Episode #462 – The Week That Works for Everyone — Except You

Welcome back to The Brilliant Balance Show. We’re going to talk today about what happens when you kind of accidentally design a week that works for everybody except you. How did we get there? What did we do about it? What could we maybe do instead?

So if this sounds like you and you are in a season where your week is regularly working for everyone else but not for you, I want you to pay extra attention to what I have in store for you today.

So I’m going to open this episode with a little trip down memory lane because, at the moment, what the start of the school year looks like for me is I have two children in two different universities, in two different states. And then I have one still buying school supplies at home for her junior year of high school.

And it feels a little different than it did when things were really maxing out in terms of having all the kids at home, involved in activities and involved in school, and managing the full chaos that ensues when you’re in that stage. And I suspect that a lot of you listening are in that stage that I’m describing, where things are in peak chaos.

I remember one year, not that long ago, where I had three kids in three different schools. One was starting a middle school that she had never been to before. One was starting a high school that he had never been to before. And one had transferred into a high school that she had never been to before.

So we had three kids starting three brand-new schools for them. Those schools had different calendars. They had different start days, end days, and holidays. They had different start times and end times. They were in three different physical locations. Of course, they had different administrations. These children chose different activities at them. It was madness.

There were so many logistics involved in the running of that year, with all of the different moving parts. And I remember just standing in my kitchen one day, looking at these three school calendars, going, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this.” I mean, there is just seemingly not enough of me—or any of us—to go around to really make this thing work.

And it would have been really easy to let that devolve into some kind of “woe is me, life is so busy” meme. And I didn’t want to let it do that because what I had trained myself to say for several years before that is that life is full.

And what I like so much better about the phrase “life is full” than the phrase “life is busy” is somehow fullness implies that there’s good stuff in there. That we mean for it to be full, right? We’re making choices about inviting in all of this juicy fullness. It’s a very different characteristic to me.

Somehow saying that life is full, it feels better, right? There’s an implication of agency, that we meant for it to be this way. And I think anytime that we can keep ourselves in a position of agency where we really do have a sense that we got to choose this and that there’s a lot of good stuff in there, it just feels better.

Okay. But regardless of whether we describe it as full or we describe it as busy, I think sometimes you can reach a point in one of those seasons where there just isn’t a lot of room left for you.

Where you’re kind of leaving it all in the field in service to your family and in service to your work. And, you know, maybe caregiving responsibilities elsewhere or community involvement that you have made a significant commitment to. But there’s not a lot of discretionary time left for you to do things that are really for you.

Even things that you know are good for you. Even things that you really like. And that’s the dynamic that I want to talk about today because that really is not a sustainable way of living.

I think that what happens is we start to feel like we have to make big trade-offs, big decisions. This is where people leave the workforce, right? Or they intentionally limit the size of their family because they’re really feeling like, “This isn’t going to work. There’s not going to be enough of me to go around.”

And I think there’s a couple of factors that get us into this mess. And I want to talk about what those factors are. Like, how did we get here? What’s the cost of regularly living a week that works for everyone except you? And then what do we do about it?

Right? How are we going to have a different way, choose a different way forward, that is more effective?

So let’s talk about how we get here first. I think there are a few things at play that I’ve thought about.

The first is really our childhood. I could call this social conditioning, but I’m going to go all the way back to family of origin. Because I bet that when you were growing up, the narrative in your household was like, “You can play after your homework is done, your room is cleaned up, your chores are finished,” right? When you’re done with your work—air quotes—then you can play.

Most of us grew up in that environment. Most of us are raising our kids in that environment, saying, you know, like, “Hey, you can go do that fun thing after you’ve done these things that are required of you.”

And I’m not telling you to stop doing that. I actually think that makes a lot of sense when you are in a child’s life and you have, here’s the factor, very limited responsibilities. There are very few things that you actually have to do.

You have to go to school and do your homework, and maybe clean up your room or participate in some household chores or take care of pets, but you don’t have a whole lot of demands on your time.

Right? I actually also think that is true maybe as you go into college or enter early adulthood, like limited demands on what people are asking of you. So it makes sense to be like, “Yeah, I’m going to get my stuff done and then I’m going to have some downtime.”

Here’s the problem. As life gets increasingly complex, we reach a point where there is no downtime coming. We are never done doing all the things in service to everyone else. And so we can back ourselves into a corner where there is no window for us to do anything that we want to do.

