What I Know Now at 53 That I Wish I Knew at 33

Last week I turned 53, and I've found myself sitting with the lessons that took me decades and more than a few hard moments to truly understand. These aren't quick tips or things I read somewhere. They're the truths I learned by living them, the ones that eventually became the foundation for the work I do and everything I now teach women about their time and their capacity.

This episode is a little different and a lot more personal than what I usually share. I'm opening up about five of these lessons, and I want you to know going in that none of them are about doing more or adding to your already full plate. Every single one is about giving yourself permission to finally put something down, and my hope is that you walk away feeling a little more seen and a little less alone in whatever season you're carrying right now.

In This Episode, I'll Cover:

• The part of caregiving nobody warned me about, and the trip that made me realize it.
• The rest lesson I still catch myself getting wrong, even though I know better.
• What I finally did after years of saying "I'm drowning" and having nothing change.
• What I would say today to a woman who's just been told she's using her kids as an excuse.

Resources Mentioned:

• A Better Share by Dr. Morgan Cutlip: bit.ly/4p9psDB

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Thanks for tuning in!
Megan 🩷🐝

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:59

So last week I turned 53 and I've been doing some reflecting on things I wish someone had either told me earlier, maybe something I would have learned sooner, or if I'm being brutally honest, things I wish I'd actually listened to when others suggested it to me. So today I want to share five of those lessons I've learned now that I'm getting close to mid-50s, and I'm just hoping that this message will help you, the listener, perhaps learn from some of my mistakes. Welcome to the Work Life Harmony Podcast. Guess what? You don't have to feel constantly overwhelmed, exhausted, and stressed out. There is another winning. When you have the right systems and tools to plan and manage your time, you can live a life of harmony. If you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed, this is the show for you. Hey friends, welcome back to work life harmony. So many years ago, I was kind of in a course, if you will, a learning environment. And there was a group of all of us on a Zoom call. And this was a group of all fellow women business owners. And one of the women there was sharing just some frustrations about, you know, not having enough time to get some things done that she wanted to do. Her kids were at a really, really young age. And at one point, the kind of head of this program actually said to her, You need to stop using your kids as an excuse. And I could see the hurt and the anger in her face, and everything kind of went quiet. And so did I. I didn't say anything. I wanted to, but I sat there quietly. And later I reached out to her privately and we had a long talk about it. And I was really grateful for that. But to this day, I still regret staying silent in that moment in front of everybody in that room. Now I'm going to come back to that story here before we're done because I want to tell you what's really important from that because I finally do know what I'd say now. But before we do that, I kind of want to set the stage here for today. So I'm going to be sharing with you five lessons in kind of my looking back on 53 years of reflection. So if you've got a good friend, a sister, a bestie that may be struggling with feeling overwhelmed, like they can't get a control of their calendar, etc., you know they could benefit from this episode. I would love it if you would share this with them. Now, as someone who's now in my 50s, you know, birthdays in my 50s landed a little differently than they than they did in previous decades. And honestly, I'm loving the 50s. But what's really changed for me is that at the end of the day, the math kind of changes. And here's what I mean by that. I am no longer saying, oh, when things calm down or when this happens, as if I'm pretending that that's going to arrive. And I am really in a season of life where I'm looking very honestly at the runway, if you will, kind of at the time at hand and what's there. So what I'm going to share with you today, it's not like a list of tips. It's not new things to add to your plate. All right. The last thing I want to do is give you more work to do. These are just some real things that I wished I had learned myself sooner than I did. So nothing that I'm going to share here today is about asking you to do more. Every single one of these is really more about putting things down, things to stop doing instead of adding things to our plate. So let's go ahead and jump in here with the first lesson. One of the things I wished I had learned before I became a mom was just how much of caregiving is mental versus physical, right? And this is true whether you're caring for kids or caring for, you know, aging parents. But it's like growing up, you would see people in that traditional caregiving mode, other moms, and it looked very physically busy, right? Feeding people, driving people, going to the park, laundry, cleaning, all of that. And you kind of feel like, okay, well, that will, you know, evolve as my kids get older. But what you can't see is that mental load, kind of that hum that runs underneath, that never turns off. And I'm thankful that today we're having a lot more conversation around this idea of the mental load, right? And what it means. But for me, when I became a mom almost 16 years ago, there wasn't really words for it. And I can remember my very first trip that I took after becoming a mom. And it was a long time after my daughter was born. And I just remember thinking to myself, oh, I'm going to get this break, right? And I'm going to, I'm going to rest, I'm going to sleep, I'm going to relax. What I what happened was not what I was expected. I remembered climbing into my hotel bed that first night, and I couldn't shut it off. My mind was racing with all the things about is this happening at home? What's going on here? It was like, I thought I was going to get this break. I got a physical break, but I could not get the mental break. Right. And that was my first kind of wake-up call over the fact that the mental load doesn't stay at home when you go on a trip, right? It packs itself and comes right along with