[F3] 3 Things Every Mompreneur Needs to Create Work-Life Harmony, Not Balance

Phylicia Pough: 00:00:19

Hey, friend.

Phylicia Pough: 00:00:20

You're listening to Harmonious Mompreneur, where faith, family and business come together. I'm your host, Phylicia Pough, a Christian wife, mom of two, and life and business system strategist for moms.

If you've ever felt like there just aren't enough hours in the day, or find yourself craving more time for yourself, but feel guilty about it, you're in the right place. While many strive for balance, I believe it's harmony, an integrated flow that works for you, that truly sustains.

Each week, I'll share insights from my personal journey and practical strategies to help you design systems that bring peace to your business and home life. So give your kids another snack, take a deep breath, and let's dive into today's episode where we'll start creating your harmonious Mompreneur life.

Phylicia Pough: 00:01:08

So many moms are on the hunt for work, life, balance. But in pursuit of that, many of them are starting to feel like they are failing.

The problem is that work, life, balance should have never been the goal. But I did not realize this until after I had children. Before motherhood, I was chasing balance while hustling at full speed, right?

And it turned out to be a disaster. Not because I wasn't putting in the effort, but because I was mimicking what I thought I was supposed to do.

Society and media, they tell you that balance is the goal and that success comes from hustling. But when I started to think about this, hustle and balance, they directly oppose each other.

Hustle demands that you stay on at all times to make things happen. Balance tells you to give every part of your life equal weight. Chasing balance had me exhausted because I was running in circles.

And after my first child, I got the wake up call.

Balance was never going to be attainable for me because different seasons and even different days, they require different levels of energy and attention. Now, sometimes, maybe on like a unicorn of a day, I would be able to find that balance. But it was never sustainable.

So I stopped chasing balance and started designing harmony. That is what I'm talking about today, what you need to create work, life, harmony.

Now, harmony is the intentional integration of work and life in a way that flows together and actually works for you. But it does not mean that there is an absence of chaos, because kids are going to be kids.

It just means that even in the chaos, you're not uprooted, you are still grounded and you're still able to move with intention. This does not happen, though, by chance. It happens by design. And this is why I created my Harmony by Design Framework.

Now, I'm not going to go through the entire framework in this episode, but I am going to give you three things that you need in order to create work, life harmony and these three things directly filter into the framework. So let's get into it. Number one is that you need support. Support can look different for different people.

And when you have support though, it takes some pressure and responsibility to off of you. Now you can have support in a lot of different areas.

So you can have support at home that could look like asking for help from your partner and from your children.

When I first got married, I actually had to have a conversation with my husband just to let him know, like, hey, I need more help with things around the house. So we had that conversation, but realized that I needed to have a follow up conversation to be more clear in what exactly it was that I needed.

And once I was clear in my needs and my requests, then I was able to get the support that I needed at home to relieve some of the pressure and take all of the responsibility off of me. You can also, if you have older children, get them to pitch.

And even my younger kids, they're four and two and they understand cleaning up after themselves. And I'm teaching them how child to be self sufficient to do things on their own so they don't always have to rely on mommy to do things for them.

Okay, Support at home can also look like hiring help and that can look like child care. That can look like someone coming in and doing some cooking or meal prep for you. Cleaning, organizing.

The key is to really think about all the things that you do, all the things that you are responsible for, and just figure out, okay, what do I feel the most comfortable handing off to somebody else? That's where you can start in terms of getting support. So that's support at home and then also support in business. Right?

I already just kind of mentioned delegation. But what are the tasks in your business that other people can do?

Because there are some tasks that only you as the visionary, as the CEO should be handling, but other things, repeatable tasks or tasks that don't require a high level of skill set or a specialized skill set that maybe you don't have would be better handled by somebody else.

So thinking through delegation and what that could look like for your business, but also before you even think about hiring someone in your business, you can highly leverage automation in your business to take things off of your plate. So many things in business can be automated from your marketing efforts to your client experience.

Finances, again, this is just taking things off of your plate and giving you support so that you are freed up to do the visionary, high level things in your business. Okay. Support can also come through community. Okay.