In other words, we get to become like an all-work-and-no-play person without meaning to because there is this never-ending list of things that we could be doing that are productive, right? That feel kind of worky.

So that is the first dynamic. I think we were conditioned from the time we were very young that you play after you work. We’ve never really given up that, even when we’ve entered a stage of life where work is never finished.

It will not be finished. If you are still one of the people holding out hope that it is going to be finished, it’s not going to be finished. It just replenishes itself on the regular, right? And there’s always some other thing you could pick up.

So you can’t rely on that creating a natural limiter. You have to create your own limit on when is enough for the day, or for the week, or for the time being.

Second thing that I think is causal is we don’t really have any time to think about this.

Right? We don’t have any time to say, “Is this working for me? Is there something that I need to change here?” Like, we become so busy doing, trying to keep up with this constant onslaught of work, that we are never stopping to think about, “Is this working?”

“Is there a better way? Could I maybe approach this differently?”

And I think because of that, it just piles on. We stay in this state for a really long time and we never really try to find our way out of it.

Like, there really isn’t any effort going on trying to double-click on this and see, “Is there a better way?” We’re just head down, keep doing it, tough it out, right?

At some point, we’re just praying that there’s a break in the work and we’re finally going to get a day of rest. And again, I don’t think that day is coming organically. I think it requires that we create it.

But I think we get into this situation by using up all of our available bandwidth by doing things and not spending any time kind of strategizing. What is a better way to handle this?

Third reason I think we end up in this situation is there is no viable alternative shown to us as a picture.

Right? Do you know anyone who’s really doing it differently, who has the kind of life that you want?

I think a lot of people would answer that question like, “No. You know, I don’t see people who are doing this well. I see people who are making big choices, like, ‘I am not going to have children,’ or, ‘I am not going to work outside the home,'” big choices that are creating capacity.

And I see people who are really stressed out all the time, but I don’t see kind of a middle ground or an approach that presents a viable, attractive alternative that I could follow.

There’s no model.

Right? The model, the narrative—and this is the narrative in TV sitcoms, it’s the narrative in movies that we watch, it’s the narrative in books that we read—is that we’re supposed to be really stressed and really crazy busy during this whole season of life.

And there’s no alternative model being presented that we can sort of reach out and aspire to.

So I’d like to change that. For sure.

Because it matters. Because there is a cost.

Staying in that operating system past its effective date, right? Like, basically, the “yes, and” operating system in which you will do everything and get all of your work done before you have any downtime—that operating system reaches its breaking point as your life reaches this moment of complexity.

And I think it really correlates with, “I’ve got school-aged children. I have big leadership responsibilities at work.” Like, I’m kind of screwed in terms of the amount of available time, energy, headspace, emotional bandwidth that I have left.

Very little is left, okay?

And the first cost of that is all of those kind of resources get stressed.

You’re very aware that you are stretched for time. You are stretched on energy. You are stretched on headspace. Like, you’re maxed out. And there is not a lot of emotional bandwidth left.

So you’re snappish, right?

And we don’t like how that feels, but we don’t really pause long enough to see the cause and effect. We just—we’re noticing the symptoms without connecting it to the cause.

Second cost that I think is there is our health. It’s so cliché at this point, but it’s true.

Like, I regularly see women in this midlife stage where, again, we’re raising children, we’re killing it at work, whose health is suffering. It’s suffering in a variety of ways.

Most of the women will tell you, “Oh, I just don’t take great care of myself,” and we immediately self-blame. “I’m not exercising enough. I’m not eating well. Maybe I’m not sleeping enough. Maybe I have some habits that have snuck in that are bad habits.”

But we’re very quick to self-blame and say, “Look at how I am not taking care of myself.”

But I think there are invisible health effects as well.

If you really look at the effects of persistent stress, which, if we just call it what it is, that’s what it is, you can have effects in your oral health. Like, you can go to the dentist and have them start telling you, like, “Oh, look, you have gum recession.” Did you know that that is caused by stress?

You know, you can have flare-ups of autoimmune conditions that were sort of dormant in you that flare because you’ve been chronically stressed. People are talking to me about hair loss. They’re talking to me about chronic pain.

All of these things are symptoms of persistent stress that we don’t have a way to get some relief from. And so those health effects are real.

And then the third one, I think, is maybe the least recognized. And maybe—I don’t know if it’s the most dangerous, but I don’t like it. And that is that there is real identity loss in staying in this state for too long.

