Tag: body awareness

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Body Awareness Career Parenting

Reclaiming Motherhood

Mother and daughter reconnecting visualizing reclaiming motherhood

Coping Mechanisms vs Empowerment Strategies

Motherhood is one of the most rewarding yet challenging journeys in life. At some point, nearly every mother has resorted to coping mechanisms to survive the whirlwind of responsibilities and emotions. But while these strategies offer short-term relief, they can sometimes trap us in a mindset that makes parenting feel heavier than it needs to be. Enter empowerment strategies: Intentional practices that help us reclaiming motherhood as confident, grounded parents and professionals, improving not only family dynamics but also workplace performance.

‘Knowing and Noticing’ to Reclaim Motherhood

Obviously, we cannot always be on top of things and feel empowered all the time, but it is important to notice when we are in survival mode and ‘only’ coping rather than thriving. When you acknowledge that you are just about coping, you can find your way back to a more empowered self. A self that is more in line with the person you want to be, the life you want to live. Allow yourself to cope in the least harmful way. Below I am giving a few examples on common coping mechanisms. By acknowledging them as such and tweaking them a little, they can pivot you closer to empowerment.

Self-Compassion for Alignment

In short, you can reclaim motherhood by being aware of what state you are in. Be gentle with yourself when you are in survival mode and trust, that you will get out of this ‘just about coping’ stage and back into alignment with yourself. Take the time to look closely, understand why you got where you are and what to do to get to where you want to be. The empowerment strategies below provide a menu of options to help you move beyond coping when you are ready.

Common Coping Mechanisms in Parenthood

Coping mechanisms are tools we use to manage stress or emotional overwhelm. Here are a few that are particularly common among parents:

woman carrying shopping bags over her shoulder; visualizes retail therapy as a coping mechanism preventing her to reclaim her motherhood
  1. Sarcasm and Jokes: Humor is a universal coping tool. Who hasn’t laughed at a meme about the chaos of parenting or cracked a joke about their kids’ antics? While this can offer a moment of levity, over-relying on humor can perpetuate a sense of powerlessness or victimhood. There is a difference between sharing a laugh and connecting over it, and laughing something off. Using laughter to share the pain and connect with others is a better way to cope. It’s a fine line, but you will notice the difference.
  2. Over-Scheduling: Filling every moment with activities for ourselves or our kids can distract us from feelings of overwhelm or inadequacy. However, it often leaves little room for reflection or genuine connection. I know it’s work, the school, sports activities, playdates, doctors’ appointments etc. that set the pace. And yes, it is not always easy to skip special events, nor is it recommended in the case of important visits to the doctor. There is still wiggling room though. You do not have to schedule three plus different sports and music lessons for your kid(s) each week, or attend all the social events at school and work etc. Try to be mindful in your scheduling as best possible.
  3. Retail Therapy: Buying new toys, gadgets, or parenting hacks can feel like a quick fix to problems. But this often leads to clutter—both physical and emotional—without addressing the underlying issues. Instead of buying things, try investing into activities and experiences together, if you do want to spend money and get a special ‘wow factor’.
  4. Emotional Suppression: Powering through the day by ignoring feelings of frustration or sadness can keep us going in the short term, but it often leads to burnout or resentment. You are also more likely to snap at your kids for small things with increasing resentment. Next you are likely to beat yourself up about it, because that is not how you want to parent. The vicious cycle starts, because now you resent yourself. Feelings can be hard to deal with and we need to put them aside for a while sometimes, but when suppression becomes a routine, it is a guarantee for disaster in the long run.

The Downside of Coping Mechanisms to reclaiming motherhood

While it is obvious that these methods provide temporary relief, they can unintentionally reinforce feelings of helplessness or dependency on external factors and prevent you from reclaiming motherhood your way. When we rely solely on coping mechanisms, we risk staying stuck in cycles of overwhelm rather than addressing its root causes.

Empowerment Strategies for Ambitious Working Moms

Empowerment strategies, in contrast, help us take charge of our emotions and circumstances. These practices foster self-awareness, resilience, and a sense of control. They also translate into better energy levels, improved family connections, and enhanced job performance—a triple win. Here are a few to consider:

Woman doing yoga and reclaiming her motherhood
  1. Body Awareness: Practicing body awareness allows you to tune into physical sensations that reflect your emotional state. This helps you recognize overwhelm before it escalates and make decisions aligned with your values. Better alignment means better energy for both family and work.
  2. Mindful Breathing: Taking a few deep breaths during stressful moments can shift your nervous system from “fight or flight” mode to a calmer state. This simple practice helps you respond to challenges with clarity rather than reactivity, ensuring you stay focused both at home and on the job.
  3. Setting Priorities: Empowerment begins with knowing what truly matters to you, your family, and your career. Reflecting on your priorities can help you let go of unnecessary pressures and focus on what brings joy, connection, and professional growth.
  4. Sharing your struggles: Discussing your challenges with a partner, friend, or support group can create a sense of solidarity and perspective. Sharing struggles in a constructive way is far more empowering than bottling them up or turning them into jokes.
  5. Physical Movement: Activities like yoga, dancing, a run or even a brisk walk can release pent-up tension and boost your mood. Improved energy and mood positively impact how you engage with your kids and excel in your career.

