95. How to Outsource as a Physician Mom: Start Here

Hey Doc —

How do you manage with young kids with household duties, work, marriage…life?

It’s the question I hear constantly — in coaching calls, Facebook posts, in casual conversations when someone’s hanging on by a thread. And if you have no nearby family and no reliable backup? The question starts to feel like a punchline.

Most advice boils down to: Just outsource more.

But if it were that simple, you would’ve done it already.

In this episode, I walk you through the real answer — the one I give my clients when they’re exhausted, overwhelmed, and questioning whether this version of life is sustainable. And no, it doesn’t start with a budget or a new chore chart. It starts with values. Identity. Permission.

You’ll learn:

• Why mindset work has to come before outsourcing
• How to audit your household labor (without sparking a fight)
• What “paid” and “unpaid” village building actually looks like
• And how to make space for the life you worked so hard to build

This isn’t about becoming more efficient.

It’s about building a system that supports the version of you that matters most.

🎧 Listen to the full episode — especially if you’ve been trying to survive with zero backup and a calendar that’s doing too much.

And because I love to make your life easier, here are the other episodes I reference in this one:

• Spouse Skeptic? Navigating Au Pair Objections for Physician Moms (for when you’re on board but he’s… not quite there yet)
• The entire June husband series:
  • What Your Husband Was Never Taught: The Expectation Gap at Home
  • How Did We Get Here? When Modern Marriage Falls Into Traditional Roles
  • Let Him Be Great: Releasing Control in Your Home
  • Hey Hubby: What Your Wife Wishes You Understood About Motherhood

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If you are going through a transition -- becoming a parent, leaving a job, figuring out how manage it all, schedule a strategy coaching session and get clarity and strategic next steps for the life and career you want.

Strategy Coaching Session with Dr. Toya

Transcript

 Hey Doc, I want to answer a question that I get a lot how do you survive when you have young kids in a two physician household? We are drowning. We are always tired. How do you do it All? I don't know how I'm going to survive because I'm currently not surviving. What do I do? And usually when people ask, the they get is just outsource. Just outsource as much as you could afford. Just, just do it. And it's like, well, that's not super helpful, right?

Because if. It was just that easy. They would've done that. These are smart. You are a smart woman, right Doc? Like if it was just helpful to say, just outsource, you would've done that shit already. So I want to give an actual helpful answer , to that question about how do we survive with particularly young kids.

Full-time job or really any job being a wife, being a church member, being all those things. And usually with no family around, like how do you do it? Okay.

The first thing that you need to do is sit down by yourself and think about what is actually important to you in this time. And yes, it's about mindset and connecting with what you want and who you are. Of course. This is a coaches podcast doc. That's what you're gonna get. But this is essential before you start doing anything for it to flow easier for you to get over the internal turmoil that will come if you do not do this first, and it's important, to do it by yourself first and then with your partner.

Because you need to decide what is your own voice, what are your own beliefs without any kind of external influence or feeling that you can't say something or you were going to say something, but then he said something and it was just like, oh, well that's different than what I figured out on your own first.

And then you all do it together. And the things that you wanna think about are, who do I want to be? So that's a big question. It's loaded, right? But who do I want to be in this life right now? How do I want to feel every day? What kind of physician do I want to be?

How do I want to show up every day in this life that I am living?

And if it's too abstract for you to figure out right now, start from how you feel right now. How are you showing up in your life right this second? What are the ways that you like and the ways that you don't like? And then just flip it. It's like, well, I am always tired.

I don't wanna be always tired. I'm snapping at my kids or my husband. I don't wanna snap at my kids. I wanna be present and happy, and I want a loving relationship with my husband. Whatever it is. Just how are you going through your life right now? And just flip it. And then. Going deeper into your relationship and your marriage. Like how do you want your marriage to be? Like, what are the things that you want for you and your husband?

And then, what kind of mother do you want to be? How do you want to parent? How do you want to show up for your children? What are the things that you want to be able to do for them and with them? And how do you want them to look back on their childhood? Not that you could control that anyway, because everybody's gonna end up in some kind of therapy anyway no matter what we do.

Right? So it's not to be the perfect parent, it is just to be the parent that you want to be. And so when you think about that, and I didn't use the word on purpose, but this is a values exercise, right? What are the values that you have? And when you go through it in that way, chances are you will very quickly realize that you cannot do everything alone.