When you regularly design a week that works for everybody else and does not work for you, right, you start to forget who you are.

Because you have subjugated your own needs for so long that you’ve told yourself through your actions that they don’t matter.

Right? It doesn’t matter. No one is suffering if I don’t get to do this hobby that I love. No one is suffering if I don’t get to see my girlfriends. No one is suffering.

You’re telling yourself that you don’t matter to the point that you essentially are disappearing.

And then I will cross paths with one of these women who has done this for an extended period of time. She reaches a little later in midlife. There is a little space maybe opening up, and she’s like, “I don’t even know what I like anymore.”

You know, I’ll say, “Well, what do you want to do with your time?” And she’s like, “I don’t even know. I mean, it’s been so long since I’ve done anything for myself. I don’t know if I remember what I like.”

And, you know, I love a challenge. So usually that’s an invitation for me to start a period of exploration with this person where she can rediscover things that she likes.

Like, all is not lost.

But how sad that we have to grieve an entire chapter of adulthood where we just put ourselves on the shelf and forgot about the things that make us who we are, that light us up, that make our life kind of worth living, right?

Of course it’s fulfilling to be ingrained in our children’s lives. Of course it is.

Of course it’s fulfilling to be ingrained in a thriving relationship or to have, you know, great work that challenges you. But is it enough? Is there some piece that’s getting constantly ignored and forgotten about?

And does that cause identity loss over time?

I argue it does. And I think it matters.

Okay, so all of this situation that we end up in, where we regularly are living a week that is optimized for everyone else’s benefit and not our own, is like a chronic problem.

To do it once, no big deal, right? To do it here and there, no big deal. It’s going to happen from time to time.

But to have it be a week-in-and-week-out dynamic that we’re living in, that’s where I think we have a real problem.

So, you know, stretching those resources that are available to us—our time, our energy, our headspace, our emotional bandwidth—putting strain on our health so we’re starting to see symptoms crop up that maybe we are not piecing together as being caused by this chronic stress.

The identity loss that’s caused by kind of consistently ignoring and acting like the things that we care about don’t matter.

That’s what we want to flip.

And there is a flip.

Okay. The flip for this is one that I really pulled out of the pages of health coaching back a million years ago, when I was very focused on helping people change their relationship with food, right, and take better care of themselves.

We were always talking about, “What do I do about all this snacking? What do I do about all of these kind of junk foods that I love?”

And the most effective principle that I ever had in that era was the principle of crowding out.

So crowding out is when you focus on what good things are you going to eat? What are you going to put in your body that feels good, tastes good, and is fuel?

Right? So, in today’s era, we’re very focused on protein. Everybody’s like protein-maxing, right? We’re focused on fiber. We’re focused on leafy greens, like things that we know are kind of nutrient-packed.

So if you’re eating well under today’s standards, you’re probably looking to get protein in, looking to get fiber in, looking to get a lot of different colors of produce into your diet.

And if you do that, you are not going to have as much desire for things that are maybe not as good for you.

There may be calorie-dense, low-nutrient foods that are really easy to fill up on. Maybe they spike your blood sugar and crash it. And you’re like, “Do I really need to have so many of those things?”

But it’s so hard to say no to them when you’re spending most of your day depriving yourself of food.

So this flip is to say, instead of worrying about what we’re not going to have, let’s worry about what we’re going to put in.

How are we going to put the good stuff in first and let everything else take its rightful place?

Now, I’m going to argue that there is an odd translation of that into the way we think about our week.

Right? What if we put the good stuff into our week first?

Not all of the logistics that we have to do—drop-off and pick-up. Not all of the little errands and keeping things tidied up around the house. Not all of that. Not meetings and, you know, email.

We do not want to put email in first.

Those are the things that need to fill in around the edges, right?

What we want to put in first is the stuff that’s really deeply fulfilling.

So what is that for you?

It is, I promise you, your list is unique to you. I could tell you some of the things that are on my list. I’ll happily tell you some of the things on my list, but my list is not going to be your list.

Right? The things that need to get placed in this week with great love and care are the things that matter most to you.

For years and years, while I had everybody living at home, a family dinner was one of the things that I was going to protect at almost all costs.

I would move it around the calendar. Like, that dinner could happen anywhere from 4:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in order to get as many people as possible gathered around that table.

But it was real important to me to kind of share a meal with the people in my family as often as possible, to make that meal, to have it be a moment that we all synchronized our schedules to be together.