How Empowerment Transforms Parenting and Work

mother and daughter head to head smiling at each other; a woman reclaiming motherhood for her own and her daughter's sake

When you shift from coping to empowerment, you move from reacting to life’s challenges to proactively shaping your experience and reclaiming motherhood on your own terms. Empowerment strategies don’t eliminate stress—but they change how you respond to it, allowing you to feel grounded, capable, and aligned in all areas of your life. As a result, you show up as a more present parent, a more effective professional, and a more energized version of yourself.

Final Thoughts on Reclaiming Motherhood

Parenting doesn’t come with a manual, but it does come with choices. While coping mechanisms will always have their place, integrating empowerment strategies can help you reclaim the joy, purpose, and confidence that come with raising your children. By reconnecting with yourself through practices like body awareness and mindful prioritization, you not only manage overwhelm—you thrive in the beautiful chaos of parenthood, career, and life.

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Career

Career Change Can Be Scary

lit candle visualizing how career change can take you into your own light

A case study

Everyone knows that a career change can be daunting, if not full on scary. That is true with or without kids, but with kids there is just so much more to consider. The good news is, that achieving a career change can be less difficult and challenging, if you have someone on your side to guide you through it. Today, I’d like to share with you the case of one of my team leaders and how she overcame her fears and mental boundaries with my support.

Maybe you have already taken my quiz, or done the deep dive to look at whether or not your career is stalling. If this has confirmed your inkling, that something isn’t quite right with your career, you are probably thinking about what you could change. Obviously, it doesn’t have to be a full career change. Maybe you just want to focus more on one particular aspect of your current role that plays to your true strengths. If that’s the case then please keep reading – Laura, as I will call her for this purpose, went through these struggles with my help and was able to tap into her strengths as a result.

visualising career change as a journey

Laura’s journey

But let’s go back to the start. Laura was one of my team leaders in the science sector. She had been with the company for a long time and in a restructure ended up in a team leader role. She was hardworking and dedicated to provide excellent support to her clients. Unlike you, she was single and without many other family commitments – she loved her job and put in all hours. Now you may think that this is not a useful case study for someone with kids who has got very different constraints still. Hear me out though – her worry about changing tracks and about tapping into her true calling were just as real nonetheless and without the right support she would not have dared to make the step either, kids or not.

Mismatched career development

Laura was doing great, she always got fantastic client feedback. She knew the company inside out and was a genuinely warm hearted, supportive colleague. I became her manager after successfully moving up within the company, but we hadn’t worked together before. She initially felt that I as her younger, with a much shorter company history could not teach her anything new. And in fact, I did learn a lot from her about the section of the company and how it worked as well as what did not work so well. Luckily, I was able to surprise her though in the best ways possible as you will see.

Once we’d all found our grove in the new team (there were two other team leaders next to Laura), slowly problems started creeping up. Laura was so dedicated to her clients, that she wasn’t able to also manage her team and fulfil her tasks as a team leader. This meant that the other two colleagues stepped in and picked-up the slack, supported her team as well as theirs. I in turn picked up what was left undone by the three of them as a result. Opening up the discussion on how to solve this within this small team, only worked so far. Laura wanted to do better in her team leader role, but her passion was for the work with her clients and supporting them rather than a team and assuming managing duties coming along with that.

When excellence does not align

The clients were over the moon with Laura’s dedication and many started asking for her, even outside her specific remit. What a gift Laura had from the clients’ perspective! From a company perspective it was great that external clients were so happy, but at the same time Laura didn’t fulfil her role to the extend the company needed her to. It culminated in her team and other teams coming to me saying that her working out of hours and permanent availability had lead our clients to believe that this level of service was standard and out of hours working normal. The teams started receiving complaints directly regarding their perceived bad performance and soon enough these made their way to me.

