the Brilliant Balance Podcast.

Today’s episode is one that I have been wanting to do for a while because the question at the center of this episode is really one that I hear more than just about any other. I think I’ve thought about it and talked about it from every angle—all the edges and sides of the subtopics under it—but this is really the central thesis of Brilliant Balance. It’s an episode that I haven’t done in quite this way before.

The question is: How do I grow my career and my family at the same time without losing myself in the process?

It’s so interesting to me because when you say that to someone who’s not in the core target audience for this show, they’re like, “What do you mean, lose yourself?” And I think, oh my Lord, anyone who’s listening to this show and is really in the audience does not need that explained to them. We know what it means to lose yourself in the process.

That really is the core question. How do I show up fully as a mother without falling behind professionally? How do I lean fully into my career without feeling like I’m shortchanging the members of my family who need me? And how do I do both of those things without having nothing left over for myself—without having to put my own interests and passions on ice for, I don’t know, decades in some cases?

I think that is the problem I set out to solve so many years ago when I was starting this company. That last part—the losing-yourself part—is the one we don’t talk about overtly. In the narrative of work-life balance, what’s missing is where the individual falls in that balance. When we are trying to juggle those two things, there’s a third thing. There’s a third entity we’re really trying to keep in play, and that is ourselves.

It is our own health. It is our well-being. It is our sense of individuality. It’s the things that make us who we are. And I think often those are the things that go by the wayside when we are trying to pour sufficient energy into our work and into our people.

What I’ve observed in the women I’ve worked with over the years—and what I’ve lived out myself—is that when your career gets demanding and your family gets big and complex, whatever that looks like for you, there’s this invisible math that starts to happen. The equation has three variables: work, home, and you. When the first two get heavy enough or big enough, the third one is the one that gets quietly, almost invisibly, sacrificed.

I don’t think it happens all at once. I don’t think most of us wake up one day and say, “Well, here’s the day I’ve crossed the threshold. There’s nothing left for me.” It’s more of a slippery slope.

The way it actually plays out in real time is that you’re saying, “I’ll just give a little bit more to work. I’ve got to stay a little later at the office. I have to give a little bit more at home because the dynamics are changing.” We very slowly and almost invisibly get crowded out until, at some point, there’s that book that’s been on your nightstand for three months with the same bookmark in it. There’s that girls’ trip that keeps getting moved and then moved again until it gets moved to “someday” and hasn’t happened in years.

There’s that hobby that used to be really life-giving. You loved it. You did it regularly. But you haven’t touched it since God knows when.

These are not frivolous things. These are not nice-to-haves or extras. These are the things that make you feel like yourself. And when they go away, when you have to live without them for long enough, you notice it.

It’s not invisible. And it doesn’t show up like acute grief. It’s not like one day you were doing something six days a week and the next day you’re not doing it at all. Let’s say you were a runner and you suffered an injury. All of a sudden, you can’t run anymore. That’s acute grief. You know what that feels like because you were doing it full tilt and then you’re not doing it at all.

That’s not really how this works. This gets chipped away little by little, piece by piece. You experience it more like a flatness, a depletion. There’s something missing, but you can’t quite name it. It’s like this little hum of resentment growing in the background because something in you knows that the parts of you that deserve attention are knocking on your door, begging for it, and you’re just not getting to them.

You know it’s happening. I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who’s oblivious to the fact that this is happening. You’re not living under a rock. But the math just doesn’t seem to work any other way.

I do think there’s a willingness involved. This isn’t necessarily happening to you. We are making choices to take ourselves out of the equation in the name of these other things. There’s only so much time and only so much of you. Something has to give, and you’ve decided over and over again that the thing that’s going to give is you.

What I want you to hear today is that I don’t think you have to choose that way. I do think you have to make choices differently, and you have to flip the order in which you’re making those choices. That flip is what really changes everything.

I don’t think you have to say, “I’m going to put all of my own interests on the shelf for months, years, or decades.”

And I don’t like what it communicates to our kids when we do that. We think we’re being good parents—”Oh, I don’t need anything at all”—but what we’re modeling for them is that that’s what parenting looks like.

