A recent article by Fast Company, stated “Eighty-three percent of women who have been working remotely since or any time after the pandemic began, want to continue to work remotely. Sixty-nine percent of those women want to be full-time remote, while 20% are interested in a combination of remote and in-person work. That is a substantial number of women who are trying to balance and advance their careers while also providing for their families.
In Episode 76, I'm discussing the pros and con's of working remotely, working fully in person, and working in a hybrid situation and how the key to your success starts with taking care of your mental health.
To talk 1:1 with me about how I can help you create boundaries and routines to prevent burnout and overwhelm, cultivate a positive mindset that will help you advance your career and enjoy your job, calm your body and mind so you feel confident and have more fun, schedule a consultation call HERE.
Help others find this resource so they can calm, confident, and have more fun by leaving a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review wherever you listen.
Find me on Instagram
Find me on Facebook
Schedule your consultation and let's talk coaching!
Thanks for listening!
A recent article by Fast Company, stated “Eighty-three percent of women who have been working remotely since or any time after the pandemic began, want to continue to work remotely. Sixty-nine percent of those women want to be full-time remote, while 20% are interested in a combination of remote and in-person work. That is a substantial number of women who are trying to balance and advance their careers while also providing for their families.
In Episode 76, I'm discussing the pros and con's of working remotely, working fully in person, and working in a hybrid situation and how the key to your success starts with taking care of your mental health.
To talk 1:1 with me about how I can help you create boundaries and routines to prevent burnout and overwhelm, cultivate a positive mindset that will help you advance your career and enjoy your job, calm your body and mind so you feel confident and have more fun, schedule a consultation call HERE.
Help others find this resource so they can calm, confident, and have more fun by leaving a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review wherever you listen.
Find me on Instagram
Find me on Facebook
Schedule your consultation and let's talk coaching!
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to the More Than Anxiety podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I'm the life coach for stressed out and anxious women who want more out of life. I'm here to help you create a life you love to live, where anxiety isn't holding you back. Get ready for a lighthearted approach to managing anxiety through actionable steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action so you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it. Hey there, before I get started on this week's episode, I want to ask for your help in helping me reach as many people as possible with this podcast. There are tons of incredible, brilliant women out there who feel really stressed out and anxious and they're hiding away, telling themselves that they're too much or they're not enough or that they're not doing the things they need to do because they don't know how and even just feeling that they get so anxious that they can't even think clearly, they miss out on all of these opportunities to be successful and to have fun and to love their life because they just can't find the help that they need to stop believing their anxious stories and to go after what they want and what they love to do. We don't want that. If you have benefited from this podcast. You can help more people find me and this resource by just leaving a five-star review and a comment. Beginning today, February 20th 2024, when this podcast airs through February 27th, next Tuesday, every person who leaves a review and shares this episode with somebody else will be entered to win a Starbucks gift card on February 28th. All you have to do is leave the review wherever you listen. Then message me on Instagram or Facebook I am Coach Megan Devito in both of those places and just tell me I left a review, I sent this to my friend and I'll put your name into a hopper and we'll see who wins the gift card. You guys are incredible and thank you for taking that two minutes to do this. You could literally change somebody else's life. Thank you, thank you, thank you. All right, let's get started. If this is your first episode, welcome.
Megan Devito:My name is Megan Devito. I am a life coach and I help women who are stressed out and anxious get clear in their heads, calm their bodies down and have a lot more fun, a lot more confidence, advance their careers, be better moms all the things. This week I want to talk to you guys about remote working and working in person. This is a conversation I've had several times with my son. He works remotely and I know that there is a huge back and forth debate on this right now. I just saw an article not too long ago on this website. It was called Fast Company and it said "83% of women who have been working remotely since or anytime after the pandemic began want to continue to work remotely. 69% of those women want to be full-time remote and 20% are interested in a combination of remote work and in-person work." ( That is a substantial number of women who are trying to balance and advance their careers while also providing for their families. But hang tight, I just told you my son is a remote worker. If you are a guy listening to this episode, it is for you too. I speak directly to women most of the time in this episode because I am one, but also because that's just who I tend to talk to. But, guys, make no mistake, this information is really important for you as well.