Solutions that empower

Laura and I had already started looking at her workload and how to prioritize so that she would be able to deal with her portfolio as a team leader, while delegating the more direct client contact to her team. We had regular meetings and while she understood the knock-on effects her ways of working had, it became soon apparent that she couldn’t transfer her passion for support and care from the clients directly onto her team. She had worked like this for more than twenty years, so of course it was not going to be an easy switch.

I started suggesting, that she may want to consider enrolling onto an internal programme qualifying her to move into a role at the same level. A role that meant providing counselling support to clients – something that to me seemed to be perfectly in line with all her hard work and what she used to like about her role.

Listening to yourself for meaningful change

Initially, Laura wasn’t partial to the idea. Talking it over on various occasions she revealed that she felt too old to change her career and risk being unhappy in the new track. She felt, she would let everyone down who had relied on her all this time. The client reviews proved to her mind that if she left to a new role nothing would work anymore. At the same time she wasn’t convinced that she really had a gift in connecting to clients outside of her current remit. And then, of course, enrolling into a programme would also mean putting exactly that to the test and potentially failing at something that meant so much to her.

That really is scary! I understood that then and still relate to this so much now. It is incredibly vulnerable to put yourself out there like this. It is incredibly courageous and as you will find out, if you keep reading, at least equally, if not more rewarding.

lit candle visualizing stepping into your light through career change

Stepping into your light through a career change

Only once she was able to allow her own fears and concerns in. Once she was able to fully identify them, we were able to work through them one at a time. Laura didn’t enroll in the professional development programme right away, but she did when she was ready and had worked through some of her fears. She was lucky in that she knew the role she would cover after taking the programme was being created anyways. With her record of service and experience as well as references she knew that she could easily secure it.

That is not always a given and may make it even harder to step into your own light. Her fears were still very real obstacles for her to overcome after so many years on the same career track. A career track that didn’t truly align with her anymore once she advanced to a more senior role.

It is not always easy to see your own strengths for fear of failing, for fear of not being good enough after all. Especially, if you chose your career track a long time ago – before even having kids. It can feel like failure to change tracks, I get that. Laura had the same struggle, even though she didn’t have kids: Moving into a new career, even if it is adjacent to your old, or asking for a promotion, feels incredibly vulnerable, because what if you fail?

Taking the leap is easier and faster with support

I am still today proud of Laura for taking this brave step and trusting me in the process to support her despite the initial struggles. She once told me that without this encouragement, she would not have made the career change and probably ended up miserable in a role that no longer suited her. Not everyone will need the support – some people just take a while and once they see the picture more clearly, they are decisive and take action on their own. Often this process takes much longer though than when you get support, but everyone has their own schedule and that is absolutely fine.

We all know that family life is always busy and if it is one thing that I am constantly short of, it’s time for sure. So you either choose to wait and see once the kids are older (read up on why I personally don’t think, that this is a good idea), or you decide to get the support and fast-track change that empowers you to make the right choice for you and your family.

Be ready to course correct

The other thing to remember about coaching is that the outcome is not always what you anticipated it to be at the start. So you may come and present all the facts in a way that are in line with what is already at the back of your head. However, you need to be prepared for this outcome to change over the course.

I’ll be honest and say that when I first started working with Laura regarding her role, we both thought it was a matter of adjustment and helping her, find her new priorities. It ended up being a small scale re-training with a new job on the other end as you have seen.

This is also why it is important for a coach to listen carefully and attentively, to really tune into what is moving you and who you are. That is also why as a coach, my approach is never one size fits all. While I truly believe that almost anybody can benefit from increased body awareness, which is a key tool for my work, the degree to which I will make use of it will vary from client to client.

What to look for when you get support

If you decide to get support and tackle a career change, or ask for that promotion, always try to find someone who aligns with you and your values. Try to get to know them before you commit for more: Look at the methods they use predominantly and how flexible they are in applying those. What is their area of expertise? Who have they worked with in the past? And, if you can, schedule a free short appointment online or in person to get a feeling for them and see if you ‘click’.

Lastly, there are increasingly options to join coaching programmes online that are much more cost effective than one-on-one coaching, or can supplement one-on-one coaching to speed up progress and cut cost. Here again, you should choose based on your personality and values and what aligns with you personally.

If you feel like you want to work with me, or if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’d love to hear from you, of course.

Categories
Background & Culture Theory Current Topics

Maternal burnout & body awareness

Why body awareness matters most for working mothers and how it can help in avoiding maternal burnout

I have started this blog with a sketch of how centuries of cultural practices are contributing to mums feeling guilty. A guilt that can lead to overwhelm and maternal burnout, because women are taking on more and more without looking after themselves. Why and how body awareness makes a difference to realigning with yourself and with what is truly yours, will be the verse of this blog. But I skipped a step since I have not really explained what I mean when I talk about ‘body awareness’. Defining body awareness is key to understanding

  • why it will make a difference to your experience as a working mother;
  • why it is important to reconnect with your body;
  • and lastly, why it is not your fault that the disconnect happened in the first place.