Support doesn't always have to be like physical actions, so you can have that physical, actual support, but you can also have emotional support, which I believe is just as important because sometimes on this journey, it can feel like you're all alone and nobody else is going through the things that you are going through. And sometimes we can get into a space of isolation, which is not healthy, and it magnifies the reality of the situation.

And so support through community looks like finding a village of people who understand what it is that you're going through, that you can share experiences with that you can relate to and where you can just find encouragement and resources if needed. What I have found, though, for me, because I moved away from my family, which was my village. Well, they still are my village, my family.

But I've moved away from. I live about two and a half hours from my family, and it's just myself, my husband and the kids here. And that was a hard transition for me.

And I had to find another village that was closer to me because I was further away from my family. What I found is that I had to come out of my comfort zone.

Right now I'm in this kind of phase of crushing the comfort zone, but I had to come out of my comfort zone and make myself available and open to building new relationships so that I could have that local village. Okay. So support can come through the community. Again, it can be actual physical support or it can be emotional support as well.

And then this one, this actually should have been number one.

But for me, I also get support in this journey through my faith, relying on prayer and the strength that God gives me to navigate this intersection of motherhood and entrepreneurship.

And just getting the guidance and the wisdom that I need, I would literally fall apart with if I did not have my faith supporting me throughout this process. Okay. It has been a tremendous, a tremendous help for me. So that's number one.

The first thing that you need if you want to create work life harmony, is that you need support. I like to say that you can have it all, right? Because we talk about, can we really have it all?

Can we really have the thriving marriage and the kids and the impactful business? Can we have all of the things? And I say, yes, you can have all of the things, but you were not created to do all of the things.

And so we can be doing all of the things and expecting that we are going to be experiencing a work life harmony, it's just not going to happen. So the first thing is support. The second thing that you're going to need is systems, okay?

And systems, they give you a standard for how a task is executed. Once a system is defined, your brain space is freed up and decision fatigue is reduced.

Now, when I talk about a system, I talk about your unique ecosystem of your processes, your tools and your people, okay? And this can be related to your business, this can be related to your home, this can be related to your life.

In a future episode, I'm going to talk about why business systems alone are not enough, okay? But when it comes to systems, I'm talking about the process, the tools and the people, okay? The process is the foundation.

The tool supports the execution of the process and the people support the execution of the process, okay? So systems, they give you that standard. So you need support, you need systems, but you also need sustainable strategies. Now, every strategy can work.

I was talking about this on an event I was participating in and one of the myths that I wanted to bust was that one way is the right way. Because in the online space, people say, oh, organic marketing is the way to grow your business.

Other people say ads is the way to grow your business. Some people will say networking and in person events. And everybody's right. Because all the things can work.

Every strategy can work, but it does not mean that it will work for you. You have to figure out and decide to do the things that work for you. Your capacity is going to dictate what you can actually maintain.

So some of the strategies that come along with bro marketing, they don't work for me as a work from home mom, okay? Because I just don't have the capacity to do all of the things that they're suggesting I should do.

So think about what are the strategies that take into consideration your actual and energetic capacity? All right, what are the strategies that take into consideration your actual capacity? That means your time and also your energetic capacity.

Like when are you the most alert? When are you the most efficient? When do you have the most energy?

This kind of goes back to what I mentioned in a previous episode about the cycle syncing. Okay? So the three things that every mompreneur needs to create work life harmony and not balance is number one, you need support.

Number two, you need systems. And number three, you need sustainable strategies. Now these three things, they will get you started on the path to work life harmony.

But if you want the full framework, then join the Harmonious Mom Legacy Lounge, where you get access to my course that walks you through each of the six phases of the Harmony by Design framework. Friend, thank you so much for tuning in. With grace and gratitude, I will see you in the next episode.

Phylicia Pough: 00:12:41

Hey friend, I'm so glad you tuned in today.

Phylicia Pough: 00:12:44

Before you go, will you take a.

Phylicia Pough: 00:12:45

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