79: You Don't Need Better Time Management, You Need This Instead

Do you feel like you’re winning in business but losing at home? Or perhaps failing at both because you’re spread so thin? If you’ve ever found yourself answering “urgent" client emails while sitting at your kid's game, or if the only way you get a break is by literally getting sick, this episode is a must-listen.

Work-life balance is often held up as something to aim for, but in practice it can feel frustratingly out of reach, especially for women entrepreneurs who care deeply about their work and carry a lot of responsibility in other areas of life too.

In this episode, I unpack why the idea of balance can be misleading and what may actually be driving the feeling of being constantly on, overstretched, and unable to switch off. 

What You Will Learn in This Episode

• The hidden internal rules that shape how you work, rest, and relate to success
• Why cognitive awareness alone is often not enough to create lasting change
• How embodiment helps you make decisions from your internal world instead of external pressure

Get my FREE weekly newsletter with strategies to help you get out of your own way and have the success that you say you want https://tertiariegler.com/news/

🧲 If you’re doing all the right things in your business but still feeling stuck, overthinking every move, or struggling to create the momentum you know you’re capable of,  I'd love to support you. 

Book a FREE discovery call at tertiariegler.com/book. We’ll explore what’s really keeping you stuck  and whether working together is the right fit.

📌Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only.  It does not constitute therapy, medical advice or business coaching.

