What If Acceptance Creates More Freedom? (Vault)

I share what three and a half weeks of single parenting reveals about distraction, time pressure, and the sneaky pull of doomscrolling when you’re craving connection. I also walk through the tools I use to stay present, protect my energy, and keep life lighter without settling or lowering my standards. 
• noticing the spike in social media use and news consumption under stress 
• recognising reactive mode and fragmented time as a creativity killer 
• breaking the doomscrolling loop by moving beyond the brain’s quick rewards 
• finding fun in everyday moments through presence and real connection 
• adjusting the bar to match the season and choosing priorities with grace 
• raising the bar on self-care to avoid depletion and protect integrity 
• practising acceptance without settling and holding dual truths at once 
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.

The Balance & Beyond Podcast Hosted by Jo Stone, founder of The Balance Institute

For women who are already succeeding, but beginning to wonder if they're willing to keep losing themselves in the process.

We know high achievers, because we are one. This podcast draws on Jo's 20 years in global leadership and thousands of hours coaching executives and ambitious women: the patterns she sees, how to untangle them, and what it actually takes to keep your success without paying for it with yourself.

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Transcript

Welcome And The 10 Minute Reset

Jo Stone (Host) 0:28

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. I have just come off the back of three and a half weeks of single parenting. And whether you're a single parent or not, I wanted to share some of my observations that are going to benefit you regardless of your parenting circumstances and share what really caused me to wobble, but at the same time, it is a great cause for celebration. So the first observation was that my social media usage went through the roof. I'm normally pretty disciplined with my social media, but I became a doom scroller in the evenings. I could see myself leaning into social media in this quest for connection, which was really, really fascinating. And as well as my social media use, I also started reading the news. And I typically stay away from the news. And the reason that I didn't have a whole lot of extra time because my calls got squinched between school hours, having all these little eight-minute, 12-minute, 15-minute increments, it's really, really hard to get creative in that time. And that was really alarming to me because I spend a lot of my days being creative, whether it's writing content or coming up with content for emails or for the podcast or for my clients or for training materials or what I need to bring forth or building and developing myself. And so I was so distracted and just in reactive mode, which made me feel despite working all day long and being busy all day long, I'd get to bed and then go, oh, I didn't actually achieve what I wanted today. And then found myself in this doom scrolling loop again. I'm like, right, this is horrible. I'm going to get myself out of it. And I did. But what is really a big celebration for me is that I used to feel like that all the time. I always felt like I was on this spinning wheel and I never had enough time and I could never get to the things that mattered. And I beat myself up for that. I don't live there anymore. And I know a lot of my clients that have been working with me for a while also don't feel that way. If you were stuck in this loop of having fractions of time, feeling like you're always at the whim of somebody else and doom scrolling, it is just a pattern that becomes neurologically and chemically addictive. It is possible to get out of it. And I will share with you some of the strategies I used to get myself out of this spiral. So you've got to move beyond your brain and you've got to find a way to get back the control of your time. My third observation is a more fun one. We had a lot of fun. And fun can actually be found in the everyday when you learn to be present. We had tons of car trips and we had dancing competitions and running around with children who were headless chickens trying to put on fake eyelashes at seven o'clock in the morning. And yet it became this time of laughter of connection. And especially when circumstances mean that there wasn't a huge amount of time for us to connect outside of that, just because we were so, so busy, to notice that when you find the fun in the everyday and you decide to be present, not thinking about what I should have done, or making client calls in the car, or trying to multitask, just saying, all right, I'm in the car for the next 30 minutes with a child. How can we talk about their day? How can we connect? How can we listen to music? How can we have a dance party? And it is a beautiful way to ensure that you're getting that connection time when life looks on the outside like it's quite chaotic. So let me share with you the tools that I lent into in order to break some of these cycles, but also going into this period, knowing what was going to be feasible and how to ensure that I didn't beat myself up because it's madness to expect me to adhere to the same standards or the same anything when my circumstances have changed. So I have to be realistic. Now I have this concept that I call adjusting the bar. And as high achievers, it can be very easy for us to say, right, I'm single parenting now. I'm going to prove I can do it all. I'm going to cook everything from scratch, and the house is going to be perfect. And we hold this crazy bar so high that we can never meet it. And we end up beating ourselves up the whole time. So I look at my week every week and went, right, where is the bar for, as an example, what we're going to eat? Those of you that know me know that I hate cooking. So I went, you know what? Cooking is the one thing that can go. If I'm short on time, that can go. There was very shortcuts. I'd bolt cook on one night