From Pressure To Presence (Part 2): Why Getting More Done Doesn’t Make You Feel Closer To Your Kids

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, my beautiful friends. Welcome back to the podcast and specifically to the series on from Pressure to Presence. This is part two, Why Getting More Done Doesn’t Make You Feel Closer To Your Kids. In part one, I shared the real reason that you experience friction in motherhood. And it’s not because you’re doing anything wrong, it is because your brain is wired for survival. Your brain’s number one job is to scan for danger and look for what’s wrong, and that’s why you find yourself overthinking, worrying, comparing, doubting, and feeling guilty even when things are going fine.

Or dare I say pretty dang good, but when you have this default wiring, it’s going to create friction if it’s unmanaged. So when I’m talking about friction, I’m talking about the gap between how you want to show up as a mom and how you want to be feeling as a mom in your everyday life and how you actually feel right now in the moment. Or you know your top feeling on a day-to-day basis during this specific season of life. So maybe you want to feel calm and patient and connected, but instead you find yourself most of the time feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, and snapping at your kids. So the big takeaway from that first episode was that nothing is wrong with you. It’s just your brain doing what brains do. Running on autopilot in survival mode, looking for what’s wrong, making that mean something negative about you.

And then those thoughts compound the feelings of overwhelm or frustration or irritation or self-pity. Whatever your negative emotions of choice are, those compound. And when you’re operating from that place, you know you really can’t live the happy, joyful, present, connected life that you want. So today I want to build on that by looking at one of the biggest traps for high achieving moms, and that is productivity. We have been conditioned to believe that if we can just get more done, we’ll finally feel better, more at peace and more connected to our kids. But the truth is, my friends, that getting more done doesn’t actually bring you that sense of peace and closeness and connection that you are craving. It often just gets in the way. And we’re going to dive into why this is, but I want you to know that I am a huge fan of productivity.

I teach a lot of productivity. But before you can get to the place of achieving just because that’s who you want to be, you have to unravel your connection with doing more from your self-worth. And the way that you do that is by understanding that you know, most likely if you’re listening to this podcast from the time that you were a little girl, you were probably praised for doing a good job when you did well in school, when you excelled in activities or sports, whenever you achieved something, you received external price. And what you learned from that is that you can feel really good when you do a good job. Said differently. The more productive you are, the better outcomes you produce, the more valuable you felt. Good job. And a messy kitchen or a messy home means that you can’t keep up and you’re failing.

Okay? That’s tying productivity and getting things done. To your goodness. If my home is clean or if my home is messy, determines how I feel about myself. Another example, if you have the perfect outfits for your kids or they are in the exact activities you want them to be in, or you have the perfect birthday parties or pack the best lunches or whatever it is that you want for your kids, and you make all of that mean you are doing a good job as a mom and therefore you are a good person, that is tying outcomes to your worth and value. Another example is like obsessively checking off everything on your list to feel good. You know what I’m talking about? High achiever, I was you. You write it down just so you can cross it off and feel good about yourself. This is not to say that productivity doesn’t matter and that you should just let things go and not get things done.

Please don’t hear me say that. I know you wouldn’t even try that even if I was suggesting it, but I want you to know that by untying your worth and your good feelings about yourself and your life from getting more done, you can actually achieve more and be happier because you won’t depend on getting things done to be happy. You won’t conflate the two. And I know what this is like. You know, first born type a loved school, loved achieving, and I used to believe that like happiness was over there. And as an adult, I have come to learn and through utilizing these tools that there’s real harm in operating that way because you will kind of just goal hop and change your circumstances trying to feel better when happiness isn’t over there. It’s just separate from achievement all together. What I really want to encourage you to think about is productivity as a feeling and connection as a feeling.

When you feel productive, you are getting things done, you are operating from a task perspective. It is all about doing. Connection is the opposite of that. It’s being, it’s not something that you can check off your list, it’s actually the letting go of the list and they’re completely different energies. I like to think of them as opposites. And it’s not to vilify productivity, it’s just that if you’re a high achiever like me, you already are really good at being productive. And yes, I’m all for calendaring and you know, optimizing our efficiency and productivity and time management, absolutely, I’m here for that as well. But the real, I think challenge and the real work to do with, you know, my clients inside the Mom On Purpose Membership and my private coaching containers specifically is like letting go of this good girl syndrome where we tie our worth and our goodness and our good feelings to how much we get done.

Because if we don’t untie that, then we are going to keep trying to earn connection from our kids and do more in order to connect with them. And it just doesn’t work. Real connection is about being, think about the way that your kids experience love and presence. They don’t experience it through getting more done. They don’t care if the dishwasher is empty, if the laundry is folded, or if every email is answered. They do not care about your to-dos, and that’s by design. They’re not supposed to care. What they notice is your attention, your eyes on them, your laughter, your curiosity, they notice your energy, your openness, and this, please do not hear this as meaning you’re supposed to be just happy all of the time. But when you want to be present with your kids, that means being authentically focused on them. So for example, you might be having a hard day and maybe you feel a little bit of, stress, let’s say you can actually still shift into presence and connection time with them and allow that stress to be there in the background.