It is impossible for you to show up like the person that you wanna be, to feel how you wanna feel, to have the relationship you wanna have, to be the parent you wanna be. To be the doctor you want to be, to have the career you wanna have and do every single thing that it takes to run your house and run your life with just you and your husband with no help.

And hopefully the husband is helping, right? It is impossible. So it is really important to do this step first. If you are looking around at your life being like, this can't be it. I dunno how people are doing it. I, I, I'm not sure , these kids, they demand a lot. My job demands a lot. This husband demands a lot.

Like, this is where you start, because I could tell you all day long, just outsource. I do actually, I have several episodes of my podcast doing just that. I realized, you know, this is something that I do with my clients that I was like, I need to do this as a, as a podcast because if you skip this step, there'll be no buy-in or it would be like you are. Pushing a boulder uphill, like constantly fighting internal turmoil because it's just like, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about this. I don't know. I don't know if I can afford it, which we're gonna get to start with this step first, right? When you are realistic with how you want your life to look, it is almost impossible.

I will guarantee you that you will realize, oh, I need some help. I need some help. I cannot do it all alone. I can't. So Dr. Toya was right. So after you've decided how you want to be and what are the things that are actually important to you.

To move through your life. And, once you realize, yeah, I, I really can't do it all. My husband and I, this is not gonna work. We have no support. We need help. Take the time to be honest with yourselves about what roadblocks you have to getting help, because chances are there are many.

And the reason I know that is because you don't have the help now. So is it that you were raised to believe that these are the things that you should be doing as a mother, as a parent, is it that you were raised to believe that only rich people do these types of things and it's a waste of money

is it ungodly to have somebody else do an X, Y, Z? Like who knows? I don't. I don't know. People believe and will raise to believe all sorts of things. It is very important for you to acknowledge that and work through it, because again, you're gonna be fighting. You're gonna be fighting that internal turmoil, right?

What gender norms are you subscribing to that do not currently fit how you live the rest of your life? How you want to raise your own children, but you are following them because that's what you were taught to believe. And the financial piece is really important too, because if you grew up thinking that it was wasteful to spend money on hired help then this entire process , is not gonna work.

So. Seeing what are the roadblocks is really important step before you go into the rest of the, the practical things of how you're gonna get the support that you need to make this work.

so that's the first step. All of the other things are actually quite practical. If you're like, okay, mindset stuff, fine. Everything else is very practical.

So the next thing that you wanna do after you do this for yourself is, like I said, to do it with your husband. You can ask him, you all can discuss it together and make your decision. Because what ends up happening too, with a lot of my clients is that you might be on board, but then the husband is just like, eh.

I don't know. We can manage, so I have some podcast episodes about that as well. They're, they're particularly for getting an au pair, but the principles are the same in terms of talking, having a fruitful conversation to illuminate your husband about why these things are needed and how to get what you want.

So you can definitely go back. Um. To the husband skeptic episode, and if you'll have deeper issues, have a whole series in June about husbands and how to understand them better and communicate and all that stuff, right? But it's important that you all are on the same page because that's another baffling that you don't wanna be fighting.

It's like you are okay, finally. And then he's like, well, no. No. Right. So what you are going to do. Is sit together and figure out what it takes to run your household. And just to give this caveat, this is an exercise that I give to my clients when there's discord, where there's an uneven distribution of household labor and there's like contention.

So I'm going to describe it like I do for that. Some of the things may or may not be relevant. But these steps and the way that I'm saying to do it is very important if there is discord. And I would say even if there's not, because doing this process may bring up some discord.

Figuring out how to outsource and get the support that you need may actually bring up things that you didn't even realize were issues. Follow these exact instructions. Okay? So y'all are gonna sit down and create a spreadsheet, use a Google sheet, use Excel, do whatever you want, and you're going to list every single thing that has to get done to run your household.

And when I say everything, I mean everything. Every task that is done by either of you, you're gonna list them on the first column of the spreadsheet. And then the column headings are gonna be tasks. Your name, his name, and it is important that it starts with the both of you looking at this list blank.

You don't start checking off, well, these are all the things that I do. Because it can seem like a call out. It can be like, well look at all of these things that I am doing and the little bit of things that you are doing. We don't want that. This is a collaborative effort, , he can contribute because there's a good chance there are things that he is doing that you don't even recognize. Right? We know that experience where people just expect that things happen by the fairies that come in the night when it's actually us. There are things that your husband is doing for the home that you don't recognize.

