Tag: maternal burnout

Categories
Career

Motherhood and Career: How a Simple Card Game Reveals Challenges & Solutions

Have you ever played a game of UNO? The special cards in this game can feel oddly familiar to working mothers: getting skipped for promotions, drawing extra tasks at work and at home, or constantly pulling new strategies out of thin air. This week, I’ve been exploring the connection between motherhood and career using UNO as a metaphor, showing how the challenges of juggling both roles mirror the unpredictability of the game. But beyond the fun comparisons, I want to take this opportunity to go deeper—both into why this metaphor is so powerful and how using proxies like this can be a valuable tool for tackling career challenges as a mother.

UNO playcards stand for struggles in motherhood and career

Motherhood and Career: Navigating Luck, Strategy, and Uncertainty

Card games, like life and career, involve a mix of randomness and strategy. Sometimes, you get lucky, and everything aligns in your favor. Other times, you draw a series of unfortunate cards and have to find a way to make them work. Motherhood and career both come with uncertainties that are often beyond your control:

  • Career Challenges for Working Mothers: You don’t choose all your colleagues. You can’t control company policies, economic downturns, or whether your boss recognizes your contributions.
  • Motherhood’s Impact on Career Progression: You don’t know how having a baby will shift your relationship dynamics, what kind of temperament your child will have, or what unexpected challenges may arise as they grow.

While these uncertainties are unavoidable, the key takeaway is that you can control how you play your cards. You can strategize, adapt, and—just like in a game—sometimes even negotiate the rules when you engage in open communication.

Why Metaphors Help Us Solve Problems

Using a metaphor like a card game allows us to step back from a problem and see it from a new perspective. Here’s why this approach is so effective:

  1. Emotional Distance for Better Decision-Making: It’s often easier to analyze a situation when we’re not emotionally entangled in it. A metaphor helps create a bit of space so you can think clearly.
  2. Breaking Down Career Obstacles into Manageable Steps: A big, overwhelming problem can feel impossible to tackle. But if you break it into smaller chunks, you can identify quick wins and understand which aspects require deeper, long-term work.
  3. Clarifying What’s in Your Control: It’s empowering to separate what you can change from what you can’t. Once you do that, you stop wasting energy on the uncontrollable and focus on strategic action.

Reclaiming Autonomy and Energy as a Working Mother

One of the biggest struggles for mothers in their careers is the feeling of lost autonomy. Your time is dictated by work, your children’s needs, and endless responsibilities. But career challenges—when tackled strategically—can actually become an area where you regain a sense of control and direction. By applying problem-solving techniques, you shift from ruminating on frustrations to taking purposeful action.

Motherhood and Career made easier - dangle feet with high heels symbolize clarity and confidence.

This is where coaching plays a vital role. Career coaching for working mothers helps break down issues into smaller, manageable parts while taking a step back to assess the bigger picture. And when you combine this structured approach with body awareness—learning to tune into what feels right for you—you gain the clarity and confidence to move forward in your career without burnout.

Take Action: Play Your Career Cards Right

If this resonates with you and you’re ready to take control of your career challenges, my Work Challenge Playbook is a great place to start. It provides step-by-step guidance to help you:

  • Diagnose the key issue holding you back in your career
  • Create a structured plan to tackle the problem
  • Set small, manageable milestones for real progress

You have more power than you think. Not everything is random. When you take intentional steps to tackle career challenges, you reclaim your energy, confidence, and career growth—without losing yourself in what you can’t change.

So, what’s your next move? Let’s play to win.

Categories
Parenting

The Real Power of Supermoms

Why Asking for Help is Your Ultimate Strength

Picture of a woman as a superhero as image of the supermom who does it all alone.

Picture this: a woman as a superhero—the quintessential image of the “supermom” who does it all, alone. But is this ideal something to aspire to? Or does it set us up for failure?

Last week, I had a revelation that hit close to home. As a working mom, my biggest challenge isn’t just balancing work and family—it’s figuring out how to serve other working moms best. I know the work I do matters. Whenever I talk to other mothers, there’s an undeniable energy in the room. The need for support, empowerment, and connection is palpable. But one recurring theme keeps coming up: the hardest part for many of us isn’t just accepting help—it’s asking for it in the first place. We often think that needing help makes us less capable, like the illusion of being a “supermom” who does it all will somehow crumble. But let’s be honest: does anyone actually have it all under control? Or are we unknowingly driving each other into burnout by pretending we do?

More Community, Less judgment

If we were all a little more honest about the challenges we face, we could cultivate more compassion for ourselves and each other. Acknowledging that we can’t do it all doesn’t make us weak—it makes us human. And it opens the door to finding not only real solutions but real community.

The Myth of the Supermom

The concept of the “supermom” is deeply flawed. It perpetuates the idea that mothers must sacrifice everything—their time, energy, and even their mental health—to prove their worth. This ties into the broader association of motherhood with martyrdom, a notion that equates self-sacrifice with virtue. But let’s take a step back: martyrs, historically, are celebrated for their sacrifices rather than their mental resilience. Martyrdom is not an adaptive trait. It’s unsustainable, isolating, and ultimately harmful—both to the individual and to the community.

Boundaries and Support – the Real Supermom

Idolizing the “supermom” sets everyone up for failure. Instead, let’s challenge this narrative. True strength lies in:

  • Acknowledging our limits.
  • Asking for help.
  • Creating supportive environments where both moms and their families can thrive.

Setting a good example for our children means teaching them to set healthy boundaries earlier than we did. When kids see us saying “no” without guilt, they learn it’s okay to prioritize their well-being.

The Example We Set for Our Children

Kids already know their boundaries. They’ll say “no” at times that might be inconvenient for us. When we insist they cooperate despite their discomfort, we unintentionally teach them to override their boundaries. If they oblige, we’re pleased with their compliance, reinforcing this behavior. Over time, they learn that meeting others’ expectations is more important than honoring their own needs.

The Pitfalls of Forcing Early Independence

Western society often celebrates early independence, praising kids for doing things on their own. But this approach ignores individual differences. Every child finds independence in their own time. Encouraging kids to take steps independently is important, but so is allowing them the space to seek support. When we discourage asking for help, we perpetuate a cycle of self-reliance that isolates rather than empowers.

How Coaching Can Support Change

That’s where coaching comes in. It’s not about someone swooping in with answers. It’s about giving you the tools and clarity to figure it out for yourself. Coaching empowers you to:

Woman and child flying a kite in the sunset symbolizing the alignment of life achieved through coaching.
  • Reclaim alignment in your life.
  • Take charge of your priorities.
  • Recognize when to lean on others without guilt or shame.

Being a supermom isn’t about perfection. It’s about living authentically, knowing your limits, and choosing your path with intention. When we embrace this mindset, we stop chasing an impossible ideal and start building a life that aligns with who we truly are. And we set healthy examples for our children to follow.

Redefining Success

So, let’s rewrite what it means to be a supermom. Let’s normalize asking for help, being vulnerable, and showing up for ourselves. After all, there’s nothing more powerful than a mom who’s unapologetically herself.

If you’re still unconvinced about the benefits coaching can offer, my newest resource “The Work Challenge Playbook” is an easy way to explore it. It’ll cost you €0 but could change everything by helping you tackle a challenge that has been holding you back at work and that might even have spilled over into your private life. Don’t miss out. Let’s redefine success together.

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?