That’s very different than acting out your stress, maybe being short with them, maybe scrolling on your phone, maybe not giving them attention and really letting the stress run the show or as it relates to productivity, if you add connection time or one-to-one time as another to do on your list and you just pause for a moment, but you’re in that energy of getting it done, I gotta get this done, your mind will be somewhere else. Your mind will be focused on the email or the project or the house or whatever it is that is in that doer, productive energy place that you’re living in. Okay? That’s the opposite of connection. And your kids will sense that and you won’t feel that connection either. Connection is about being with your kids. I want you to think of the word with, okay, what does that mean? Where is your attention?

Where are your eyes? How is your energy? Do you feel light and curious and open? Do you feel available because you probably are a mom who wants to do a good job and cares about you know, your impact on your kids. What I don’t want you to do is hear this message and then use it against yourself to beat yourself up to think you’re not doing enough, and then have it be one more thing on your to-do list. That is the opposite of what I want to, offer to you here. What I do want to offer you though are different ways of thinking about how you’re showing up with your kids to really increase your connection with them, which is ultimately what we have with them anyways. They grow up, they leave home hopefully, and what’s left is the relationship. And so just think about those little day-to-day moments and how you are showing up.

And if you’re only focused on productivity compounded over time, that’s very disconnecting. You’re wiping down the counters and your child calls, mom, look at me and you barely glance up. You’re productive, you’re doing something and they can kind of feel unseen. It’s a moment of disconnection for them. Or let’s say you’re spending an hour reorganizing the playroom, but they would have rather had you sit and play with them for 10 minutes and let the playroom be messy. Or let’s say you stay up late catching up on home things or work things and then you know, the next morning you’re feeling extra tired because you didn’t get enough sleep and you snap at them when they spill their breakfast.

All of these little micro experiences that you’re having on an everyday basis matter, they’re like little deposits or little withdrawals into your connection bank with your kids. And productivity, I think gives you this sense of feel good emotion., that’s the best way I can describe it. It’s like comes back to again, good girl syndrome being taught. You know, you are really good when you get more done. And so you can accomplish more and say, look, I did a good job cleaning up, or I did a good job with the laundry. I did a good job at work, or whatever it is. So you feel good, you get that little hit from producing, but at the same time you don’t realize the cost of it. This doesn’t fill that deeper need for connection for you or for your kids. And this is not to say that there won’t be times when you are going to choose to wipe down the counters or reorganize the playroom or catch up on household chores and responsibilities or work.

There will be those times, but is it all of the time, are you really good at getting things done and not so good at being happy and connecting and being playful and grounded? I think that is one of the biggest traps that I see with my high achieving clients because we’re so used to getting our good feelings from accomplishment and we don’t feel that sense of accomplishment and therefore pride in our worthiness from simple connection. And yet connection is what matters most. And so we’ve got to learn how to untie our worth from our productivity so that we still are productive, but it’s within boundaries so that we focus on connection if that’s truly what we want, which I know it is. I know so many of you are listening and nodding and saying, I want more presence with my kids, I just don’t know how. Or it feels like there’s not enough time or it feels like this is just a really busy season, or maybe they’re busy. It’s like, yes, but you can own your side of the street. How you show up and your energy and your openness and your curiosity towards your kids is what matters most.

Productivity gives you this sense of control and accomplishment and it’s not bad, it’s just that overdone. It can rob you of the connection that is right in front of you without needing to do anything other than notice it. Make space for it in your heart. Slow down. And I’m not saying never clean the playroom and I’m not saying, you know, leave your work emails unanswered. And I’m not saying that, you know, you should never say no to your kids when they want to play or connect. It’s actually a lot easier to say no to them and to say, you know, this is my work time or this is time when I’m taking care of the home, or whatever it is. When you have filled that connection bank up. So when you know that there is space in your day to play with your kids, to focus just on them, it’s a lot easier to say no at the times when that isn’t what you want to choose because you know you’re already going to fill that or you know, whether that’s later or earlier.

You trust yourself and you know that, that that is something that you prioritize every day. So for me, I’ve really gotten good at this. I’ve gotten to a place where if I’m working and my kids kind of want something from me or they want to play, it’s so easy for me to hold that boundary for work and not interrupt my work and not stop and not feel guilty about it at all. Like no guilt because I know that there are lots of other moments and times throughout the day where I’m just focused on them and I’ve gotten so good at letting the mess go. Like I don’t feel triggered by a mess at all so much. So it’s kind of funny, whenever I have help or support coming in, they are so much better at cleaning up than I am and I kind of, I kind of like it.

It’s, it’s like a nod to myself like, oh yeah, I’m so comfortable with a little bit of a mess. Because when I think of the order of priority, a higher priority than cleaning up is connection with my kids. And again, it’s not either or, it’s just the order of priority and I’m going to prioritize connection with my kids. And when my kids are really little, being around them to keep them safe is also super important. And so I don’t clean up as much as I used to and I have no guilt about that at all because in order of priority, that’s lower on the list. And so just paying attention to how often you are in Doer mode, you are in productivity mode, you are in, I gotta get things done mode and how validating that feels for you overly so. Meaning you are used to getting your self-worth from doing more and accomplishing more, and how that can really get in the way of becoming a more present and connected mom. So if you want to become more present and more connected, it’s not something you put on your to-do list, it’s not something you schedule on your calendar. It doesn’t even come from calming down your body. It doesn’t come from doing fewer things, you know, meaning like hiring more things out so that you have that time.

