Balance & Beyond

Moment: Why the Habits of Billionaires Don’t Work for Women

• Jo Stone • Season 4 • Episode 8

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We explore why common balance strategies fail for ambitious women despite our best efforts and reveal the essential missing ingredient needed to make them finally work.

• Meditation often becomes another opportunity to ruminate on to-do lists rather than finding calm
• Time blocking frequently gets pushed to late hours (10pm-midnight) due to constant interruptions and prioritizing others' needs
• The celebrated 5am routine rarely accounts for mothers' realities and can create resentment when interrupted
• "Pink care" activities like massages and spa days often generate more guilt than rejuvenation
• Boundary-setting becomes ineffective when undermined by FOMO and people-pleasing tendencies
• The missing ingredient isn't new strategies but the mindset that supports them

If this resonated, share it with a friend who needs to hear it today, and don't forget to subscribe to Balance and Beyond for full episodes and more of these bite-sized breakthroughs.


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Balance and Beyond Moments. Your weekly dose of insight, wisdom and mindset shifts, all in 10 minutes or less, whether it's a powerful truth, a fresh perspective or a spark of inspiration. This is your space to pause, reflect and reset. Let's dive in. Do you feel like you're doing all the things that you're told are meant to work to help bring you balance, Whether it's meditation, getting up early, taking care of yourself? You've got all the fridge magnets, you've seen all the quotes and yet, no matter how hard you try, they are not giving you the results that they are meant to. Well, you are not alone. I thought I had what was a pretty good toolkit. I was doing all the things that successful people were meant to do, and yet I was feeling worse and nothing converted. So today I want to share with you what actually is going on when you're trying to use these tools. What is going wrong for you and, most importantly, what is the missing ingredient? What is the missing shift that, in particular, I have found ambitious women. What are we missing that is stopping these working for you? And the good news is, it's going to be much simpler than you think to actually make all of these strategies and tools finally land. So let me share with you some of the tools that I was leaning into the most, and there's a pretty good chance you've tried some or all of these at some point on your journey.

Speaker 1:

It's one of the things that I lent into pretty early on, because whenever I did any research on what successful people do and how they live their lives and their morning routines was meditation. It kept coming up again and again and again. So that, right, I'm going to be still with myself, I'm going to calm my mind. All that happened during those 10 minutes was I was constantly running through the list this is what I need to do, and I'd get frustrated at myself because I forgot to buy bananas. And then I go oh my God, I forgot to do this and I this, and I thought why am I lying here remembering all the things that I haven't done in a day? Now I know that the whole point of meditation is to become self-aware, and I was very aware that my brain was very busy and yet, no matter how hard I lent into it, nothing shifted.

Speaker 1:

Another strategy that I thought right, I'm a pretty efficient person. I can get more done than most. Right, I'm going to block out my time. I'm going to you know, this is the strategic work that I need to do. I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of my life dealing with things that were urgent and not important. I was constantly putting out fires and, yes, there was. A part of my job as an executive was to deal with what was in front of me, but I could never get to the stuff that really mattered, to the strategic work or the work that I really loved, that I knew I had to get to because that was going to stop the fires.

Speaker 1:

But my days were this constant stream of interruptions and pings and notifications an urgent text message and an urgent this, and so, even though I would say, right, I'm going to block out time for myself. This is the piece that I have to work on. Sometimes, you're right, I'm uncontactable. This afternoon, non-negotiable Things always interrupted my calendar, things always popped in. There was always something, you know, something would come from the CEO and I'd be like, oh, I can't really say no to that. And in the end, the only real time I ended up blocking out ended up being 10pm to midnight, on the couch, and that was the time where nobody else was home, nobody else was awake and I could actually do some proper deep thinking.

Speaker 1:

The challenge was, I was exhausted, usually at that point in time because I'd been up and had a very busy day, and so, while I thought I was doing strategic work, it was never to the quality that I'd hoped, and I was then up late, and then I'd finish about, I don't know, midnight or 1230 sometimes, and then I go oh, I just need some time to me, and I would end up scrolling social media for 20 minutes or half an hour and being, oh my God, it's 1am, I've got to get to bed, I've got to get up, and that was this cycle. Another thing that I tried to do which is very difficult when you're up till midnight or 1am was right, I'm going to wake up early, I'm going to get up at 5am, I'm going to have some time to myself before everybody wakes up. This is what I'm going to do for myself. Everybody swears by the 5 am club. They called it.