Defining body awareness

Body awareness is the ability to perceive, understand, interpret and react to the signals of our bodies from within and without. Signals from without would be feeling a breeze on your skin, for example. The body schema is another aspect of body awareness. It combines signals from without and within and allows you to move more or less effortlessly and more or less consciously through space.

For example, if we wear a large backpack, or a bulky purse and we move through crowds, our body schema normally incorporates that protruding item to allow for smooth movement without bumping into other people. To do that we combine physical signals outside of ourselves (like seeing other people, feeling the backpack) with signals from within. The vestibular system adjusts how you balance your body with the added weight, for example. The body schema is a big part of proprioception, i.e. the way we perceive ourselves within our own body in time and space.

Signals within can be basic needs like having to use the bathroom, being hungry or tired. Feelings and emotions also manifest physically and are signals from within, but can and often will be triggered from events without our bodies. If you fall and scratch open your knee, for example, the resulting pain comes from within your body while its cause came from without. Sadness can stem from a loss of a dear person. Happiness can be incited by spending time with close friends. Anger often comes from other unresolved feelings and so on and so forth.

Learned disconnect

Often we have learned from a young age that we cannot or must not trust these signals. The scratched knee does actually not hurt (as badly as we make it out). We have been told to calm down, or not be too intense, when we did not feel calm at all. We have all heard:

picture shows a street sign saying yield. We have learned to yield to the perception of others when it comes to our body rather than trusting ourselves paving the ground for maternal burnout.

‘Don’t be sad.’ or

‘You are so much prettier when you smile.’

It means that we learned to distrust our body’s signals and how we perceive them ourselves. We exchanged this at least partly with what others thought appropriate behavior and appearance might be. Our own bodily signals were henceforth labelled ‘too much’ and had to be ‘reigned in.’

This is the short version. If you look at it in more detail – hopefully I will get around to it eventually, it is even more complex. Especially women are being taught about their own bodies from a young age distorting their own perceptions and trust in themselves.

How motherhood boosts the disconnect

Fast forward to motherhood and you have the perfect ground for fully disconnecting from your own body and developing maternal burnout. Years of being told that others know more about your body, what it should look and feel like, you enter to a nowadays almost complete medicalization of your own body that henceforth shall serve to create another human being. We now know that even the brain changes during pregnancy to prepare for the task of motherhood. Once the baby is born most likely you will be dedicated to raising it and putting it first. From an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense and keeps the species alive.

Overwhelm & maternal burnout

However, it disregards that we no longer raise our children collectively. Often even grandparents are not close by to support the growing family. Taking care of one or more children, in particular when they are still young, is physically as well as emotionally draining. If you add to that a disconnect from your own body, a consistent disregard for your own needs, you are on the fastest way into overwhelm and maternal burnout. This is not what our children need. This is not what we need, nor do we want it. It’s just something you so easily slide into without noticing.

Disappointed professional ambition

Then we add to this professional ambition. Maybe you experience personal disappointment at what you thought you’d achieve professionally, but simply haven’t. Simply couldn’t, because it was just too much. All the time and money you spent on education. The time spent on working hard to proof your value at work, on personal development and continued education. Will you wait until they are older, but then maybe so will be your parents or in-laws – who will look after them? Probably you, because your partner is likely to earn so much more than you at this point, that it doesn’t make sense otherwise.

Empowering body awareness

I am digressing a little, but then again, I am not. This is the scenario that is very real for many of us. I am not saying, that it isn’t important to take care of other people, but it should be a conscious choice and not something you end up doing, because you are a woman. To the contrary taking care of other people is hugely important while it doesn’t get nearly enough recognition socially. Last but not least of all, you can only really take care of other people, if you know how to take care of yourself.

Picture of a woman in a lotus seat. Body awareness can help you steer clear of maternal burnout.

This is where the loop closes: In order for you to be able to take care of yourself, you cannot skip the step of reconnecting to yourself and to your body. It allows you to decide how you want to take care of others. It allows you to choose to pursue a career and how to prioritize according to your own as well as your family’s needs. Body awareness won’t solve all your problems, no. It will, however, make you stronger, more resilient and creative in finding solutions that work for you. It will empower you in situations where you’d otherwise feel helpless or maybe even hopeless.

Do you want to take back control? Do you want to empower yourself, to trust yourself to make the right choice?