Transcript

Hello, it is Tertia, and you are listening to the Feminine Embodiment Podcast. This is a show where I teach women entrepreneurs practices and tools to reinvent yourself by getting out of your head and into your body so that you can feel more fully alive, more magnetic, and have the impact you are here to have with more ease. Today I want to talk about the myth of work-life balance, but before I dive in, if you get to the end of this episode and you say, This is me, I'm constantly on and I am done with that. I wanna permanently change that for the better and step into my genius, then hop onto a free discovery call with me. I'll leave a link for you in the show notes and we can see how we can work together. Okay, let's get to the episode. So many, many moons ago when I was a baby coach, I had just left my corporate career of 8 years. I was growing my business. And I was lucky enough to have one big client that I could bill every month, but I didn't want to have only one egg in my basket. And so I was hustling shamelessly for more clients and I was everywhere. I was networking like anything, and I was also totally unbalanced. I was working incredibly long hours. I was spreading myself really thin and there was a lot going on. I was so happy every time that I signed on a new client that they could basically decide when they wanted to work with me. So I ended up working over the weekends and I ended up working in the evenings because this is what my clients asked from me. And I was so afraid that they wouldn't want to work with me unless it was after hours, hours that suited them. So in the days I would do networking and then in the evenings and over the weekends I would work with my clients. And during this time I also hired a coach. And one of the things that I wanted my coach to support me with was work-life balance because I felt that I was absolutely too busy and too overwhelmed to do anything outside of work. What I wanted from my coach is I wanted her to give me a magic formula so that I could give myself time off without feeling guilty about it. Like I thought if I knew what the ratio was of what work-life balance should look like, then I could take time off and I could build in some me time into my days without feeling bad about it and without feeling like I was letting my business down and not giving it my best. And of course, you know, there's no, no such magic formula that doesn't exist. Work-life balance is a myth, right? And you probably know this too. As my business grew more successful, this problem just became worse. Now, of course, when you're building your own business, since this is your vision and your dream that you're working with, it's natural to feel that you have to give all of your time and attention to it. But what happened with me, and this is really at the, the foundation, I guess, of what this episode is about, is the very traits that got me to be successful in the first place also became the things that ended up working against me. And then when I did my feminine embodiment coach training a few years later, I actually discovered what was going on underneath. And here it is. So many of us who are successful, high achievers, ambitious, we live by a set of rules and we run our businesses by a set of rules that we believe to be true, right? So it's these internalized rules, and I'm going to run you through a few of these. The first one is that you equate being busy with having value with being valuable. So you tie your worth to something external of you, to something that the outside world can see, something physical and actual. And especially for us as women, this can hit us especially hard because we tend to be more perfectionistic. And then many of us, if you have children and you work for yourself, you have this super mom thing going on. And I know that this was definitely a big theme in my life as well, where you try to be the business owner, the partner, the daughter, the mother, the sister, the friend, the community member, the one who does everything at 100%. And of course, this is not sustainable. And then you add to that, not only do we want to give 100% to everything, but also as soon as we hit those goals that we've set for ourselves, it doesn't feel like we've really arrived anywhere. And what we then tend to do is we tend to keep on moving the goalpost. It feels never good enough to celebrate it. And that ties in with the second set of rules, which is you undervalue your achievement. So that looks like no matter how much you work and what results you get, it feels like it's never enough. So we have this consistent pressure to do more. We compare ourselves to other, we look at what other people achieve and we look at their lives and we end up feeling that our lives aren't as glitzy or as successful as theirs. And with comparison, you're only basically shooting yourself in the foot, right? And I know you know this, but I think what is important to understand here is that even if we know these things on a cognitive level, even if we know that we wear our busyness as a badge, or even if we know that we undervalue our own successes, knowing something on a cognitive level and knowing something somatically and exploring that somatically are two completely different things. And I'm going to get into the somatics of this a little bit later. So there's two other things that I see play out in these rules that we have. The third one is that we tend to prioritize work above everything. So you put work ahead of your health and you put work ahead of your relationships and not on purpose, not cognitively. You're not doing this on purpose, but it just ends up happening that there's forever work creeping into your relationships. So you're sitting on conference calls instead of being at your kid's game. More often than not, you work straight through lunch and you only realize when your sugar crashes late afternoon that you haven't eaten, and then you have a cup of coffee just to get through the rest of the day. We get so good at numbing our physical cues to get the job done, and I see this as something that especially happens with my high achiever clients. It's like they have this internally driven slave master. So one of the things that I love exploring with my clients is the roles that they play in the different dimensions of their lives. So for example, I had a client that was playing the role of taskmaster, right? Whenever she was in her business, whenever she was doing all of the things that needed to be done, she was like in the archetype or in the role of taskmaster, like pushing forward and ticking off the boxes and, you know, putting