Mastering the Work-Life Juggle

What if your relentless hustle is actually leading to burnout rather than success? In this episode, I share my personal journey from a grocery store cashier to a corporate leader, revealing how an intense work ethic initially seemed like the key to climbing the corporate ladder. However, this approach came with severe downsides, including health issues and mental fatigue. I discuss the vital lessons I learned about energy management, setting boundaries, and the importance of asking for help to sustain both productivity and well-being.

As our schedules become increasingly packed with back-to-back meetings, managing our energy becomes crucial. Discover practical strategies for blocking out time for focused work and short breaks, allowing for greater flexibility and preventing energy drain. Learn how to set clear expectations and boundaries with colleagues, communicate your limits effectively, and negotiate deadlines—all essential for maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Whether you're striving for a promotion or trying to juggle a busy workday, these insights will help you work in a more sustainable and fulfilling way.

Chapters

• 0:01 Rethinking Hard Work and Energy Management
• 10:48 Setting Boundaries for Energy Management

Transcript

Christina: 0:01

Okay, so hear me out. I think hard work actually makes things harder, it doesn't make things better. So, like, let me explain. I've worked very, very hard my whole life. I started out as a cashier in a grocery store. Six months later I was a supervisor, worked full-time all through college. Later I was a supervisor, worked full-time all through college, worked my way up through that, worked for Wegmans, through that grocery chain. Then I became a store manager of Perfumania it was called and then I became a store manager of Mandy's, which was a clothing store. And then I got into corporate, started out at entry levels and account manager, worked all my way my got several promotions all the way up to leadership.

Christina: 0:52

Working hard, I mean like long hours, working holidays. When I got into corporate I was working evenings and weekends like working, working, working, and I felt like hard work served me really well. I was getting all these promotions right. It felt like it was getting me further, was getting me more money, it was getting me more skill sets and experience and all of these kind of things. But I kept hitting burnout.

Christina: 1:21

When I go back on my story, I mean when I was in retail, I was a store manager of the clothing store and I was working through having pneumonia, Didn't know I had pneumonia, finally went to the hospital, ended up being bedridden for a whole week because I was so sick, because I didn't rest initially when I had gotten sick, and now it turned into this whole thing and I honestly felt like I was gonna die. It was just so bad, and I have so many stories of that where working through being sick or just working through really tough times in a job where I probably should have left that job, or the list goes on and on and on and hard work actually made my life harder. And what has totally changed everything for me is I hit such severe burnout in corporate about two years ago. I couldn't think straight. I felt like I was actually losing my mind, like I couldn't remember simple things. I didn't feel like I was thinking correctly, and so I was like I need time off, like when I was like now I took a week off.

Christina: 2:32

The first four days I was in bed doing nothing, and I realized that how, how I was operating was going to drive me literally into a place where I wouldn't be able to get out of, and so, where hard work seemed like a great idea. It got me to this point where I was like this is just making my life harder. This is not okay, and so I started to think about how can I operate in a way where I I enjoy work, I like getting things done, I like being productive and I like to grow, but in a way where I'm not personally suffering. And that's why I don't like the idea of hard work, because hard work often causes us to neglect our needs, our basic needs, neglect ourselves. I'm not talking about YOLO and like just not have a care in the world and like figure it out as you go like hair in the wind. As much as I'm sure we all have idolized over being able to be that person and just sell everything and travel the world, that's not an opportunity for most people. And so I'm not talking about how we don't have to ever work hard, but I'm talking about working in a way where operating, in a way where we're constantly refueling our energy and not just letting things drain from us. So I don't agree with hard work, because hard work causes us to do it all ourselves. It doesn't require us to ask for help, it doesn't require us to set boundaries, it doesn't require us to make a change when things aren't working. It doesn't require people to respect us. It honestly is like please use and abuse me, I'll do it all, I'll figure it out. I got this.

Christina: 4:32

And I feel like we often aren't thinking about how we only have so much energy to give and we act and we operate as if we have an endless amount of energy to give, which is crazy. Think about if you did that with your bank account, if you just pretended like, oh, I don't have a balance, I have. However much I spend, I'm always going to have money. Doesn't matter how much I spend, I'm always going to have money in the bank. At some point you do that and your stuff's going to start declining. Like you don't have any more money, girl, like you are in the negative. And it's the same thing with our energy. We have to know how much we have to spend, because a lot of times we're giving way more energy than we actually have in our bank account to give. And that's when we hit those places where we're in the negative.