you. And because it is so invisible, I didn't have the language to talk about it. And because I didn't have the language to talk about it, I couldn't have useful, meaningful conversations about it with my partner, with my family, with friends, with anybody. And thankfully, there is this amazing book out there that I love sharing with people. It's called A Better Share by Dr. Morgan Cuplip. That really gives great language and conversation to have around that. And I like to share this as kind of a lesson just because if anyone listening out there is entering into a season of caregiving, right? Whether you maybe are a first-time parent or you are caregiving for your own parents, to just have that mental awareness and understanding that the bulk of the work is mental, not physical, and to find a support system that you can feel comfortable talking to about that because it's a game changer. Now let's move on to lesson two. And this is something I've talked about here before on the podcast, but again, it's a lesson I wished I had learned a lot sooner than I did. And it is simply this rest should never be a reward for completing your work. I'm gonna be fully honest, I still struggle with this one today. All right, I'm still learning and implementing this lesson. I am a Gen Xer through and through. I was raised in the generation where rest is what you get after all the work is done. But the catch is the work is never really done, is it? Which means you never really earn the rest. So then when you take the rest, you feel guilty because you're not being productive. And I still struggle with this today, even though I know better. Sometimes I will find myself resting on a Saturday afternoon, maybe watching a movie. And my husband is not a sit-on-a-couch guy on a Saturday. He he just likes to be busy. And if I see him like coming in from outside to inside, I will catch myself wanting to jump off off the couch to look like I'm working. Not because he thinks I should be, because I think I should be. So I am still rewiring my brain for that. And I allow myself to pause and say, no, Megan, you are allowed to rest. Rest is maintenance. Rest is part of how we survive. Rest is how we continue to show up and do the things that are important to us. It should never be treated as a reward. Because at the end of the day, that to-do list, all those things that you want or need to get done, you're just never going to get caught up. So we have to learn to build and prioritize rest in, you know, alignment with everything that we are currently supporting, doing, giving, etc. I've come a long way. I still have a little bit longer to go, but the more I honor the fact that rest is a priority, the better I show up for myself and others. Now let's move on to lesson three. And this was one that I learned in my kind of corporate days. And it is really learning how to calculate and understand your true capacity. I waited way too long to understand how to have a conversation around my capacity. Here's what I mean by that. For years in my career, I was the dumping ground for all the things. Projects needed, give it to Megan. More stuff done, give it to Megan. And truth be told, it wasn't necessarily just give it to Megan. I would volunteer, right? Because I wanted to look like a good team player. I absorbed everything that didn't have an obvious owner. And never, even if I knew, oh, it's too much, never during that process did I sit down to do the actual math to say, is this even physically possible for me to do these things in the time that I have? And I had a very pivotal moment in my career where I was again absorbing way too much. And I hit a breaking point where I kind of had my own little breakdown at home one night. And I just remember screaming out loud, I can't do this anymore. There was nobody there. I was just screaming it out loud to myself. And so in that moment, I kind of paused and I thought, all right, how do I have? Because I'd had some conversations with previous bosses of just kind of saying, you know, things like, oh, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed or I'm drowning or I'm overloaded and nothing seemed to change, right? It was kind of like this, oh well, suck it up around those conversations. So I realized, what if I take the emotion and the feeling out of it and I turn this into a data-driven conversation instead? That allowed me to sit down, make a list of everything that was currently on my plate with my job, all of the recurring work that I was expected to do every single either day or week, and then all the projects that I was supporting as well. And next to each one of those things, I wrote down how much time they took. And when I went through this exercise, it helped me to understand that with that particular job, I had about 25 hours worth of work every single week that was expected of me with kind of recurring work that I produced every single week, took about 25 hours of my time, which left 15 hours for all of the project and one-off demands. Yet when I went through that exercise, I had an additional almost 35 hours expected of me with one-off project work, meaning the math was adding up to I would I needed to be working consistently 60 hours a week. Not sustainable and not what I was getting paid to do. And so when I went back into work the next day and set up a meeting with my boss, I came in with the data and said, hey, here's everything that I'm doing. I would love to have a conversation with you about priorities because I want to make sure, given all of this, that I am picking the right priorities to focus on during my 40 hours and we can have a conversation about the overflow. Now, did he love that? Of course not. He wanted to, he wanted me to work 60 hours, right? But it led to a very powerful data-driven conversation and an awareness of here's what I'm going to do, here's what I can't support right now. And certain work was taken off my plate. And we had a really great priority-driven conversation. It took me having a complete mental breakdown to learn this, right? And that's what I would like to avoid happening for you, the listener. I wished I had had that kind of tool in my toolkit years sooner in the workplace to be able to track what is my capacity with the job description that I'm doing, how much of my week is already consumed by the recurring work, and what is available for one-off and ad hoc. Because when you have that data, it allows you to have really powerful conversations. Now, the fourth lesson, and this is