The Mental Offload Podcast

What will the next step in your career look like?

Does the question itself make you want to sweep the whole issue under the rug? Or maybe you've been told that if you just keep your head down and work hard, someone will notice and you'll get the recognition you deserve.

This can set you down a dangerous path. One were you keep putting more effort, more time, more energy into your current job…and avoid thinking about the bigger picture: your career trajectory.

Let's talk about playing the long game: where you're working on your career as much as your current job.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why it's important to separate working on your *job* from working on your *career*, especially in a slower economy

• The 4 things that matter to your career trajectory – your performance is only one of them

• The things you can implement this week to start working on your career

If you're listening to this episode in May/June 2023, you can sign up here for The Mental Offload's career workshop.

Or learn more about The Mental Offload at www.thementaloffload.com.

Partners who don't do as much as we'd like. Colleagues who seem downright antagonistic. The friend who forgot to text on our birthday. Sounds like a recipe for frustration, resentment, and hurt feelings. But it doesn't have to be.

Patriarchal and cultural socialization shape a set of rules for how others should treat us. We end up carrying this into our relationships at home and at work. And it rarely serves us up something more than disappointment and anger.

But when you learn to recognize your relationship manuals, you'll have a secret weapon that will help you lead yourself and negotiate with others, from a place of true confidence and power.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How our socialization becomes a Manual for how partners, colleagues and friends "should" behave

• The role of culture, sexual orientation, and gender-based socialization in writing our Manual

• Why tactics like "chore strikes" often backfire and lead to more resentment at home

• The difference between healthy expectations and a relationship "Manual"

Get free resources for better work-life balance from The Mental Offload at www.thementaloffload.com.

Is it possible to thrive in a biased world?

It can feel like an impossible task, one where we're always at risk of failing someone else. Or our own standards. Trying to navigate a world that has soooooo maaaannny rules for how we're supposed to do things can be utterly exhausting. And thankless. It also leaves many of us as perfectionistic people-pleasers.

But where did those rules, standards and expectations come from anyway? In this episode, we break down the process of how we ended up in this state, starting with "good girl" conditioning.

We also take a glimpse of how conditioning of additional cultural identities can compound the pressures of socialization.

And we talk about the tools for breaking free of all of it.

What You'll Learn:

• What Good Girl Conditioning is, and how it turns into internalized sexism

• How we end up carrying around a "Manual", and how we end up deferring to it

• How our cultural background impacts the Manual

• The problem with the Manuals we have for ourselves

• Why breaking free of Good Girl Conditioning requires re-writing our Manual

For more information, visit The Mental Offload.

You've probably heard that it's important to have a "good mindset". And you may think that means having a growth mindset or a "positive mindset". And these are important.

But when it comes to balance, what's even more powerful is a CEO mindset.

This doesn't mean that CEOs are some sort of universal role model, or even a role that we all aspire to hold. But let's not throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. We'll separate the instructive bits of how CEOs think, from the parts to leave behind, and we'll address the obstacles and patriarchal thinking that often gets in the way of us stepping into our role as CEO of our own lives.

If you want to subvert the patriarchy, developing a CEO mindset is one of the most effective tools in your arsenal.

What You'll Learn:

• How an "Individual Contributor" mindset shows up at work and at home

• Why a CEO mindset is so subversive to patriarchal conditioning

• The critical ways that CEO mindset differs from a growth mindset or positive mindset

• How thinking of your self, family, and career as "business units" you need to lead can improve your balance

For more information, visit The Mental Offload.

If you lead a busy life, you know that having organized systems is critical. When you have solid systems in place, life runs smoothly.

But when you don't have the right systems in place, life can quickly get chaotic and overwhelming. Systems are one of the 4 Pillars of Work-Life balance, because you will only be as successful as your systems.

Even the most disorganized people have systems in place, it's just that their systems aren't very useful or efficient.

And even if you consider yourself pretty organized, you'll want to dive in to learn how to level up your systems, in a way that supports your work-life balance.

What You'll Learn:

• How good systems reduce the mental load

• 4 reasons why we fail to put intentional systems into place

• Why "default systems" end up tripping us up

• The one thing that can fix a broken system, and how to identify it

To learn more, visit The Mental Offload.

Have you ever found yourself looking at the unfinished projects around your house and thinking "if you want a job done right, you need to do it yourself"? Or maybe it happens at work, when a direct report sends back the document with errors for the second time, and you choke back your frustration, as you wonder why they can't seem to run their own spell check?

Overachievers usually ARE able to do things better, faster, and more easily than others around them. But that also can leave us doing it all – and exhausted and resentful, too.

It's easy enough to tell people "just stop doing everything yourself," but it's very difficult to implement if we don't address the bigger picture: how to work with people who may not do it as well as we do it ourselves.