Did it happen every single night? No.

But it happened a lot more often than it would have if I hadn’t been so intentional about it.

Right? Another one for me would be some kind of exercise or movement virtually every day.

Right? I just have to do it. I need to go out for a walk at a minimum. If you follow me on social, you know this. Like, boy, a walking video is because I’m doing it almost every day, right? Hi.

We built a home gym so that all of the things that I need are right in the house and I can get down there and do it without a lot of friction.

That’s really important to me. And so it gets space even on really hectic days.

So you know what the things are for you that you’re short-changing, right?

Maybe it’s date night. Maybe it’s time with your girlfriends. Maybe it’s a hobby that you’ve—you know, maybe you used to play piano and you’ve just put it on the shelf and you haven’t played in years. You just keep walking by that piano and not playing it.

And maybe you love to garden. Maybe you love to read. Like, there are—I promise you—there’s something that you know would be so fulfilling to you that you’re not getting into this week.

And figuring out how to get that in first, without everything else falling apart, is a skill.

Okay? There is a whole kind of formula for how to make this happen.

So the highest-level principle is crowding out. What are you going to put the most important stuff in first and let the other stuff fall to the edges?

And if I say that and you’re like, “Well, that’s nice in some imaginary world in which it would work, but that is not going to work in my real life,” I’d love to talk about that with you.

So this month in the Coaching Circle, we are going to cover this topic. We’re going to call it “Your Week, Your Way,” really about kind of getting back in the driver’s seat of how are you going to structure a week using a process that I’ve come to call the Weekly Edit.

So that’s the skill that we’re teaching. It’s on September 9th. There is a live class in which I am going to come on the screen with you. We’re going to be in a Zoom room. I’m going to teach this skill at a pretty granular level because, at the big-idea level, this is pretty straightforward.

But when the rubber meets the road and you actually have to do it in your real calendar, some stuff comes up and you’re going to feel some resistance.

So the masterclass is my chance to teach it in detail. What does it look like to really design a week that works for you?

There are a few steps to this process that make it work a whole lot better that I’ve refined over time.

Okay. And then a couple of weeks later, in September, we’re going to do a coaching call where we’re going to see, “How did this go when you took it out for a test drive? How did it feel? Where did you get stuck? What didn’t go so well?”

Bring that back to the call, and I’m going to workshop those situations with you so that we can get a better result the next time.

These things that I teach in the Coaching Circle are practices, right? They’re not something that you’re just like, “Oh, yep, I’m a master at that.”

There’s something that you have to kind of go back to regularly. You have to fight all of the societal pressure to do it the old way and get yourself in a container where you have some support to sustain and continue these practices.

They build on one another from month to month.

So when you come into the Coaching Circle, you also are getting, in your first month in the Coaching Circle, the Brilliant Balance Reset.

Right? It’s a collection of four practices that, when you get those sorted out, everything else works a whole lot better, right? They just sort of buoy your energy so that you can attack the next practice with even more vibrancy.

So that is coming in as a bonus your first month in the Coaching Circle.

And it’s a month-to-month experience. It’s something that you can choose to stay in for as long as you’re getting value, but you also can leave at any time.

So this particular month, September, we are going to be just elbow-deep on this idea of redesigning your week using this Weekly Edit process in a way that I think is going to give you a lot more satisfaction.

So you get to the end of the week and say, “Oh, not only did I take care of the important things for everyone in my life, but I also had a little time for me.”

This week is working for me as much as it is working for everyone else.

And that’s kind of the whole game.

Right? It really is the whole game.

So the link to get yourself signed up is in the show notes to this episode. We make it really easy. It’s also at the Brilliant Balance website, so brilliant-balance.com. There is a page for the Coaching Circle where you can get yourself registered in time to join me live for this class on September 9th, and also to be in the classes that we are hosting going forward, as well as the actual coaching call where, again, we have this two-way dialogue unpacking what’s working, what’s not working for you as you take this stuff out into your real life, which is the only place it really matters.

If it only worked in theory, it wouldn’t be worth anything.

The value to this is that these are the same practices I’ve been using for years now, and ones that I’ve been teaching in a variety of coaching programs, now done at a very accessible level.

I think it’s a very reasonable investment, and people are getting so much value out of being there.

So I hope you will consider joining us in September. Again, the link to get yourself signed up is right below.

All right. Thanks for tuning in today. That is all for today, my friends. Till next time, let’s be brilliant.