Latest / The Feel Good Club for Ambitious Moms of Neurodivergent Kids / Not Feeling Good Enough as a Working Mom?
Transcript
- ROCKY: If you judge a fish by its ability to fly, it will spend its whole life believing that it's a failure. This is probably your winter and this is what human development says. But when this feeling of not enoughness starts coming up again and again, this is life not punishing you. This is life inviting you for a promotion. Welcome to the Feel Good Club podcast. This is the place where ambitious working moms learn how to elevate their well-being, increase success in all areas, and create a positive, aligned life. Whether you're here to hear expert interviews or inspiring talks, this is your space to learn and grow. I'm Tia Graham, keynote and TED speaker, bestselling author, and founder of the Feel Good Club Community for high achieving moms. I am an expert in the science of happiness. This show is here to help you feel grounded, happier and connected to yourself and others. I know you are going to love it. Thank you for being here. Let's dive in. Hi, Rajna. Welcome to the show. I'm so happy to be here, Tia. And I just want to say all the work that you do of lifting and supporting and inspiring. working moms is absolutely incredible. Thank you for what you do and for who you are. My pleasure. I'm so glad that we're connected. So can you share a little bit about your story and how you came to be doing the work that you're doing now? So tell us a little bit about your career, personal history. Absolutely. Satya, unfortunately, feeling that I am not enough as I am. might be the most quietly destructive lie that high achievers carry around with them. And it's this feeling of not enoughness that drives like ambitious women like us ⁓ to maybe many times overwork, over optimize, over prove when it actually is a primal fear that if we stop achieving, we stop mattering, that our worth lives in our outburt. that all of our core human needs of love, belonging, safety, it is something that we have to earn, like one accomplishment at a time. So we push, we deliver, we carry on until something breaks that equation. And it's something different for everyone. For me personally, that break came as like a very clear rupture. When I look at my life, there's like the first three decades. filled with accomplishment, achievement, accolades, appreciation. I walked into a school environment at the age of four and from the beginning, back in India, you're ranked. So was ranked number one, wheeled after ear. I graduated college with a 4.0 GPA. I was extremely successful in my corporate career from a young age, being in rooms with senior leaders and being the one shaping the direction. And all of that was that achievement. giving the proof that I am enough until overnight it all evaporated. For me, it happened when I became a mother. ⁓ Emergency C-section, some other complications, and just a very brutal start to that journey. And that early childhood days were very rough on me. And I decided to take a career pause. And I thought, I'm just going to be a great mother excelling at that. And I felt like a failure every single day. So I did what I had done always in the past, just do more, push more. But the more I tried to do, the less it felt. The more I put effort in, the more stuck I felt. It's feels like, you know, being in quicksand and you're like flailing and that's not going to get you out. So I kept carrying on that way until... It's like, remember it was something my mom said that made me realize I am at rock bottom. This is like, I'm exhausted. I'm burnt out. This is not working. What did your mom say? So it was, it was actually what she said was, ⁓ Rachna, the way you're working right now, one plus one can add up to two. But there's a different way of being that allows one and one to come together and become 11. Now this moment. was not a moment of great, like, aha, there's a different way. It was a moment of like everything feeling even more intense and worse than before. Because in that moment, I realized my one and one was coming together to become 0.11. And I was just like trying, struggling. And it's just like I had become a shell of a person. And you know, Tia, it's like if we are in that place, Nothing good is going to flow out of that into our families and what we create around ourselves. it was, yeah, it was that realization that I'm at rock bottom and this pushing harder is not going to solve the way it had solved everything else in my life. It was just like work more, do more, achieve more. It all worked out. And also at this time, I think I read a quote that goes something like this. If you judge a fish by its ability to fly. It will spend its whole life believing that it's a failure. So I think the coming together of these few things, I made that choice to shift, to shift from trying to fly to let's start learning how to swim. And for me, that was diving into the world of personal development. It's like all the books that I used to see on my bookshelf growing up as a child, where my dad was very much into that world. And it started with, you know, trying to improve myself, trying to fix myself. And then I realized that it's a journey of understanding yourself and discovering yourself. It started with trying to like in true hyper-independent fashion, trying to be like, I got this, all the information is out there, I'll do it on my own. To then investing in mentors, guides and coaches. And I know I've heard you say that many times before, that you're a big proponent of that and it truly is life-changing. I'm so deeply grateful for. every person who has supported me on the way. And it's like through that consistently showing up, going deeper, uncovering the