Megan Devito:Since the pandemic and guys, it's 2024, can you believe that? We're already four years out from when everything just kind of went bananas and flipped on us? But since the pandemic, when we look at how people are working and remember when this all started. Let me backtrack. When this all started, I was still teaching several like three days a week at the school where I was. It was a high school for at risk teenagers or teenagers who just weren't doing well in a traditional school setting, and I remember it was like March 20th and they were like that's it, we're done, we can't come back because of this pandemic. So we went home for the rest of the year. Everything was - we were just kind of done right.
Megan Devito:I think that most of the schools in the United States did that, and the following fall we all had to decide how we were going to structure our school Like were the kids going to be fully remote? Were we going to have a hybrid situation? What was going to work? This was not specific to my school, though. It was chaos in corporates, or corporations across the United States, across the entire world, trying to figure out how to keep employees safe, how to keep their businesses afloat and what that would look like, and in that place where there was a ton of fear because we didn't know what was going to happen with the virus, and trying to figure out how are we going to make money, how will we keep the economy going? How will all of these things work?
Megan Devito:A lot of people, men and women, went remote because they had to. We didn't know how to necessarily protect ourselves, what to do. At that point in time, there weren't even vaccinations. So there we were, creating this new way of working. A lot of people chose to go remote that could, unless you were a doctor or a nurse. If you were like for me, I just taught in a mask the whole time. We didn't go remote. So in that place where we were trying to figure out how to stay safe and how to be productive, we shifted so many things. Yes, we shifted towards a flexible work arrangement, but we also shifted our brains. So I want to talk about both of those things in this episode and really my aim is to just help you guys understand what's going on.
Megan Devito:Why is there this back and forth conversation, how it affects you in terms of your mental health, but also your job stability, and come up with some solutions so that we can deal with the mental health impact of working from home, because there is a mental health aspect of working from home. And the mental health aspect of going back to the office, so that you can make informed choices that work really really well for you and your career and your family and be all around a healthier person. So let's talk about the pros and cons of going back to the office. So if you're fully remote now and they're calling you back and I think I just read another thing where it was 90% of workers who are remote, or 90% of the companies who have remote workers want them in the office five days a week. I think we've had a huge mind shift around this, because it's pretty nice to be able to stay home and work. Corporations see this a little differently, maybe in terms of productivity. We're going to get into all of that. So when we talk about returning to the office, there are some reasons these big companies want people to come back. One is because collaboration is good.
Megan Devito:Introverts hear me out. As an introvert, I know that sometimes we can pull away and feel really fantastic doing things on our own, but then you've got one brain coming up with all the ideas and, yeah, you might be able to jump on and do a little bit of collaboration here and there. But collaboration is important and corporations know that two heads are better than one. So bringing people back to be able to collaborate and bounce ideas off of each other is a really motivating factor for them. That includes networking, meeting new people, expanding your reach, knowing how you can help other people who can scratch your back so you can scratch theirs. All of those things happen more when you return to the office.
Megan Devito:It's also more structured and I wonder how much of this is the deciding factor for people. Do they think people are not working as much at home that they're not getting their jobs done? That seems like an easy thing for me from someone who is not in that position of having to manage a lot of people who are working remotely other than my kids when they are home from school. But Isn't it easy to just look and see if someone is getting their work done and their productivity is high? I don't know what the measure of success is for each individual person or what the expectations are for these corporations, but if they are looking at a structured work environment as something where we say - we come in at nine, we go home at five, or we come in at eight and we go home at four, whatever those hours are, if this is a time thing, that could be a motivating reason for them to ask people to come back.