Speaker 1:

And yet, as I started looking into all these routines of let's call them the rich and famous or the successful, you hear about these mornings where they wake up and they meditate and then they journal and then they do some exercise and then you know they have a check-in with their team and then they you know they might I know some people bounce on trampolines or they have a cold shower and they have a green smoothie. You look at all of these routines and pretty rarely does making lunch boxes, getting kids out of bed, finding socks for crazy sock day, finding a gold coin for some donation and digging out a rat-eared note that you have to sign that day. That doesn't ever really feature in their plans. And many of these morning routines that we see of the rich and famous and the successful are men. Very often, if they have children, they seem to have either a stay-at-home life who's doing all of that? Or they have nannies and caregivers, or their kids are much older. And here I am trying to model what I think is something that's going to be good for me, based on somebody who has a completely different life.

Speaker 1:

And when you get woken up by a child thinking, right, I'll get up early, this is amazing. And then you happen to make a bang and a child wakes up and you end up then getting incredibly grumpy at that child. It's like how dare you wake up before 6.30? This was my time, and so I would find that, even though I was trying to wake up early, if somebody dared interrupt that time, I'd be resentful, and that wasn't the way I wanted to start my day, and very often, because I'd been up late the night before, I'd been falling behind with things rather than actually doing things that I needed for me. I'd be like, right, I'm going to jump on the treadmill, let me just stick on that washing first, because then, when I'm done with the treadmill, I can then put it in the dryer. And all I ended up doing was doing an extra load of washing which didn't have to be done. Then, like, okay, this whole waking up thing early, especially when I'm in bed at one not working for me and then one Mother's Day, like we all do, you know, you get a fridge magnet.

Speaker 1:

Take care of yourself. Self-care is the best gift ever, right? No, I need to do more of this. I know I need to make time for myself, and my version of what I thought I needed to make time for myself was what I often call the pink care, where it's about have the massage, go and get your nails done, go and spend the day at the day spa, and it's these big gestures that are often, you know, half day, go away with the girls, and that's all wonderful. And don't get me wrong, I love a massage. I am all for weekends away with the girls, do whatever you need to do.

Speaker 1:

However, in those moments, I actually found that I was feeling more guilty. For taking the time or the effort it took to actually get out the door made the massage not worth it, whether it was all the logistics and the stuff I had to do just to get away for an hour or then. Somehow in my head there was a random point system that I counted between my husband and I and I hear this from women all the time and it becomes this oh okay, I've had this massage, but now I've had some time away, now I'm going to have to give him some time away and I don't know if I want to do that. And so we beat ourselves up and never actually enjoy the thing that we're meant to be doing for ourselves. Does this sound familiar? That you're trying to take care of yourself, but sometimes the effort or the guilt that goes along with that because then you feel selfish eliminates any joy or filling up of your cup that you get from that activity and you start to wonder well, it's not worth it. It's just not worth it, I'm not going to bother. Oh no, let me just stick on another load of laundry. That's one less thing off my list. And that suddenly becomes how we're going to take care of ourselves.

Speaker 1:

And then one of the last tools that I tried to implement and you could call this a tool, you could call this a way of living was I knew that I needed to hold better boundaries and whether that was better boundaries for self-care, boundaries for my time. And yet I always tiptoed around this line between wanting to yes, I want to, I don't. I want to say no, I want time for me. But then what if they think I'm rude? Or what if I'm a B-I-T-C-H, what if I miss an opportunity?

Speaker 1:

And for me, very often, when it came to saying no or saying yes to an opportunity or a social event, I have always suffered from a very big case of FOMO. And I love opportunity, I love new things, I love excitement and for me, often the saying no wasn't the hard part. I said yes because I was excited about it. I was like yes to that project, because that project sounds amazing. What I was never very good at is saying okay, I'm going to say yes to that opportunity. That also means now I have to say no to something else I've already picked up, and I could never do that because I worried about letting people down, or I worried about not being asked again to come and join that project or come out for dinner or whatever it was, and so I was constantly torn between this line of well, I want to be involved and I want to participate, but oh well, oh, I've got so much on. And then we'd go around and around and around these circles. So I hope there might be something familiar there for you in what was actually going on with my toolkit.

Speaker 1:

And if you suffered from any of these, if any of these examples ring a bell, well, what I had to learn the hard way and I'm hoping I can spare you all the pain is the missing ingredient, especially for women, that was stopping all of this working. The good news is there's nothing wrong with your strategies. Meditation works. Time blocking works. Waking up early works. You can take care of yourself. However, if you do not have the mindset that supports your strategy, no amount of strategies are going to work. Thanks for taking this moment for yourself. If this resonated, share it with a friend who needs to hear it today, and don't forget to subscribe to Balance and Beyond for full episodes and more of these bite-sized breakthroughs. See you next time.

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Jo Stone

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