In this episode, we're going deep into the 2nd pillar of work-life balance: Your Team. And we'll unpack the 3 things you must address if you want to successfully stop doing it all.

You'll learn:

• The 3 decisions you need to make if you want to better leverage your team, both at home and at work
• How internalized sexist messages infect our beliefs – and what to do about it
• The opportunity cost of decisions about how to leverage ourselves
• 1 thing to implement if your team aren't as competent as you need them to be

Want more from The Mental Offload? Get the weekly newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up at https://www.thementaloffload.com.

Most working mothers know this truth: you need to be on top of your time if you want to be making the biggest impact you can. But with only 24 hours in a day, what tends to get squeezed? All time for ourselves.

But here's a truth that we're NOT told: not all time management "problems" are not always caused by poor time management practices. In this episode, we look at the root causes of time management problems.

Whether you're overwhelmed looking at your to-do list, constantly putting off important project, or find yourself snapping at your partner at the end of a long day, you'll learn the root causes of what's really going on.

And you'll learn how to support yourself – even in a productivity culture that wants you operating on an assembly line – so you can start operating more strategically with your time.

What You'll Learn:

• Why it's important to decide whether you have a boss or employee relationship to time BEFORE you decide on a time management system

• How to support the natural ebbs and flows in your energy levels

• The surprising way that decision fatigue derails our schedule

• Moving out of "reactive" mode, to get strategic with our time

• What's really going on when we're procrastinating, overworking, or constantly checking email

• The 4 things that you can do with an emotion – and why it matters to your time

Featured in This Episode:

• The classic I Love Lucy sketch: Lucy and the Chocolate Factory

• 4000 Weeks: Time and How to Use It, Oliver Burkeman. (Also called 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals in some markets.)

• The Life Coach School podcast

For more information, visit The Mental Offload.

In an always-on culture, where work is more and more "greedy" about wanting our time and availability, how can we achieve balance?

At the Mental Offload, we've created a framework for achieving balance. It has 4 elements, that work together to support – or undermine – your balance. Your time, your team, your systems, and your mindset.

Your balance will only be as good as the weakest of these 4. In this episode will talk about how it only takes one "wobbly leg" to throw us off balance.

What You'll Learn:

• The 4 pillars of balance, and why you need each one

• How the pillars work together to support balance

• The major mistake that high-achievers don't realize is sabotaging their balance

• How failing to address our weakest pillars can lead to burning out

For more information, visit The Mental Offload.

Gratitude. It's touted as the solution for so many of the ills of modern living. And the promise is a good one: more contentment, more mindfulness of the good things (and good relationships) in our lives. Sounds wonderful, right?

Except when it's used as a way to paper over our legitimate complaints, unfairness and bias, or disparities in the mental load.

There's a whole industry built on gratitude practices. But in this episode, we look at where it also becomes a tool of patriarchal control and self-gaslighting.

A way of telling women to "put a lid on it."

This episode pulls from sociology and game theory, to help us think about fairness, power, and the mental load.

What You'll Learn:

• When Gratitude practices are and are NOT useful

• How not to use gratitude as a gaslighting technique

• Gratitude vs. Checking your privilege

• The stunning data that suggests this is a question of power differentials

Featured in this Episode:

• Should Women Be Grateful for Help at Home? BBC, July 2021.

• Game theory: Ultimatum game explanation and average results

• Americans' Time at Paid, Household, and Childcare Work 1965-2011, Pew Research Center

• "Gender Differences in Perceived Domestic Task Equity" Young, Wallace and Polachek; Journal of Family Issues, 2015.

• Perceived Equity in the Gender Division of Household Labor, Braun; Journal of Marriage and Family, 2008.

For more information, visit The Mental Offload.

If you've achieved big things personally or professionally, chances are you're highly competent. And although this is a major asset, it can also be a trap.

Have you ever been told that you "don't seem like she needs help"? Or heard that your high standards are the problem? This is common for Overcompetent women: high-achievers who do things to a higher standard than most people. And so they often find themselves doing it all by default.

In this episode, I look at an important lesson from the work of Tiffany Dufu, thought leader, start-up founder, and author of Drop the Ball. By implementing this one practice, you can shift away from doing it all.

What You'll Learn:

• How Overcompetent Moms get stuck in cycles of resentment and disappointment

• The psychological phenomenon of "loss aversion", and how that impacts our thinking around our choices

• Why focusing on our "Highest and Best Use" is critical for high-achieving moms

• The 4 questions to ask to help you put your time, money and focus where it matters most

Featured in this Episode:

• Tiffany Dufu, Drop the Ball

• The Mental Offload

For more information, visit The Mental Offload.