Megan Devito:Here's what we also know. We know that isolation and spending too much time alone Impacts mental health and that the rates of anxiety and depression are directly tied to how much time we are isolated and alone. Guys, I see this with teenagers all the time; I'm raising them. That period of isolation during the pandemic, where we all had to pull away and we were on Lockdown; we didn't have interaction with other people, wreaked havoc on our brains. We were afraid to see other people. Some people were afraid to see other people because they were afraid they would get sick and that someone in their family would get sick. So we isolated. Whether it was by choice or by force, we changed our brains and isolation became necessary. And Even though we didn't like it and it was uncomfortable, it felt safe, which is the exact opposite of what we really are nervous systems need.
Megan Devito:But we know that that, even though working remotely can be incredibly productive, that you can feel really good, that it's so powerful To be able to get up in your house, not to have to battle traffic, not to have to pay for gas, not to have to deal with all of the rushing around, just to be able to get up, work out, shower, go to work in your office at home, and when you're alone all the time, without the collaboration, without the networking, returning to work could be one way to help people feel less anxious and depressed. And I know for the people who are working remotely who are feeling anxious and depressed, it can also feel very threatening. I have talked with people who have developed social anxiety just from being alone for so long that they don't feel like that they know how to interact anymore or they're paranoid about what people will say about them or what they feel, and that might have been a problem for them before we got into all of this remote work and all of this COVID like aftermath, but especially now trying to go back. And for the people who are feeling more depressed, if they're feeling like they, you know, not they don't have the energy to get up and Like get to the office it just feels overwhelming to have to go back to work. And this is the stuff that we need to work on, because when you are feeling incredibly anxious and threatened and Fearful about going back into the office or you're feeling like I don't think I have it in me to do that. I'm exhausted and I just I feel so overwhelmed with the idea of doing that; those are the issues, those thoughts that we need to work on to be able to make that happen for you, if that's something that you are wanting to do or that you're gonna be required to. So those are some of the like, the first two thoughts. But on the flip side, you have also the negatives to in-person work. You may not want to go back because you might remember what it was like to be in the office and feel incredibly overwhelmed, like to the point of burnout.
Megan Devito:And, let's be honest, the talk about burnout and rates of burnout right now, expectations that employers have for employees and really just this, this Boundary that's been created. We learned some really powerful things during the pandemic about boundaries, didn't we? I Think that could be the best lesson in that the whole crap tastic nightmare of just - I'm gonna have boundaries, I'm not going to work 18 hours a day, or whatever people were working I mean, my husband works obscene hours and a lot of people created those boundaries during the pandemic. So if you are thinking if I go back I'm just going to get burnt out I cannot handle the thought of driving in traffic to get to work again.
Megan Devito:Or if you are trying to figure out how in the world you're going to find quality and affordable childcare - what am I supposed to do with these kids? Childcare is so expensive and finding somebody who you feel is trustworthy, that is a challenge. Creating that work-life balance so that you are not going to work, then coming home and working some more, or going to work and so stressed out that when you come home you don't even want to see your dog or your partner or your babies or whatever else it is. So trying to find that balance in there so that we don't fall back into that same pattern of overworking and saying yes to everything, when really you need to be able to leave work at work and you need to have a personal life as well. Creating that balance is really important.
Megan Devito:If you've been remote for a while, you're also probably battling that comfort level that I talked about, where you might just feel like working from home, after not being in person, is better for you. And I mean to be clear not everybody who works from home is depressed or anxious. There are people who are going out and working collaboratively with a friend who has another job at Starbucks, or they're meeting other people who work remotely and collaborating that way. That's great. I'm not saying everyone is anxious and depressed. I am saying the rates are higher, though, because it's true.
