Balance & Beyond
Balance and Beyond is the podcast for ambitious women refusing to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive and where you have the power to define success on your own terms.
Balance & Beyond
Moment: The Life You Didn't Choose
Making part-time work arrangements successful requires more than just reducing hours – it demands unshakable confidence built from the inside out rather than being dependent on external validation or productivity.
• Unshakable confidence is essential for setting and maintaining boundaries in part-time roles
• Women often try to prove themselves by maintaining full-time workloads in part-time hours
• Finding your voice is crucial for negotiating appropriate workloads and expectations
• Clear boundaries around meetings, email responses, and availability prevent work creep
• Strong focus and the ability to disconnect completely are non-negotiable skills
• Companies implementing four-day workweeks often see increased productivity and creativity
• Assess your readiness for part-time work by examining your boundaries, confidence, and focus
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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 Now. We talk about boundaries, disconnection and focus.
Speaker 1:One of the other pieces that I have found must be in your toolkit and really must be embodied in you is you must have unshakable confidence if part-time is going to work. Confidence if part-time is going to work. And where I see this rear, it's ugly head, is people feel like, because they've got flexibility, well, I've got to prove that I've still got it. I've got to prove that my output isn't going to suffer. I'm going to prove that I'm still a senior or I can delegate and I'm on top of things. And so these women, because you don't have unshakable confidence, lean in to feeling like they have to get more stuff done and thinking that doing more is going to make them feel better. They're so focused on everybody outside of themselves, without having what I call inside out confidence, or unshakable confidence, that they actually get into a spiral of eroding their confidence. So if your confidence is based on how much you can get done. Well, then, when you can't do enough, you don't feel good. If your confidence is based on what somebody says about you or feedback that you get, well, if they can give it to you, they can take it away, and so you might have a bad meeting, or something doesn't go the way you wanted, or something a project you're running goes off the rails. Well, now you start shaking because oh, oh, I've got to do more. And then you dive in and you do more.
Speaker 1:Unshakable confidence is not related at all to how many hours you work or how much you get done. It is not outside in. That's based on what you can produce. It's based on external markers, it's based on positions, it's based on titles. It has to be built from the inside out so that you don't feel like you have to prove yourself, so that you don't feel incredibly grateful for the flexibility, and so that's okay. I'll come to this meeting on Friday when I'm not meant to be working. No, from a place of unshakable confidence. You say no, from a place of unshakable confidence. You are able to hold these boundaries. So, once again, these all stack together.
Speaker 1:Now the last piece that makes a really, really big difference, and I see this play out in so many different ways is part-time will not work if you have not found your voice yet, and you usually won't find your voice until you have unshakable confidence. What this means is, if you haven't found your voice, you aren't able to have that perhaps difficult conversation with your boss or your team about your workload to say, all right, I'm now making the shift to part-time, what are we doing about my workload? So many women go that's okay, I'll keep it, take off this one project off me. But then, because they're still yes people, they still say yes to other things and so their workload ends up being just as big. And now they're doing a full-time role in four days and just getting docked 20% for it, and they don't have the ability to speak up and ensure that the structures are set up well for success for them.
Speaker 1:So by this I mean what are your new KPIs? What are your targets? What are the check-ins you've got with your team or your manager about? Is this working or is this not? Have you got a lot of clarity on when you're in the office versus when you're not? About what you're on, about what you're off? What meetings are you prepared to take?
Speaker 1:What are your boundaries around phone calls or meetings on your days off? What does urgent mean? How do people escalate these things to you? Have you found your voice and said to a project that you know schedules a critical meeting on a Friday Sorry, I'm unavailable on that day? Have you told your voice and said to a project that schedules a critical meeting on a Friday sorry, I'm unavailable on that day? Have you told everybody that you won't be responding to emails? Or because you don't have boundaries, you respond to them anyway. So you train them how to treat you. And then you get upset that they've emailed you on a Friday or they've given you a call when you're with the kids and you train them how to treat you and so many women feel happy that they've you know they've been able to drop a day and still, you know, retained a senior position and whether they're in management. But that if this is what you want, well then you have every right to it, but you have to claim it and when you've really found your voice. I know women who build all of these things and they are so productive that they managed to negotiate working a four-day week with no drop in pay and without now thinking well, I've got to do 10 to 11 hour days because I've now got to do my 50 hours a week in four. There is so much data now coming out, with many companies actually shifting to this permanent four-day week and still paying staff for five around productivity, around creativity, that there are huge benefits to this.
Speaker 1:But if you aren't focused, if you are still procrastinating, if you are still being a perfectionist, well then this isn't going to work for you. If you can hand on heart, say I've got strong boundaries, I have learnt to disconnect, I know how to focus, I'm not going to fall victim to procrastination, I completely back and believe in myself, and I mean not just in the meeting, but I mean you're not beating yourself up, I mean you're not second-guessing yourself, you have access to your intuition and with all of this, you can find your voice, you can deliver the zinger, you can say that piece. Well then, I wish you all the best on your part-time journey, and I know that this can be a wonderful way to set up your environment for success. However, I see too many women that don't know how to do these things and don't know how to put these strategies in place because of a lot of beliefs and a lot of inherent lack of worthiness. So it's only once you can build all these things up and, as you can see, these all are going to work together.
Speaker 1:If you can't learn to focus well, then you're not going to be able to set your boundaries. You need to disconnect as part of your uncheckable confidence. This is this crazy soup of wonderful things that, as women, we get to work on. So, if you are considering going part-time, if you've been banding around the idea, I want you to have a really hard look at yourself and make sure that you are able to tick all of these boxes and if so, you're going to have a wonderful whatever time you've selected off for you. If not, it's time for a really good heart to heart and a really good understanding of where now you need to put your energies, what support you need, so that, if you are making this decision, you are making it with the best chance of success, however long you're working. I wish you all the best 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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