I don’t want to model that for my kids. I don’t want them to think that in order to be a parent, you have to have no interests of your own. You have to not need anything or want anything. You just have to be completely sacrificial for decades.

I’m not really here for that.

Most women who are in peak-complexity seasons of life have adopted a mental model. We’ve started looking at the world in a way that seems completely reasonable, but it’s actually the source of the problem.

The model goes like this:

I will handle what needs to be handled for work first.

Then I will handle whatever needs to be handled for my people at home.

Then whatever is left over—if anything is left over—that will be for me.

And too often, there is nothing left. So there is nothing for you.

Check in with yourself as you hear me say that. Is it true for you?

Do you end up in situations where you make sure nothing has fallen short at work, then make sure nothing has fallen short at home, and only then ask whether there’s anything left for you?

That time keeps getting smaller and smaller because you always find your way to the bottom of the list, and the list doesn’t end.

It’s not that you’re not productive. It’s not that you don’t have a strong work ethic. It’s that the math doesn’t work. There is structurally not enough time left over to fully handle everything you could do for those two groups—your team at work and your team at home—and still have something for yourself.

So here’s the reframe.

What if you decided what was actually necessary for you to feel healthy, whole, and human—the things that make you you—and you put some of those things in first?

Not in a way that ignores the demands of your career. You can’t have a four-hour morning routine. I get that.

Not in a way that makes it seem like you don’t care about your kids, because obviously you do.

But what if you put some non-negotiables on the calendar that are yours and then reverse-engineered everything around them?

I know some of you are going to think that’s impossible. Maybe it sounds irresponsible. Who puts themselves on the calendar first?

But I’m suggesting that it works because I’ve observed over and over again—in myself and in the women I’ve coached—that when you draw a hard limit, something interesting happens to the rest of the work.

When you say, “I am going to that yoga class,” or “I am taking that girls’ trip,” or “I am meeting this person for coffee on Friday morning,” or “I am going on vacation and not doing work during that vacation,” something happens.

The work compresses.

It fits itself into the remaining available time because it has to.

This is rooted in a principle called Parkinson’s Law. The idea is simple: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

If you give yourself a full day to write a report, it’s going to take all day.

If you give yourself two hours before you leave for the airport, it takes two hours.

It’s remarkable how work fills whatever container you’ve given it.

You’ve probably seen this happen. A meeting gets canceled and suddenly you have a light day. You think you’ll have all this free time. Yet somehow those remaining tasks expand and absorb the whole day.

The same thing happens at the scale of a week, a season, or even a career.

If work has unlimited access to your time, it will use it. All of it. And then some.

Work is an insatiable beast.

Home can be the same way. There is an infinite list of things we could be doing at home.

But here’s the counterintuitive part: when you constrain the container—when you say work has to fit into these hours because you’ve protected this other time—most people discover that the important work still gets done.

The constraint forces clarity and prioritization.

If you’ve ever worked less than full-time, you’ve probably experienced this. You become more intentional. You delegate. You prioritize. You say no more often. You make decisions faster.

The constraint becomes the game changer.

It doesn’t limit your output the way you think it will. It sharpens it.

This is the central thesis of Greg McKeown’s work on Essentialism. Can you choose the most important things?

Research on creativity bears this out as well.

When people are given tighter constraints, their creative output often goes up.

Without constraints, there are infinite solutions, which can be paralyzing. Add constraints, and creativity increases.

I always think about that classic scene in Apollo 13 where they dump all the available equipment on the table and say, “We have to connect this to this using only what’s here.”

That’s a constraint.

They couldn’t build something new. They had to work with the materials available to them.

The constraint increased creativity.

We think we want unlimited options and unlimited time, but a blank page can be paralyzing. Constraints become the forcing function we didn’t know we needed.

That’s the paradox at the center of Brilliant Balance.

The thing that feels like a limitation can be the thing that finally makes the difference.

If you’re trying to solve for how to grow your career and your family at the same time without losing yourself, you’ve already got constraints. The question is: How creatively can you work within them?

Let me tell you about a client of mine.