really at the heart of everything that I do. And thankfully, I, you know, I learned it early-ish on, but I want all women everywhere to learn it as soon as possible. The systems for me, it translates into that the systems around how I planned, managed, organized my time and calendar that worked for me in my 20s were systems that were not built for the life that I'm living now. And honestly, they were not built for the life that I was living in my mid-30s, 40s, and now 50s. Because the systems that I was using in my 20s, and friends, these are the same systems that a lot of the male productivity experts are still teaching. They were systems that were built before the internet in some cases. All of them were built before smartphones. And these systems were built where the tools that we had were paper. That was it. And the systems worked great when we didn't have information overload, when we didn't have constant accessibility, right? When we didn't have the ability to work from home and home stuff bleeding into work, right? And for me, that system early on was my dear Franklin Covey daily planner. I took all the training, right? One page a day. Whatever you didn't finish, you rewrote for tomorrow. Turn the page, copy forward, add more onto it. Pray somehow it gets done. Right. And my real wake-up moment was on a Friday when I was doing that ritual, right? Turning the page to Friday, copying Thursday's leftover tasks that didn't get done forward. And as I was writing Schedule Well check on Friday, it hit me. I'm like, I already know I'm not going to call and do this today. But I'm writing it down because that's the system. That's how we don't lose stuff. And then I was like, how many times have I written schedule well check? And I started flipping back through my planner. I had written the same handful of tasks over and over again, some of them for six weeks, right? Six weeks, five to Monday through Friday for six weeks. Even though in the moment I knew I wasn't going to do it that day, that was the system. That's how things didn't fall through the cracks, was you just kept recopying it, right? Now that sounds like a system, but it really wasn't. It was more like a treadmill on paper, right? It's just the same loop over and over and over again. And this is why I do what I do now. This is why I have spent the time I've spent developing this top framework that I teach and why I'm really, really protective of women who say that they're convinced they're the problem. They aren't. Chances are you are using systems that were never built for the life that you are living today. So the lesson I want you to take away from that is if you are trying to implement some kind of an organizational system or a planning system or a morning routine or whatever it is in your life, make sure that it is one that was built with the awareness of the realities of your life and it supports it. Right? Because if it doesn't, it's not going to work, and you're going to end up feeling like, you know, it's you instead of the system. Now, the final lesson I want to talk about here really brings me back to what I was sharing at the very beginning, where I was on that call and had to unfortunately listen to someone telling this poor woman that she was using her kids as an excuse. All right. That caregiving was an excuse. She wasn't hiding behind her children or using them as an excuse. She was just being honest about her capacity. That exact honesty that took me, my own breakdown, to learn about years ago. And she was brave enough in this room to say it out loud and then was told that she was making excuses from another woman with kids. And that's the part that still like stings for me when I think back to that. Now, if I were in that room all these years later and someone were to say that, what I would do today is I would speak up and I would say out loud, naming your capacity is not an excuse. It's an honest and responsible thing someone can do to make sure that they don't get overscheduled and burnt out. A woman who has the courage to say, There's only so much of me right now, is not making excuses. She's stating a fact about her life. Right? You can't pour, and we've all heard this before, you can't pour from a container if it's empty, right? The word excuse is how we shame people into into hitting burnout, right? Into overriding their limits until their bot until their body stops or their mind just stops. Right? So you wouldn't want to do that to someone else, right? And and you don't, we can't continue to allow that to happen in rooms that we're in. Your kids are never an excuse. Your aging parents are never an excuse. Right? Whatever you're going through that's taking up the most room in your life and heart in this season is not an excuse. It's your life and it's your capacity. A real system gets built around the life you actually have with the mental load, with the caregiving, with the curve goals, right? Instead of demanding that you pretend like that life isn't there. So, friends, if you've ever felt like someone is subtly implying that you're using your kids or your fill-in-the-blank as an excuse for why something isn't getting done, absolutely speak up and tell them I have an awareness of my capacity. Right? It's not an excuse. It's real, it's honest, and it's brave. So that's what I've got for you here as I am entering 53. And I hope that you can pick one of these, maybe to embrace in your current season of life. Learn from my mistakes. Learn how to rest before you get burnt out, right? Learn how to assess if a system is right for you. Don't let anyone accuse you of taking what's important to you and turning it into an excuse. So, with that, happy birthday to me and thank you for being here. And as always, happy planning. Getting on top of all things, time management, organization, and productivity doesn't have to stop just because this episode is over. If you are feeling overwhelmed, your calendar's out of control, or you're just running in a race that will never end in terms of your to-do list, I have great news for you. I have an app in both the App Store and Google Play called the Pink Bee. And it is chopped full of small but incredibly powerful trainings to help you get out of overwhelm. It includes my signature Ditch the Overwhelm training and introduction to my time management framework built specifically for women. So open up either your app store or Google Play, do a search on the word the Pink Fee, all in Word, and download the app to get started today.