Don't acknowledge, don't even know that those were things that had to be done. I almost guarantee it. So encourage him to add the things so that everybody knows what needs to be done and who's doing what.

For the purposes of this activity, you have your list. Of tasks and you are going to then choose the things that you both want to do, the things that you love doing, the things that align with the values that we talked about in the beginning, the things that align with who you want to be as a parent, who you wanna be as a partner, all of those things.

Because this is not just outsourcing every single thing and. Checking out of your life and abdicating your roles. No, this is about getting support. So if there are things that you truly love and I always go to cooking 'cause that's a good example 'cause it's something that I hate to do, but it's something that some people love to do.

Right. So for me. I would 100%, and it is my life goal to always outsource having food in my house. But if you love to cook, if that is one of your love languages, if it relaxes you, then keep that. This is not taking away the things that bring you joy and bring you pleasure so you choose the things that you both want to keep doing, and not because you feel like you should, but because you love it. So you have those things. You mark highlight them, however you wanna highlight them, and then. That's when you start adding more columns for the people that are going to support you for your village. columns, for the different paid and unpaid village members who are going to take the rest of the tasks off of your plate, who are going to support you.

So I wanna start with unpaid because. The assumption is when we say to get support and have people help you, and you know by definition outsource usually means like paying, but you can get free help. That's why I use that term, unpaid village. Your neighbor can take your kids to soccer practice. They can take them to school.

The kids are the same age. You trust them enough, somebody else can do that, right? You can have a family member that lives down the road, and I actually had a client whose mother-in-law was doing pickups and drop-offs for her, and that was something that was arranged because the.

Mother-in-law had time. She was older. And you know, a mother of the husband is usually naturally at a disadvantage because we control stuff, right? Like our moms get more access by default for most of the time. Once you know your mother's still in your life and the relationship is good in general. They just have more access than a husband's mother.

So it was a gift to her to be able to support my clients in that way. And that is how I want you to think about all of this, particularly for the unpaid village members. You asking for help is a gift. For my client's mother-in-law, she got to spend time with her grand babies alone without my client, which is special in and of itself.

She got to feel helpful and useful in her old age. Her husband had passed a long time ago and she was just there alone with nothing to do. It gave her a sense of purpose being useful, something that all humans want. It is a gift for you to ask people to support you and ask them for help. So if you are feeling like, oh, I don't wanna ask.

'cause that's something that we had to work on. Like she was doing it a little bit and then stopped. And half of our time that we worked together was us working on her getting up the nerve to ask her to make it a regular occurrence. Who can you ask in your community, in your family to help you? who can you give that gift to, It may be awkward. I know asking for help is not usually the strong suit. It is beaten out of us. We must do all things alone. We must just figure it out. We must be more efficient. We must be better. But this is, this is it. This is how you do it. This is how you survive. This is how you quote, unquote, do it all.

You don't, you ask. So who can you bring into your unpaid village and be creative? Think outside the box. Think about that person who mentioned that they would help that one time, and you brush it off and said, oh, they're just being nice. Yeah, they're probably being nice, but they're probably also being sincere and they can help you.

Who do you remember seeing that you didn't know? That kid went to your kid's school and they live so close and they were so nice. Be creative and add those names and give them, give them tasks. Give them tasks to get it off your plate. Ask one of your family members to move across the country, lemme tell you, that sounds crazy, right?

To ask somebody to move across the country. People do it all the time. People do it all the time.

The person may say no. They may be like, what? No, I can't do that. I have a job, but they could say, yes, you never know. And remember, it is a gift to be asked.

I can't tell you how many times I have asked my mother-in-law to leave her husband fly across the country and live with us for a couple months just to help us out. And my mother-in-law is lovely, but we are not super close. At the time, we literally, \ lived on two opposite ends of the country.

She loves her husband. They have a very good relationship. Very good. Marriage. It was a big deal, but I asked every single time and she said no. Some of the times she was like, I can't actually, we asked her to come. She is not here. Houston. She's supposed to be here right now, but she has, she has her own life.

She has things to do and there's no resentment. There's no nothing. But I was not gonna ask what, no, of course. I'm gonna ask her to leave her husband and her house and all the things she has to do because once she can, she will. Okay, I think. I think you got the idea of that one. So those are the unpaid village columns, right? Everybody who can help take tasks off, add them on there. Do you have a stay at home? Mom who loves doing laundry and wouldn't mind coming to do your laundry. It might sound weird, but people like, people like doing all sorts of weird shit, man. And that may fall into the paid village pot.

