Q&A: What do you say to women who are contemplating a career change or break for kids?

Q&A: What do you say to women who are contemplating a career change or break for kids?

I'm your host, Tiffany Sauder, and this is Scared Confident.

I'm going to share my personal, like how I think about that for me and then you can reflect on if that works for you. But this is not about "shoulding" anybody. Like, this is not the perfect outcome. This is just what works really well for me. So if you decide that you want to have a career and have young children, multiple, it is going to be really freaking hard and you have to armor up for that. I don't want to apologize for it, and I'm not going to pretend like it's not. It's super hard.

For me, in my head, if ever quitting was an option, I would have quit by now. In my own head, I have to be like, this is what I'm doing and I'm committed to that outcome. So then my brain spends its energy thinking about how I'm going to make that decision work for me and my family, the decision of me working and having a career.

I am not quitting and not quitting, quitting, and not quitting, quitting, and not quitting, quitting, and not quitting. I'm not doing that a hundred times a year. That would exhaust me. That doesn't work for me. That doesn't mean that I have not periodically stuck my head up above water and said, Hey, I'm going to look around and make sure that this decision still makes sense for me and my family.

So strategically, definitely, it's something that I evaluate, but I don't spend time in indecision, like on the regular, because that is just way too much for my brain. I, also, often try to separate what I want to do and how I'm going to make that happen are two separate questions. So I think that women, families, like, couples, need to make the decision of what do you want it to be?

What's your heart saying? What's your motivation? What's your desire? What's your picture of yourself? Is it that you're working outside the home and that you guys figure it out? Or is it that you're at home and you want to figure that out, because they both require solving. They're just different things to solve.

So I think separating what you want to do... For me, I've wanted to work outside the home. It is the cry of my heart to do that. It's where I feel the best energy and really I feel like it's what God's called me to do. So then I can spend my energy on figuring out, well, how the heck are we going to do that?

And we have had to resolve that over the last 12 years since we've had kids in different ways, along the way. It's not the same static answer. I think that sometimes the wrong question is asked when all of a sudden things break. It could be you used to have a parent close and they moved away, or it could be your spouse's hours changed, or it could be you added another kid to the mix. Like whatever it is, something inside the bucket and ingredient changed and now it doesn't work anymore. It feels really hard again. For me, that's a sign of okay, I've got to resolve something because things are breaking. I go back to those sort of the basic five that I shared in one of the first Q and A's. Is it the home? Like, can I keep up with the home and that's what's driving me crazy, is that I don't have enough time for myself and I need to solve for that differently.

Is it the laundry? I'm spending all day Saturday doing that and I've got to solve for that differently. Is it the food? What is that? What is it that's breaking and getting out of whack and how do I find a new process for that so that the space I'm in, the schedule we're doing, is sustainable. So for me, sustainable is not easy, but sustainable is that I can do it for months and months on end and most weeks at the end, I'm feeling like, Ooh, that was good, we made it. But it's not easy. Justin Moss says to me all the time, everything good is uphill. It just is. It's like super unfortunate, I've had this before, like the same 20 years that you're trying to raise your kids is the same 20 years – like if you're not really cranking on your career, you're not going to get to where you probably want to be.

Like, you're not going to be able to earn the financial reward and some of the financial freedom that I think many of us are working for for our families. So that sucks that those have to happen on a very similar timeline, but it can be done. I think that figuring out what you want to do first and then solving with your spouse, with mentors, with resources, with other people to figure out how do you put the things in place so that you can make that happen?

I think that's a real question. For me, I think whether or not you take a break or step out of the work environment for a while, in my industry and marketing, sitting on the sidelines for a year is probably the same as sitting on the sidelines for five years in other industries. It just changes so fast and you get out of practice so quickly that I personally would be nervous to do that in my job and in the industry that I'm in, because you just become irrelevant really, really fast.

So again, for me, I've decided to stay in the current, to figure things out so that we can do this sustainably. Then it doesn't just work for me. Yes, I'm a customer of our process, but my kids are a customer of our process and my husband is a customer of our process. So we all have to think hard about how do we pull this off and we all have to be happy with it.

So what else is on your mind? Text me (317) 350-8921. (317) 350-8921. And be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening today.

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