Megan Devito:So remember how this was at the beginning and how you figured out, like remember let's go back to the beginning of the pandemic and remember it started and everybody was just freaking out on figuring out how to work remotely and how to juggle making lunch for your kids who were not in school, and how to help them with their homework, then how to show up on a Zoom meeting and be professional, when maybe you just had on a nice shirt and your pajama pants, or even just how to navigate Zoom. Like how do we even turn this thing on? How to manage your time or how to still network or how to make your internet stay up. Do you guys remember how hard it was when everybody was on something at the same time and the bandwidth was so low that everything was just glitchy. How do I submit this project? It's due. I don't even know how to turn this thing in. But you did it, and now it's comfortable and you're at home, which, for most people, is their safe place.
Megan Devito:So if you're thinking about going back or being called back, you might have some thoughts about that. Your brain is comfortable again and you've created a new routine. That's even better if your kids went back to school, probably. So going back into the workplace means that you have to get uncomfortable again and rethink your routine, and anytime we make those changes, your brain's going to freak out, because it likes to do the same things over and over again. So let's talk about the future, of what remote work could look like. I don't know what it's going to look like. We can guess, we can read the articles, we can see all the things, and I guarantee that you have thoughts about them, whether it's like, yes, everybody has to go back into the office or yes, everybody should be able to work remotely from home if that's what they choose. So there are some advantages on either side.
Megan Devito:Right, there's advantages to being remote. You have a lot of time to be flexible. You have a flexible space about, you know, maybe it's where you work. Maybe you're working in your kitchen, or you're working in your home office, or you're working at Starbucks, or you're taking your computer and your wife has a business trip, or your husband has a business trip and you're traveling with them and you're working in a hotel, being able to work, while you're balancing a normal everyday life, like not having to find childcare for a sick kid or being able to work as you can if you're not feeling 100%, being able to go into the office or having a later or earlier start time. This has really allowed people to create a personalized work environment where they can move, while they think. This is me, guys, I have to move to think sometimes, and too much sitting shuts off my brain and it's terrible for everybody anyway. So you can take your work outside and have sunshine and fresh air. Everything from having the right chair or the temperature, or listening to music or not, can really be beneficial.
Megan Devito:And again back to those ideas. On the flip side, though, are you isolated? Are you getting lonely sitting in your kitchen or your home office all the time, even when you're killing it on your projects and maybe connecting with others over like Slack or Zoom or whatever humans were created to need and to thrive off interaction. So I guess my thought in this entire thing is we have to find a balance here, and you might notice that there's like communication breakdown, where your messages or your information isn't being shared or communicated effectively at all when you're not communicating and interacting face to face. Maybe you're bouncing your thoughts and your ideas and showing all of this incredible stuff, but people aren't seeing it because you're not there and they are.
Megan Devito:While I was getting ready to record this podcast, I was just reading information on remote work and going back to work and thinking about all these different, you know like scenarios on how this could work. But one of the other things that I saw is that more women are being overlooked for promotions and advancement opportunities because men are eager to go back to the office at a much higher rate or they're quicker to go back to in person, and that leaves women who are brilliant and working hard to advance without the same level of acknowledgement of what they're working on or accomplishing from maybe being hybrid or remote working, and it's a lot of times when it comes to how much money is being made or flexibility in terms of childcare. It's easier and more of a traditional role for guys to go back to work, but that doesn't mean that the women are not killing it in their careers. They're just not being seen face to face or, as seen as some of the guys are, which you know. This is a long running problem, isn't it? This is all very much a balancing act, though. It's a balancing act on success and ability and mental health, and there is no right answer for everybody, and I am not endorsing one way to work over the other.
Megan Devito:From my perspective as a coach who works with women who are anxious and stressed and who also works from home, I believe taking care of your mental health is job one, because when you are not factoring in burnout or overwhelm or depression from being isolated, stress, social anxiety, all the things then you can solve the problems that arise at work, whether it's at home or remote, with a clear mind, and that's what I help women work through. So let's talk about how to take care of your mental health and achieve your career goals so that you can do whatever has to be done before you can deal with the stress and the anxiety and all the ways that you could work, all the ways that those feelings, those big emotional issues are messing with your success. You have to know what you're looking at and what it is. I mentioned burnout, and both of those issues come from not creating boundaries and holding boundaries. So, whether you go back to the office or you're working remote or hybrid, creating and holding those boundaries has to happen so you're not working from sunup to sundown at home or at work. And it starts with routines, finding your priorities, believing that you can say yes or you can say no, and that you're valuable without working 14 hours a day, and that perfection isn't the goal.