her head down and getting everything done no matter the cost. And she wanted to switch from that into what she called her conductor. And her conductor was the person who ran her business like a symphony that created beauty, and there was space between the notes and soul that happened when she was playing the role of conductor in her business instead of playing the role of taskmaster. And this is what I meant when I said embodiment makes a difference. Right? Instead of just working on the level of the mind or coming up with a plan or a strategy of how you're going to start running your business differently, or how you're gonna start prioritizing your health or your relationships above what it is that you do every day. When we work on an embodied level, we are really making changes to these rules, these rules that are written in your subconscious mind on a nervous system level. And that's what makes it sustainable. Okay. And then the final thing that I want to talk about in terms of the rules that we live by, that we think is true, is that we think we have to, we unconsciously believe that we need a reason to relax. We need a reason to feel pleasure and we need a reason to have space. And you can recognize if this happens to you is whenever you feel anxious or guilty or like you're being lazy when you're taking time off. I had a client who would reorganize her Google Drive every time a client canceled on her. So if the client canceled, let's say 20 minutes before the session, she would take that hour that the client had to do things like moving around her Google Drive or organizing her cupboards and her bookshelves. And maybe you do this too. Maybe you feel when you have nothing to do, it feels deeply uncomfortable. And so many of my clients use work as a buffer to kind of avoid feeling that internal flatness or emptiness. One of the other ways in which this might show up is when you get sick, it's a huge relief because now you can rest without feeling bad, without feeling like you're stealing time from your business or that you're doing something that you're not supposed to do. So something that you might not know is that these set of rules that I have just shared with you are actually signs of what is called internalized capitalism. And this comes courtesy of this hyper-masculine world that we live in, the world that is very production-oriented, very capitalistic, and that focuses on profit over people. And so what we've done is we have internalized so many of these rules that we see externally and we apply them to our own lives. And then when you also bring your ambition and your drive to succeed with these internalized capitalism rules, it really feeds these traits that makes us successful but also works against us in the end. So if you've identified that these four patterns play out in your life, I'm going to share with you now two practices that you can begin to explore in your own life and in the way that you run your business, in the decisions that you take every day to bring some change about. So the first practice that I wanna share with you is really a reflection that you begin, or an inquiry that you begin to engage in. Ask yourself, what season am I in and are my priorities aligned with this? Part of the rules that we have adopted and that we live out into our businesses that actually count against us is we tend to want to be on all the time. We tend to think that we need to be in summer all the time. We think that we need to be in like hyper-production mode all the time. And whenever we go through phases and seasons in our life, as we do, where we are not on top of our game, where we are not feeling super creative or where we don't have so much energy, instead of working with that season as it is, we judge ourselves and we often just try to push through. If we want to have businesses where we feel alive, where we are magnetic, where we can have that impact that we desire without sacrificing ourselves, we need to honor ourselves and we need to honor the seasons that we are in. And so you need to make sure that the goals that you have is aligned with the season that you are in. I, for example, last year I had to cut down on the number of clients that I worked with because last year I prioritised my health. I am going through perimenopause. I'm in late perimenopause, and last year was quite a rough ride with the, with the year of the snake shedding its skin and getting rid of all the things that no longer serves us. I really experienced that last year. So I took the decision to cut down the number of clients that I worked with, and I also called off a group program that I already had people signed up for the program. They had already paid. And before we started the very first call, I actually decided to call it off because I didn't have the capacity at that stage to hold space for a group of people. I am in a completely new season this year, thank goodness, because Some seasons are harder than others, and it doesn't mean just because we embrace the season that we are in that we don't recognize how challenging some of these seasons are. But there are also so many gifts in them. And this year, my season, as I say, has changed. I feel I have a lot more energy available to me, so I've increased my podcast episodes to weekly episodes. I have a weekly newsletter that I now send out that's not just simply a promotion of this podcast episode, but it's a newsletter that's completely independent on a completely different topic. So really wanting to bring value and offer support to my community in that way as well. And so if you're not on my newsletter, I'll put a link for you in the show notes so that you can get onto my newsletter as well. I revamped my one-on-one offering, which is very exciting for me. I have capacity, my creativity is soaring, and I'm really tapping into this in this season of my life. So once you've identified what season of life you're in, it's going to help you to decide what you want to say yes to and what you want to say no to. So the biggest problem that I see with many of my clients is that their decisions come from these internal rules, right? So these unconscious internal rules form their decisions, Or they make their decisions from external pressure, what they see happening in the external world. And my suggestion to you is that you learn how to make decisions from your internal GPS. And the way that we do that is to learn the skill of embodiment. So embodiment is really concerned with dialing and turning up the volume of your internal world. So instead of just living from the head up, from the neck up where we move and focus our attention