She bought a business and grew it from one location to two and then three locations while growing her family from one child to two and then three children.

Everything was growing at the same time.

Several years into our relationship, she came to a session and said, “I think I want to take a sabbatical for the summer.”

Now, business owners don’t really take sabbaticals. The word felt important to her. It wasn’t about a vacation. It was about stepping back and being truly present.

She wanted to experience summer the way it used to feel before business became so demanding.

But the more she thought about it, the more impossible it seemed.

Her team wasn’t fully ready. She had leadership responsibilities. She had revenue targets. She had vacancies to fill. People were counting on her.

Eventually, she concluded it wasn’t possible.

So I asked her a question I come back to often:

What would have to be true?

Not, “How do you take an entire summer off?”

But, “What would have to be true for you to create the version of summer you’re actually longing for?”

She sat with that question.

Eventually she realized she didn’t need the whole summer off. She needed a real family vacation. She needed a slower rhythm. She wanted to spend meaningful time with her kids. She wanted to be present.

She even had a vision of making homemade popsicles and lingering at the pool instead of rushing through.

Once she got clear on what she actually wanted, she worked backward.

She ended up taking at least one full week off each month. She shifted to four-day workweeks. She protected specific hours for her family.

Then she equipped her team and her family to support that vision.

In the process, she built delegation systems she’d been putting off. She gave ownership to people on her team. She made decisions she’d been avoiding.

The constraint forced progress.

And yes, she worked less that summer. But she also built infrastructure that benefited her business long after summer ended.

I want to be transparent that she had support. She was part of Bold, my private advisory circle. She had accomplished women around her helping her think through decisions, challenge assumptions, and hold her accountable.

That support mattered.

Sometimes it’s very hard to do things that aren’t traditional when we feel like we’re the only one trying.

So if you’re considering a big change, think about where you can find outside perspective. Maybe it’s someone who’s done it before. Maybe it’s a coach. Maybe it’s a peer group.

Now, I want to give you something concrete.

Think about what would give you a little more space for yourself and the things you actually care about.

What are those things?

Sometimes I ask women what they like to do, and they stare back at me wide-eyed because it’s been so long since they’ve considered the question.

Start there.

Can you list things you like to do?

What did you enjoy before life got so complicated?

What are you curious about trying?

The more specific, the better.

It’s one thing to say, “I want to exercise more.”

It’s another to say, “I want to try hot Pilates” or “I want to learn horseback riding.”

Specificity fuels motivation.

Maybe it’s travel. Maybe it’s a hobby. Maybe it’s spending time with a particular friend.

Most of us know what these things are.

The obstacle isn’t awareness.

The obstacle is that we’ve developed the habit of treating them as optional.

We tell ourselves they’re the reward we’ll get after everything else is done.

But for now, just identify them.

You don’t have to figure out the schedule yet.

Just know what they are and then ask yourself: What would have to be true?

In my experience, two things happen.

First, the most important work still gets done.

Second, your family’s needs do not get ignored.

Instead, the constraints start giving you information.

You begin to see what might need to change at work or at home in order to make room for what matters to you.

If you’re navigating a season of peak complexity, what isn’t an option is saying, “I’ll get to myself later.”

That leads nowhere good.

You’ll be a better parent and better at your work if some amount of time is protected for the things that matter to you.

The goal is not perfect balance.

The goal is a life that has room for you in the middle of it.

A growing career, a growing family, and you not getting squeezed out in the process.

If you’re trying to figure this out right now, know that you don’t have to do it alone.

That’s what this community is all about.

An easy next step is to schedule an exploratory call. Bring your specific situation. Let’s see whether there’s something in the Brilliant Balance toolkit that can help.

You may not even realize what options are available.

You’ve seen your life one time. You’re an N of one.

I’ve seen this pattern hundreds of times.

Helping people identify those patterns and find solutions is one of the reasons I do this work.

And as always, if today’s episode made you think of someone else—someone who’s quietly trying to do it all and losing herself in the process—send it to her.

It might be exactly what she needs to hear.

That’s all for today, my friends.

Until next time, let’s be brilliant.