In my delightful interview with Jan Marie, she shared with us so many great tips on how to HAVE IT ALL without feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and downright resentful. Think of the image of a super-mum, wife, daughter, friend, who has a good career or a thriving business, plus someone who is health-conscious and earth-friendly, well the list goes on. 

Jan has been a licensed therapist for 18 years before become a Transformational Life Coach. She knows how it is like to be in transition first hand. We talked about how she felt she needed a change with her work, although she loved working with her patients, she wanted more freedom to share her work and to support more people. 

Like me, Jan is also a mum and she has 2 little ones. We talked about how common new mums don’t talk about their struggles or past wounds, as we spend all our time trying to do everything right for our babies but often overlook the importance to take better care of our body, mind and soul.

When we are low on our priority list, our self-worth and wellbeing will be greatly affected, but we may not be aware of it until we get burnt out or literally falling ill.

3 Keys to Maintain a Good Work-Life Balance

We talked about 3 keys to maintain a good life balance, especially when we are managing many on-going projects in life: 

Learn to delegate - try to let go and don’t everything yourself. If your mind saying, “Oh he/she doesn’t do it the right way” Remind yourself YOU CANNOT DO EVERYTHING BY YOURSELF!

Ask for help- it can be as simple as carpooling or get your neighbour to pick up hers and your kid, and you make dinner for both families. Or I often ask my friends to bring a dish when it comes to social gatherings so that I have more energy to focus on spending time with people and I have more energy and “appetite” to do more gatherings! 

Schedule ME time - this is an important part of self-care, once again we need to replenish our energy and nourish our body and mind. It may be just a 5 minutes silence of mediation in your day or a 30 mins nature walk in the weekend. This is vital to keep us above the water and more importantly, the clarity and energy to be a BETTER PERSON. 

None of these tips is hard to do, but the question is: Are you willing to do it? Or at least try? 

Are you being seen or heard?

Another common challenge that a lot of “burnt-out” women face is the issue of not being seen or heard. What tends to end up happening is that we will add more projects and agree to do MORE for others so that we hope we will be seen or heard, yet, it only adds on to our to-do list and get us more overwhelmed and under-thrilled. We may even feel resentful and powerless to keep going on with this never-ending story.

If you are the most wonderful, kind and generous mum in the world, what would you do to mother yourself or take better care of you right now?

The key to breaking away from this pattern and the cycle of “Doing More but Feeling Less” is to better our communication, stop the negative internal dialogue and switch to a more positive approach. Think about how to pivot the awful situation to an awesome opportunity. Maybe it is about speaking up, or delegating or asking for help or simply to say no to things, or perhaps it's time focus more on you. 

We covered so many real-life scenarios and positive spins in this interview, I hope you will enjoy this as much as I do.