Christina: 5:23

And now it's like well, shoot, how did I get here? I love myself, I care about me. Like what happened? We weren't conscious about our energy. We were just in the push through get it done mode. I'm super woman, I got this, which is just not reality. And so I actually do a lot of work with clients and I do workshops and around personal energy management, and it is so powerful to see how it hasn't just changed my life but it changes other people's lives too. Of doing an audit and really being conscious of, like, what do I actually have to give today, energy wise, and how do I make sure that the actual like necessity things are taken care of?

Christina: 6:08

And then, instead of being that in that hard work I do it all, I get to show up for everybody and do everything mode, you have a real honest conversation with yourself and others of like, hey, I just don't have any more to give today and they're gonna have to figure it out. And it's that tough love thing for yourself and also for other people, because I had to go through this whole personal development phase of learning that it's like, hey, I'm not actually responsible for anyone else's well-being in their life. I'm not. And a lot of times we put that responsibility on ourselves and be like, oh well, they have it harder, or maybe we know they deal with a certain mental illness or their circumstances are really rough right now, and so we're like you know what, I can just do this, I can just do that. And my answer is just because you can doesn't mean that you should, and if you're doing something at the cost of you, then it was never your place to do that for them to begin with.

Christina: 7:11

And sometimes, when we're acting in a place of love and let me just overextend myself and let me do it, we're actually getting in the way of that person's journey, that person's growth, where God wants to meet them where they are, and we're not thinking about that because we're in fix-it mode, we're in superwoman mode. We want to sweep it and rush it and just do it. So I feel like it's all within reason because I'm a very caring, giving person and I don't want to ever change that about me. I love that about me. The thing that I realized is I don't have to change who I am. I just have to change how I operate and I need to make sure that I'm operating from a place of sustainable energy and not a place where I'm constantly depleted and now I can't function at my best to even take care of me, and these are things where it's like we know it. We know you can't pour from an empty cup. We know take, you know put your energy mask on first before you help someone. We know it, but we don't do it.

Christina: 8:18

And so that when you think about like your personal energy being, like you have a certain balance in your account and you need to check it every day and say what do I have to spend, it starts to help actually put things in perspective, because a lot of times when I meet with clients, they're like I can't take anything off my plate. All of this needs me and I get it. There is. There's never been a time that I've worked with someone and there hasn't been at least one thing that somebody else could have been doing, but they wanted to do it or they felt like, well, I could just do it quicker and better, so I'll just do it real fast. No, and so if you're thinking like there's nothing I can't take off my plate, there are ways for people, other people to come and support you.

Christina: 9:12

You are not God, you are not a savior, you are not the answer. We need to take ourselves off that pedestal. You are responsible for being the main caretaker of yourself. If you have kids, little kids who aren't grown adult, kids, you are responsible for being the caretaker of those kids, everyone else's well-being, everyone else in your life. You could help them if you have the energy to help them. And it's time that we make that shift, because then people actually get our very best. We actually get our very best. We actually get our very best. It serves us and everyone else around us way better in the long run. Um, and so I want to leave that with you.

Christina: 9:59

Just that idea of doing I call it like an energy audit in the morning. Wake up, how's my energy feel? What do I have on my plate today? How do I schedule my day where I'm not maxed out? How do I schedule my day where, if I do these few main things, I should still have a ton of energy left at the end of the day, cause we know life is lifing, stuff's going to come up, disasters are going to happen, and you need to make sure you have energy left over for those unexpected things. I like to call it like having an emergency fund. You know we need to have some energy stored away, just like we would have some money stored away in case of an emergency, so we have something to pull from. Otherwise we create bigger disasters and actually need to be there.

Christina: 10:48

I started this in a really practical way for myself was looking at my calendar and if I had back to back meetings that day, I already knew it was a problem. I already knew like my energy is going to be spent the second I shut my computer down. I'm going to have nothing left, and so I started blocking off some blocks of time for me to work on things or for me to step away from my computer for a minute. I also had those blocks of something urgent came up. Then I was like, okay, yeah, I can do that too, because I had a time space to do that, that which now I'm getting into. This whole other thing, which this requires you to set expectations and boundaries with people in a new way, which maybe we'll chat about this another time. But think about the areas of your life where you can say this is the amount of energy that I have. I'm not superwoman. Can we do this tomorrow? Can I do this next week?