different layers. I started reaching a point that felt so out of reach in the beginning with where I was like, this I am enough as I am wasn't just a belief. It wasn't just an understanding. wasn't even just a knowing. was this felt. embodied sense that I could access. And so that's how it has, it was my greatest struggle. It became my most meaningful mountain that I feel like I have climbed so far. And now it has become my contribution back to exhausted high achievers who are like out there trying to earn what is already theirs. And especially for like working moms who have been handed achievement as that yardstick and been asked to go achieve in 12 different directions all at once. And then I like love feeling and questioning themselves day in and day out. So I guess that that is my journey. thank you for sharing all of that. And I know that now you coach people one on one and you also speak on everything that you have learned and the tools that you have. So when you were at rock bottom, ⁓ were you feeling that way because you were giving so much, like you said, you were trying to achieve and be this good, great, maybe even perfect mom. And were you at rock bottom because the feedback that you were getting from your child was not giving you the sense that you were this great mom? guess what? What was happening that made you feel rock bottom? And also do you think it was because you weren't working, that you were ⁓ parenting full time? Did that make you feel a rock bottom too? Those are my two questions. Yes, absolutely. And I think that's such a great question in terms of what caused this extreme burnout. And I think it was a combination. One, I remember distinctly, and I realize how silly it is now that I was like, I'm to be such a great mother that my Baby is never going to cry, but I will always know exactly what they need and be there for them. That's the message. You're measuring stick with my baby will never cry. And my first son was one who cried all the time. Day in, day out, I could be holding him. I could be doing absolutely everything. And it just wasn't enough is what it felt like. So you could never be successful. based on what we're trying to do. Okay, so that's one. Okay, what else? And then I think you hit on it, right? Because I made the decision to take a career pause, given how rocky it had been and how much my son needed me. So I was in this position where I was not juggling a high power career and motherhood. I was dedicated to motherhood and I was failing at it, is how I felt. ⁓ And it's a choice that not a lot of people, no one else really around me had made. So it does bring on that feeling, right? That everyone else is still out there in the world achieving, accomplishing. So for me, that break in the equation, as I mentioned, was a complete unraveling. It was three decades followed by there is no accomplishment, there's no achieving, there's a lot of giving. And burnout is a problem of over-giving and not receiving back. And what I wanted to receive back, looking back, was this like perfectly happy baby, but that was this like... great mother. yes, that is what caused that feeling of rock bottom. Let's take a quick pause for something that can really support you. If you constantly question if you are good enough as a working mom and desperately want to feel happier, I'd love to invite you to a complimentary discovery call with me. In 45 minutes, we'll get clear on what is out of alignment. what you want your days to feel like, and two to three simple changes you can make immediately to feel calmer and more confident. It's completely free and it's a chance for us to connect and see if the Feel Good Club for Working Moms or one-on-one coaching might support you. To grab a spot, go to tiagram.com forward slash discovery call. That's tiagram.com forward slash discovery call and pick a time that works for you. Where do you think this concept of, ⁓ my baby's not going to cry. Where do you think that came from? I think it was self created in terms of like, that was my idea of being a connected mother that I'm taking such great care of my child. And I hadn't been around many, or maybe like one baby. really hadn't been around a lot of babies. So it was like, if I'm a great mother, I'm taking great care of them. There's just going to be this like happy, happy child. Yeah. Happy baby all the time. And how long was your... career pause because you were working like taking care of a baby is so much work that is just unpaid work, right? And then there's the emotional load, the mental load of childcare and taking care of a home. How long was your paid career pause before you started? cause really you've become an entrepreneur. So how, how much time was that? It was a little over four years. It started with, it was intended to be two years and then COVID happened. ⁓ And then that extended things. So it ended up being a little over four years. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So many, many high achieving working moms and many humans, like 8 billion of us feel that we are not enough, right? This is a very common human experience. So can you walk us through what you did that helped you go from feeling not enough and having your enoughness be tied to achievement or accomplishment, whether that be your career or what your child or baby is doing, right? Cause that's a different achievement or accomplishment. How did you go from not feeling enough? to knowing and being, and just reconnecting to your enoughness. Walk through what you did to get from here to here. Yes. I would absolutely love to do that. I ended up in true life strategy consultant style. have like a whole framework step by step of how I got there. Would it be okay, Tia, if before we go into that, if we address maybe a little more of this fact that you said that it is something that we carry as humans. And fortunately, it is like an almost universal struggle that a lot of us think is an individual problem that we are struggling with. don't know if you saw recent- talk about that and then talk about your, yeah, what you did. Yeah. But it's like, recently I saw that Blake, I forget his last name, the founder of Tom's Shoes, the donate one. He has started an initiative called Enough or something, because he went through this journey himself of ⁓ like, he created Tom's like an incredible, like service-driven, mission-driven empire, and then went through depression and then realized that we tie our enoughness to achievement. So it's it's amazing. it impels everyone. Yeah. No, think of Jamie Kurlima, who she sold her company for over $1 billion and still didn't feel worthy. So yes. Yes. Yeah. Let's talk about this universal lie is kind what I want to say. It's a lie about the perspective on it. it's like fear and fear is like false evidence appearing real. It just feels so real. But what I really want to offer to working moms who might not, who might be feeling not enough is that when you're in that space, it feels really hard. And what I want to offer to you is that it feels like a crisis, but it is not. It is a season. What I mean by that is just like we understand this about the world around us, right? I'm on the East coast. I'm in New York. There are very clear seasons. Right now it's winter. The trees are bare. It's cold. Nothing is growing. And yet we know that come spring in a few weeks, we haven't declared the trees dead. We know. that they will start sprouting, they will be covered with blossoms and new leaves. ⁓ So we don't panic. We're like winter, we're in winter and it's going to be spring outside. But when we personally as humans enter a season of life that feels like winter, which is part of human development, this will happen. When things feel hard and heavy, what we do is we catastrophize. We think... This is it. This is forever. Something is wrong with me. I am broken. I am failing. So I just want to offer that this is not forever. This is probably your winter and spring is coming. And this is what human development says. And this is what I have seen over and over again and working with people in this space that the season tends to arrive around the age between like 35 to 45. And it's right when your career is probably pretty stable and you're doing well and you are probably in the middle of parenting for many of us. And when you feel like you have everything, instead of it feeling good, it starts feeling like everything is shaky and that not enoughness gets really loud. And the fact that this happens over and over again with different humans in different phases of their life is because this is a signal. What is it a signal for is what I would like to share. So think of it this way. Let's imagine there's a first grader and she has learned addition and she's feeling like really great with her ability to add. She can do like seven plus seven, no problem. She's crushing it. Great. And ⁓ one day she walks into the classroom and now she is handed a worksheet. In the past was seven plus seven. She's got it. She's crushing it. Now today she's walked into the classroom and that worksheet that she's handed is seven plus seven plus seven plus seven plus seven. And it just goes on. The whole page is filled with seven plus seven plus seven and she flips it and it keeps going and it goes on. How is she going to feel? She's going to feel lost. But yeah, she's going to kill open wound. She's in a feel like she doesn't know what she's doing. Yes. But what really is. happening is she is ready for multiplication. And because what addition got her this far, but now if she were to learn multiplication, she could solve that sheet much more easily. So that is what is happening to us as humans. The skills that got us here, the drive, the discipline, the ability to push through, it got us this far. But like they say, what got us here won't get us there. Right? So now... Unfortunately, life doesn't come with a clear worksheet and a teacher that guides us through, it comes through confusing messages and signals. But when this feeling of not enoughness starts coming up again and again, this is life not punishing you. This is life inviting you for a promotion. It is inviting you to learn a new skill that will serve you really well. And one of these new skills is unconditional self-worth, right? Where you know you are enough. It does not depend on your outcome or what's happening outside you. It does not get touched by a bad day. It does not ride the roller coaster. It is steady. And it is this skill that gives you the stability that external achievement never could, because with that comes a short dopamine hit and then the goalpost moves and then we're on the hedonic treadmill and all that good stuff. With unconventional self-worth, you are resilient. You have this groundedness that people can feel just by being in your presence. And you have this peace that ambitious people try to chase through doing more, but you can only ever find it by going inward. Alan Watts has this beautiful quote that has always stayed with me where he said, the only peace that you will find at the top of a mountain. is the one that you take there with you. ⁓ So I feel like, yes, it is. That's a beautiful quote. So if someone, I'm picturing this beautiful woman listening to this, who is thinking like, yes, that sounds wonderful, but I don't have that. I don't have unconditional self-worth. I don't feel enough because of marriage. or my career or kids or my financial situation, who knows? Maybe my physical