So let's, let's go over to that. So once you have the things that you love, you have the tasks that can be taken by your unpaid village members. Now you get to pay and try like see. Whatever's left is what you are going to pay for, and this is the time that you are going to budget. You're going to say, okay, this is what we can afford to spend because we already know we need these things covered.

So it is very important to not start this entire process with the budget. Okay. It is important to not start this entire process with the budget. The order in which I have laid this out is very important because if you start with this is how much we can afford to spend, you will naturally constrict your mind.

And you will not be able to come up with creative ways to get the support that you need because you're starting from a place of scarcity. You're starting from, oh, how is this gonna work? I'm never gonna be able to find somebody to do X, Y, Z. And that's, that's not a way to start off getting help and assistance from anyone.

You want to start from an expansive place. That's why you start with who do you want to be? What are your values? Thinking of it from yes, this is the life that I want. I swear there is a method to the ey gooey madness, and I'm also not advocating that you live beyond your means because I love money.

I love wealth building. I love women being educated about finances and being able to manage it themselves and all of those things. So why in heaven saying, would I tell you to spend way more than you could afford on outsourcing? That's not what this is. Doing it in this order will help you prioritize how you spend the money that you do have.

And you probably end up spending less because you have focus on the unpaid village part, which is a part that people usually just skip over. So once you have the things that are left that you're like, okay, this is what we need to pay for. How can we afford this? The language is important. How can we make this work?

Not, Ugh, we are never gonna be able to afford this. When you ask yourself how you will be amazed at what type of answers you are able to come up with,

let's take laundry. It's usually the easiest one you can do. Like me, and have a housekeeper that comes every week and does laundry folds, puts 'em away, which I don't have right now, and I am. I'm so sad to talk. I'm so sad. I want to go back to California and get Miss Jeanette and have her come down here and live with us.

There are piles of laundry dirty and clean in my room right now. Anyway, I digress. You can do it that way. It is the most expensive way to do it. Except if the person was living. Like I said, my old housekeeper did not live with us, so that is the most expensive way to have a live-in housekeeper who does laundry?

There are cheap ways to get laundry done. You can drop your laundry off somewhere. You can do a pickup service where you leave the laundry in a bag outside and they pick it up and send it back folded. And those services are usually quite affordable. So be creative. What are the things I really don't want to do? I don't like doing, take so much of my time and how can I afford to get it done?

. Now that you've done the mindset work and you have the list, you and your husband are on board. So where am I gonna find these people? That's like the easiest step. Honestly, it may not seem easy because it's like, you know, good help is hard to find.

And who do you trust? Usually in this entire process, the things that I have talked about, the things that we usually don't know we need to do, don't want to do, because it causes conflict, it causes us to confront things that we were avoiding before or that feel uncomfortable, and it involves communication, effective communication with our husbands.

It involves all sorts of really difficult work. That is difficult in a different way than finding the person, finding the help.

Like that information is much more readily available to you, right? You can go on Facebook right now and be like, how do I find a nanny? How do I find a housekeeper? And that's actually. One of my best recommendations. That's exactly what you do. You go on Facebook, right? But that stuff, yeah, it's time consuming and you may have to go through a couple frogs but it's fairly straightforward once you get to that point.

And one thing that is important is to be persistent, So what I've had. Clients do in the past, so, well, I tried to find somebody and it, it didn't work out, so I just didn't bother you. It's like, yeah, that's why I knew it wouldn't work, and I'll, we'll just figure it out.

We'll handle it. No, doc, be persistent. Proceed with persistence because it is important. You will make it through. You can push through. You have done it before. You literally could not be where you are right now without having the ability to push through difficult situations. You will make it work.

There's no question about that. The question is, what kind of person will you be at the end of it? Will you be exhausted? Will you be snappy? Would you be burned out? So be persistent system.

It can be challenging. You may have to try different. Let me tell you, since we have been to Houston, we have been, we are on our third meal prep thing, service person, and he's about to get fired because the food is super duper salty and I just can't even,

I'm on my fourth housekeeper. I currently have housekeepers that are breaking shit. All of a sudden the stuff in my bathroom is rusting. I can never find anything they need to go. Right? And it just started talking to somebody else and it's frustrating. It's annoying, but it is important because I know what I need to feel supported.