outside of us, we actually bringing our whole body online so that we can lead and make decisions with our whole being. All right? So not only your thoughts, but your thoughts, your physical body, your emotional body, your feelings, your inner knowing. And this is a very comprehensive data set that you can use to make decisions that really support you and that nourish you and that can let you do really well while you are also being well. Now, when you make a decision from these internal programs, these programs that are running in the background, or decisions from 'I have to' or 'shoulds,' then all that you're doing is you're reinforcing that old identity. And I know it can be so hard to start to change the things that we do. I remember a few years ago I had tennis elbow, and when you have tennis elbow, you have to avoid using your arm for certain activities. And the number of times where I would just use my arm without thinking about it drove me nuts, and I had to apply a lot of focus to remind myself not to use my hand or my arm in that way. And that's why I love embodiment because it's literally a practice that you do so that you can become sensitive to your internal world. And that makes it less easy to fall back into old habits. You're literally rewiring your nervous system. And that's the second tool or strategy that I wanna speak about, and that's our nervous system capacity. Let's say you've been hitting your revenue goals and you, your metrics are looking great, but at 9 o'clock every night, you're still checking your phone. You've got a pit in your stomach. I see you. The problem is, and this is especially true for those of us who work from home, like my office, I have a home office. The problem is that our boundaries blur, and it's not because you don't have discipline that you're checking your phone at 9:00 PM. It's not because you don't have discipline that you've tried 30 different apps in the last 6 months to keep you focused and on task. Our nervous systems feel safer with what it knows. So states like being stressed, being busy, which comes from this internalized capitalism rules that we have written that are running in the background. Our nervous system knows that. So it's going to continue to let us be in that state. And that's why we try to get a very urgent email out at the same time while you're cooking dinner. And so we often use the term self-sabotage, but it's not really self-sabotage. I believe The actions that we take, the behaviors, the way in which we do things, the way in which things play out in our lives, it has so much to do with what our nervous system knows. All right. And if this is your nervous system, if these patterns play out for you as well, then the clue here is that we need safety in your nervous system. What I noticed since my work has shifted from travelling to clients and working on site to working more online and doing all of my client work online, I'm home a lot. And so I need very clear boundaries and very clear transitions to show my nervous system that it's safe to switch off. I need practices during the day to anchor myself and to ground myself so that I don't have my nervous system sending off alarm bells at 9 o'clock, trying to kill fires that might not even exist, but so that I can move with more ease through my workday. And that ease is also then something that I can bring to my client sessions. If we work one-on-one with clients, you bring yourself to the client session, right? And so I know for me, the self that I want to bring to the client session is a self that has capacity to hold space, for my client. It is a self that feels comfortable and confident and grounded in who I am and in my ability to hold space for my client because they are going to pick up that resonant energy and that is going to support them in their goals. So not only do I, this is how I think about it, not only do I hold and work with my nervous system capacity for my own wellbeing, but I also do it so that I can hold the wellbeing or hold space rather for my clients for them to discover their wellbeing. This is what I've learned about work-life balance. There's no such thing as 50/50. It really has so much to do with our intention, the thing that we put focus on, and that which drives us from the inside out because our programming, the lay of our nervous system, our internal map of the world, the perceptions that we have about who we the relationship that we have with ourselves and with our success, the definition that we have about success, all of those things affect how effective we are at maintaining quote unquote work-life balance. I hope you found this insightful. Now you can 100% work with your nervous system, creating safety in your nervous system, to have more space, to have more ease, to be less switched on all the time. You can absolutely do that yourself. You can also learn how to bring, or honor rather, the season that you're in and to align your priorities with that season. If you want my help to do it faster and to be more on point and to clear those internal capitalism programmings out of your nervous system so that you can move forward with more ease, then the best thing for you to do is to head over to my website, tertia regler.com, and sign up for a free feminine embodiment discovery call. And we can talk about where you are right now, where you want to get to. And if you want to work with me, explore what that looks like, then I can discuss that with you as well. So let's wrap this up. The thing is, there is no magic formula. There's nobody in the external world that can give you permission to stop pushing so hard, that can give you permission to bring in more wellness and nourishment and space into your everyday. There's nobody that can give you permission to work less and play more and bring more pleasure in. You are the only one that can give that permission to yourself. And as I'm sure you have learned from this episode, we can do that, find that internal permission within ourselves by working in an embodied way on the level of the nervous system and working with our internal felt sense, that data in our inner world that's available to us. This is the best, most effective and easy way that I know of to start changing habits and to start showing up in a different way and to reinvent yourself so that you can be that fully alive and magnetic woman instead of someone who is spread thin, feeling guilty that no one has the full experience of you. So that's it for this week. I hope that you found this episode helpful. Thank you so much for joining me here. I appreciate you so much, and I will speak to you in the next one. Bye.