Megan Devito:So I want to tell you a little story. I had a client a while back who I worked with, who had just switched roles in her career, and this was in the remote work, like we were just bridging that gap where people were felt comfortable going back into Work, like not working hybrid, but really going back into the office. So this is where we were in terms of a timeline with her. So I was working with her and she had just switched roles in her career and she was closer than she had ever been to reaching the role that she wanted or that she thought she wanted. But she wasn't really sure what she was actually going for. She wasn't sure if she was on the like the correct career path, and she admitted to me that she was usually pretty self-aware but she was really struggling to figure out what she likes and what she wanted to do, and this partly was because she was so overwhelmed with work and she had a little. She had a little guy at home.
Megan Devito:But she also was having a lot of trouble believing that she was enough in either place. If I go to work, I'm not enough. If I stay home, I'm not enough. Lots and lots of negative thoughts about what she was doing well, or even believing that she was doing anything well, or admitting that she was brilliant at all, which, oh my gosh, she so was, and she was just really hard on herself. And felt like, no matter what she was doing, it wasn't good enough, or someone would see that she hadn't earned her place in her company, and of course she did. But if you are struggling with the thought of if I am remote or if I am in person, or whatever this is, I just want you to see, do any of these thoughts sound like you? Do you feel like you're struggling to feel like you've earned your place or that you are enough where you're working? So Back to her, though.
Megan Devito:But she was bringing home work, and so she would go to work, she would come home and then after dinner, she would take a short break, and then she would work again until she went to bed. And she'd go to sleep, but then she would wake up in the middle of the night to work some more, because she was so worried about doing enough or being good enough, or being asked for the promotion that she totally deserved. The funny thing is that, on the other side of all that, she was also Burnt out. So burnout and overworking, obviously we know that you get burnout when you overwork, but that idea of I have to work more but I don't know what I want to do, I don't know what I'm working toward this was just a like a revolving door issue for her. She was so burnout from working those obscene hours that she was ready to walk away from the entire thing and really didn't even know what she wanted to do, because she didn't have time to find out what she really enjoyed, and that's what we worked on, and that was the fun thing. And the first thing we started doing, because she admitted she had a lot of trouble seeing what she was good at was that we just started directing her brain to find the things that she was good at and what we're already going well for her.
Megan Devito:When you start focusing your thoughts toward what's going well and what's working, you're forcing your brain to change and the way that you want it to go. And let me be clear this doesn't happen on its own. It takes time, it takes intention and it's always part of every single coaching session that I do. Whether I'm working with a teenager or I am working with an adult, we always start with what's going well. What, how was your week? Tell me some good stuff every week. So we started right away with that and, of course, always we set goals. Coaching is always goal-oriented. So I said what do you want? She said I just want to get clear about what I want. I don't have any idea what I want and I was like okay, so we set that as a goal. We wanted to get clear about what she wants and what she doesn't want.
Megan Devito:We worked on finding her strengths and we practiced admitting her strengths without it means something like she was being braggie or she was, she was being fake, whatever it was that she was thinking about that and I can't exactly remember her exact thought, but I know that we got very clear about saying this is what I'm good at, this is my strength, and I'm going to admit it. When somebody asks me, what are you good at, I'm going to tell them, even if they don't ask, I'm gonna volunteer the information. I'm good at this. I can help you. So we practice being brave by setting and holding boundaries for the time that she was home and admitting what she was good at at work. We worked on her belief in her ability to just ask for what she wants in terms of promotions and salaries, and we helped her find more ways to take care of herself when she was home by doing fun things With her family and to do silly things that she hadn't entertained since she was a kid. We dug into what was valuable to her and what her values were, and and what makes her a valuable employee, but also a valuable mom and wife and human being.