I know what I need to show up as a type of person. Wife, mother, coach, coach, especially right when I am unsupported, I do not feel like myself. I feel weighted down. I feel unproductive. I am not in flow. So for me to be there and be the type of support that they deserve, that they are paying for. I need to have a housekeeper, to be the type of mother that my children deserve.

I need to have a meal prep service it is for me, but it is also for everybody that I love and everybody that I support, and everybody that I serve. So, going through this process in this way and being persistent.

Is important for you and everybody else in your life.

And the last thing that I will add

about the paid village. And the spending of the money for said village. It is not a cost. It's not an expense. It is an investment. It is an investment in your sanity. It's an investment in your time. You are buying your time back. Because I know how long that laundry takes, and I'm harping on laundry because that's my current situation right now.

So bear with me. Okay? what is the value of your time, even at the lowest paid specialty? And assuming that we are only counting your value as what you can produce as a physician and how you can care for people, even though your value is way more than that, even at the lowest paid level. That laundry is way too expensive.

Your time is better used, loving on your kids, loving on your husband, loving on yourself.

And if you're like, well, no, I want some practical return on my investment. Fine. When you are better supported, when you are less tired, when you are less. Mentally spent. You can be more creative, you can have a greater capacity for everything. And that includes generating income, this is about being in a more expansive state, which will naturally attract more wealth and more money. That could look like having the confidence and gaining the skill to go and negotiate and get more money for the same amount of work that you're doing.

Get actual money for that leadership position that you are not being paid for. If you're not exhausted, you can go start that TikTok channel that you've been wanting to create, and then get sponsorships and then start generating income that way for something that you enjoy doing anyway.

You expand your capacity for wealth, for time, for everything. This is an investment. These are not expenses. And if you think of them that way, there will continue to be that conflict.

You're not gonna wanna do it. You're gonna give up the minute one person doesn't work. If somebody falls through, you're gonna be like, see, this is why I don't ask people for anything. They can't be trusted. And then you're gonna keep pushing through and there'll be so many missed opportunities for you to live your best life.

You know? That's my goal, doc. I want you to live your best life.

And I know you want that too. So now you have a practical playbook for the question, how do I do it all? How do I handle it? How do I outsource, whatever variation of that question, I laid it out for you step by. And of course if you're like, my situation is a little bit different, I just can't get past this one thing.

That is what I am here for. As your coach, schedule a strategy coaching session, we will go through it line by line. I will ask you all the questions. We will dig deep. We will do all of this work together, so you have your personalized plan. To get the support that you need to get your paid and unpaid village to bring up whatever mind drama that you have about outsourcing and how you should be as a woman, as a mother, as a parent.

We will do all of that together. Schedule on my website,

Dr. Toya coaching.com/coaching. Check the link in the show notes in all of my bios, and let's talk. Let's, let's get you this plan so that you can stop asking that question. Stop crying about that question. Stop dreaming about that question of asking your friends. Stop going in these Facebook groups and being like, I don't know.

How do y'all do it? What should I do?

we will do that together so that you can start moving and you can start getting your time back. You can start feeling more like yourself, feeling like you can finally breathe. You have the capacity to actually live the life that you work so hard for, to enjoy your children, to enjoy your husband.

Let's do it. Go ahead and schedule, and I know you are thinking about another doc who needs to hear this, so send her the episode. She has been texting you I can't make it to paint and sip because I don't have childcare or my weekends were just filled with cleaning and laundry and, you know, I made it to clinic late because I had to do drop off.

My husband was in the OR at seven, so it was just on me.

Send this episode to her. It is gift just as impactful as a gift that you will give the next person that you ask to be a member of your village. Give them that gift. Give the doc that gift and give me the gift of leaving a five star review on Apple Podcasts. You can type something and see how wonderful it was. On any other podcast platform. Leave a five star rating post about it on social media and tag me. It is how other physician moms find out about. This podcast and more importantly, get the help that they need, get the support that they need instead of drowning and just accepting it as what it means to be a mother and a physician.

To change the culture and what is accepted as normal for us. We have to have these conversations, and I am leading that charge, and I need your help. I want your help. I'll be grateful for your help. will mean so much. It will be a true gift, and I thank you in advance.

I thank you for listening, and I hope to see you on the next episode of Stethoscopes and Strollers.