appearance on and on and on and social media makes everybody's lives look better. ⁓ And so for someone who's saying, yeah, and maybe who has never really felt enough and has always had this questioning inside, ⁓ what can this person do? Yes, absolutely. Now we get to how do we get to this, what feels very out of reach, because we're in that place of like, self-judgment and self-doubt and unconditional self-worth is up there, right? Right, so it's like going to the gym. If you walk in the first time, you're not going to walk over to a hundred pound weight and try to lift it and then feel like, why can I not do this and walk out disheartened? You're going to do it gradually, build up the reps and muscles. Same thing. It's like, need to build up the emotional strength. So to get to unconditional self-worth is again, there's, it's a staircase that you have to climb. And this includes starting with self-awareness. And then from there, moving on to self-connection, which means connecting to all these other parts of you that you tend to like ignore or not even realize how amazing you are. Moving on to self-acceptance, ⁓ bringing in parts of you that you have pushed aside, you don't like, you don't appreciate. And I heard your episode with Stacey on the inner critic. It's just like, are parts of you that you push aside. I've worked with a woman once who was like, I hate my inner critic. And there was just so much like passion in her about it, right? We have all these parts of us that we push aside. So self-acceptance has to come in. From there, you can then start ⁓ reaching and self-appreciation becomes available to you. And then from there, you can have self-respect and self-approval. A lot of times we feel like we want things from the outside world, but if we look within, are we truly respecting ourselves? Are we appreciating ourselves? And then you can get into a space of self-value. And then when you have climbed this ladder step by step by step, then it that feeling of unconditional self-worth starts becoming accessible as a embodied and felt sense. But yes, if you're like at self-judgment and self-doubt, the next step is not unconditional self-worth. The next step that I would recommend is actually self-connection. Right, right. ⁓ my gosh, Rajna, this, this... ⁓ process, this path, this journey is so beautiful and I wrote it down is so clear. When I think back on my journey from feeling not enough and you and I have so much in common because my first baby came flying into the world and she was early and she was in NICU and she didn't eat and she didn't sleep. He's 11 and a half. She's still horrible. She cried. Same thing. I was trying to be, I was trying to be this good mom. And it was like, no. For me, what I would put in there, what I would add, and this is just on thinking of my journey, something that was transformational. Oh yes. And maybe it goes underneath one of yours, but for me, a huge part of this, and I'm trying to think of where I would put it, but a huge I know where it goes. Self-compassion. So, like, learning how to, but I think it's under, it's like under acceptance, it's under appreciation, it's under, it's like, actually see it as the container in which to do this work, because it's like you're unraveling decades worth of patterns. So when you go into this work, go into it in that container of kindness towards yourself and self compassion. because what happens otherwise is you start at self-awareness, you start becoming aware of your patterns, and you go straight back into self-judgment. So, is that self-compassion, that like foundation and the container in which to do this work, so that you keep going up the ladder instead of beating yourself up along the way on the ladder and absolutely self-compassion, I know. You are a big proponent of it. has been life-changing for you. I'm a huge fan of Christian Neff. So yes, it absolutely belongs. ⁓ my goodness. So for, me ask you a simple question. What do you think is one thing that someone can do? And if you can try and make it simple and easy, what's one thing they can do to start being a little more self-aware? What's one action they can take? So I would say we as humans have a very strong negativity bias, right? So we zoom in and personalize everything that we miss, right? So start zooming in and personalizing the things that you are doing well. So at the end of the day, yeah, at the end of the day for the longest time, I used to end my day with a list of three things I'm proud of myself for. So it was just like taking ownership that... this is what I am doing and what I am creating in my life and I'm showing up. So like I started with gratitudeless and then I actually moved on to I am proud of myself to build that in a sense of. I love it. I love it. I'm going to share this with everyone. ⁓ Rachna, this was so great. Where can people go to find you and learn more? What is the best? Where's the best place to send them to? Sure, the website is RachanaJ20.com. My Instagram, which is where I think I will be most present is ThraipwithRachana and I'm on LinkedIn as well again, just my name. say hi. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and it's so great having you part of the Feel Good Club. Absolutely. And on it, thank you for having me. Thank you for joining me on the Feel Good Club show. I hope today's episode left you feeling inspired and equipped to take on your day with confidence, self-love and joy. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with your fellow ambitious working moms. Remember, you are not alone on this journey. We're all here to support each other in feeling good and living our best lives. Until next time, Take care and be hopeful. And remember, prioritize your happiness.