Megan Devito:By the end of our time together, she was in a completely different place in her ability to leave work at work and to trust herself to know what she needed so she could decide what works best for her and for her family. She was taking care of herself and she had totally leveled up her career by admitting that she was a storyteller and that she was really good at organizing people and and managing things. She's just like at the end of it and of course, I mean she just admitted that what she loved and what she was incredible at but everybody else already knew it Because they could see what she caught it. She just learned to believe it too. This is the value of coaching. This is the value of working with a coach.
Megan Devito:We have a lot of old programming in our brains that we've picked up things like 'Don't brag about yourself', 'you don't want to sound like you're bragging', you don't want it, you know you don't 'Don't be too much, don't be too much.' All of these old stories that we have. Or make sure that you are working hard. Hard work gets, gets you everywhere, and that's. There's a level of truth to all of these things. But when we internalize those things and we make hinderances be or negative things that we feel like we have to keep up. We could never admit that we're good at anything. They hold us back.
Megan Devito:So when you're working with a coach, what we do is we show you the thoughts that you have and ask you what it means. What does that mean for you? What if none of that is true? What would, what would you actually believe? What would somebody else say about you? And then we find ways for you to be brave and to feel confident and to go after the things that you want and to admit that you're freaking amazing, until it becomes your new normal or it becomes your new first thought, instead of your. I should never admit this. Coaching shows you what you're thinking and helps you step away from a thought into the truth. It is incredible, and what I know from every single person that I've worked with is that once you start to admit that you really are good at things and that things are actually already going well for you and that you are capable, you become braver faster.
Megan Devito:And in this whole situation, as you're feeling anxious, as you're trash talking yourself and wondering what people are saying about you, we learn to calm down your body. So, like, hold on a minute, let's take a breath, let's calm your body. Let's get grounded and now let's see what feels like the truth, what feels powerful. Let's lean into those feelings and let's find new thoughts that we can think about these. This is how we change. This is how we let go of stress. This is how we let go of anxiety, create boundaries, create new thoughts about what you're capable of, so that you can have fun again.
Megan Devito:So, whether you are going to stay remote, you're going to stay fully in-house working or you're going to be some sort of hybrid situation for work, please take time to take care of your mental health. Make sure that that is the first thing that you're addressing, so that you can be successful at work, have an incredible home life and have so much more fun. If you want to talk to me about how I can help you get there, it's super simple. There's a link in the show notes. It says to schedule a consultation call, click here. You click that and it's going to bring up my calendar. Just pick a time that works for you, that's available on there, and give me a call. At that time We'll talk about what's going on right now. What are you stressing about? What makes you anxious? What do you want to see happen differently and we'll come up with a plan for you. You'll find out if I'm the right coach for you, I'll find out if you're the right client for me and then you get to decide if you move forward or not. There. it's super simple, it's really powerful just to know all of the things that are actually keeping you stuck so that you can start making changes Again, just go to the show notes, click the link. Schedule the call.
Megan Devito:You can also connect with me on social media. On Instagram and Facebook, I am @Coach Megan Devito. I'm also on LinkedIn. Just look for me at Megan Devito or Megan Devito coaching. All of those different places.
Megan Devito:I would love to get a message from you and let you ask all the questions. You can message me there to schedule the call. Whatever works best. Let's make the best of this work situation and figure it out without freaking out, because I know that everything's going to be okay. I will help you get there and before I go, remember if you could take time to leave a five-star review and a comment, or share this podcast with somebody else, and just let me know that you did it.
Megan Devito:I'm going to enter you to win the Starbucks gift card. That will happen on February 28th, so your entries have to be in by February 27th. You guys, thank you again for listening, and if I don't talk to you on a consultation call before, I will be back with another episode next week. Take care, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel more relaxed, have more energy, more confidence and a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. Talk to you soon.