and we'd eat it for three nights, and the girls go, sausages again. But there were some bars that I decided not to adjust, or I adjust it in the counterintuitive direction, which is tool number two that I lent into. And that is adjusting the bar up when it came to my self-care. This may be counterintuitive to you because usually what happens is we go, oh my gosh, it's so busy. And I normally work more than 20 hours a week, which is pretty much all I had between school hours. So you would think, all right, well, she's gonna spend every waking second working when she's not driving around Ubering or parenting. But in actual fact, I have to be more focused. And it's so important if I'm the only grown-up here that I am whole and I am not grumpy and I'm not depleted. So I increased my bar for self-care. And by that, I meant I walked the dog every day. I still played nipple on the weekends. Didn't matter. I was gonna do my thing. I wasn't going to give up my things. I did a float tank at a local spa. I had wine with girlfriends. I enjoyed my time because I knew that this wasn't about sacrificing me for the sake of work. Because if I am no good, my work is going to be no good. I'm no good to my clients if I'm depleted. If I'm on a call with them and I'm helping them have a breakthrough, I'm helping them shift through something. And I'm sitting here depleted, I'm giving them some advice to take care of themselves. Meanwhile, I'm not taking that own advice, is incredibly hypocritical and out of integrity with everything I stand for. So I increased my self-care and it was what got me through it. And that self-care sometimes even looked like finding in my bathroom the really nice, beautiful shower gel that I had from a retreat last year and I hadn't opened it yet. So if you're in a circumstance of any kind, whether it's a busy season, a chaotic season, a time of life, a time of year, whatever it is, I strongly suggest that you invest more in yourself. I don't want you to think that you go even further down the bottom of the list and you have to lean in and absolutely prove that you can take care of everybody else. And the last piece that really builds and underpins these other tools is I lent really hard into the emotional state of acceptance. Key clarification is this doesn't mean I settled. What I mean by acceptance is that I looked at my diary and went, okay, I can't do as many calls as I normally would do. I'm not going to fight that. I'm not going to make it mean that I'm going backwards in my business. I accepted that this was how it was going to be. I accepted listening to Taylor Swift in the car because at the moment that's the only thing that's on rotation. And it's so easy to fall into this trap of having to walk the dog every day. And oh my God, I've got to do it again and I've got to do it again. This is my life for three and a half weeks. Not a problem. I'm not going to fight it. And usually a suffering in our lives means we're stressed and we're overwhelmed and we're exhausted. It's because we're not accepting what is. We're not accepting the chaos. And that doesn't mean that I didn't want it to be different. Of course, I would love to not have to walk the dog every day. And of course, I would like somebody else to do some driving. And of course I would love somebody else to cook. But that doesn't mean that in that moment I carried all that emotional pollution and made a whole lot of meaning out of it. So when you can learn to put these things down and simply accept your circumstance and hold that duality of yes, I can accept that I get to walk the dog and I get to cook and I get to do all these things with the kids. And I'm looking forward to the time when he's home and I don't have to cook and I don't always have to do pickup and I can lean more into my work. I can hold both of those. It doesn't make me mediocre. It doesn't mean that I'm settling. It doesn't mean that I'm not striving. It's a way to put things down and find lightness. It's a way to be present in the moment. And it's a way to have a hell of a lot more fun because I'm not grumpy and nagging and short-tempered because I didn't want it to be this way. So they are some of my favorite tools that I lean into on a regular basis, but they were ones that I absolutely had to lean into more. So I had to adjust the bar. Now, key word here is I didn't drop the bar because that is loaded. And that comes with settling mediocre, reducing my expectations. Why would I ever do that? Of course I want to feed my children healthy food. But in that moment, I gave myself a whole lot of grace and decided what my priorities were. And I was more concerned with my emotional health and their emotional health than I was whether or not they ate four or six florets of broccoli. I picked my battles. I increased my self-care. I invested in myself. And most important things we can invest in ourselves are time and energy. So, yes, sometimes there's money, but time and energy are the things that I absolutely had to put in. And I found things to invest in myself. And then I accepted my fate. I understood that this was a short period of time. If this was my permanent circumstances, I would make some changes. Our lives would have to look different, and that's okay. But I accepted what it was, holding in the duality of yes, I can accept this. And I'm also looking forward to the time when it would be different. And that makes for a much, much easier life. So I hope you've obtained a nugget out of this. I said, regardless of your circumstances, single parenting is a tough deal. It's a tough gig. So if you are a single parent part of the time, all of the time, it is not easy. But learning and having a toolkit that fuels you and makes sure that you have something left in the tank at the end of the day is even more important when everything relies on you. So actually investing in yourself, putting time and energy and filling your cup is the best thing you can do for your career, for your kids, and most importantly, 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.