It’s actually about being different. You have to feel connected, you have to do thought work around your racing mind, those negative what if worrisome thoughts or stressful thoughts? You have to manage your mind and let go of those perfectionist fantasies, those perfectionist tendencies. But at the same time you can keep your high standards. So I’m all about having high standards, I’m all about producing, but not because I need to get my good feelings from those activities. And that’s the difference because that means I can let the mess go if it means that I have to choose between that and connection with my kids. So this is the work we really do inside the Mom On Purpose Membership of learning how to let go of kind of chasing happiness. Happiness is over there when my kids are in school, when my kids finish this up, when we’re in a different season of life when they don’t have so many activities.

You know, when I get the next, you know, advancement in my career or when I’m no longer staying home with the kids or like it’s always on on the other side of what’s upcoming, you have to let go of that and really learn how to manage your mind in the challenges that you’re in now and learn how to create the feelings you want to create so that you can feel however you want to feel. If you want to feel connected and present with your kids that is available to you. You can learn how to stop feeling so triggered by a mess. You can put your phone away and you know, stop scrolling and stop replying to emails and have better boundaries. You can expand your capacity for presence as a feeling that you experience and that you enjoy. And it’s a learning how to get out of that constant go, go, go doer mode and how to feel present and calm and connected and at peace right where you’re at.

And that doesn’t mean you lose your highly productive self, and it doesn’t mean that you lose your ambition. I think people think, okay, well if I’m connected and slow and present with my kids, like I can’t get so much done. And that’s just not true. When you utilize the time management tools and the connection tools and the parenting tools that I teach inside the Mom On Purpose Oembership, all of it is available to you. It’s not either or, it’s and both, but productivity and connection are opposites. You have to stop doing and start being, and this is exactly what we do inside the Mom on Purpose membership. Every single month you get a brand new masterclass on the first of the month, and then every single week we have coaching calls and you get the replays in a private podcast. So you have content that teaches you exactly how to do this and coaching in a q and a in a space where other moms are doing this as well.

So you get the tools and skills required to be more present with your kids. Most of my clients are high achieving moms and they are stuck in doing more trying harder mode. They’re exhausted and overwhelmed and it feels like it’s too much. But they wouldn’t necessarily say that. So you might not say that to me if we just met, but you know, if we were at happy hour or we were having a long chat, you would tell me that. And I think it just comes from how we are taught to think about being productive and doing more. We are praised for it. It’s like, you know, glorifying. She does it all. The mom who does it all, she can get so much done and have all these babies and homeschool and on and on and on and on. She’s in the best shape of her life, right?

It never ends. And it’s like, okay, hold on a minute. Why is that the gold standard? We often don’t brag about, she is just so connected to her kids. And so part of this is self validation and noticing that you are dependent on getting your good feelings and your worth externally from that external validation. And how do we change that so that you can feel valid and worthy and trust yourself to make decisions about when to be productive and when to connect with your kids that doing more energy is really useful for getting things done. And I want you to get things done. I think I produce at an extremely high rate and I also know how to turn it off because that type of energy doesn’t work for connection. Presence is a skill. It is one that we are not taught. It’s one that we are not rewarded for growing up again, we’re rewarded for good grades and making the team and scoring the goal and getting into a certain college and all of these external accomplishments, that’s what we are validated for and rewarded for.

No one’s saying, oh my gosh, she knows how to be so present and connected with her friends. She’s such a good friend. And so you haven’t been taught the skill of presence and you can’t think, plan or schedule your way into it. You have to learn how to be different and turn down that dial of productivity and turn up the dial of connection. And that requires vulnerability. It requires slowing down that racing mind and teaching yourself and your nervous system that this is actually a huge part of life that you’ve been missing out on a huge part of how you want to show up as a mom. Because when you are older, decades from now and your kids are older, what you have left is that connection. You want to have conversations with them and be friends with them. And that’s not to say that you’re friends with them.

Now of course you’re a parent now, but it’s like working for a boss who micromanages you versus working for a boss who respects you and is open to your ideas and suggestions. You want to be the boss as the parent, as the mom who doesn’t micromanage and isn’t so critical and isn’t always doing and looking for what’s wrong in productivity mode. You want to be the mom who is open and available and curious and connected to her kids. And yes, you will hold boundaries of course, but you will also do it in a warm-hearted way, in a loving, respectful way. And it’s an art. It’s an art that I want to invite you to learn how to do as part of the skills that are required, I think to have the happiest, most connected present motherhood available to you. So I want to invite you to join me inside the Mom On Purpose membership over at momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more.

That is where we take this work to the next level. So to wrap up this part of the three part series, remember that productivity doesn’t equal presence. You’ve been conditioned and programmed to measure success, to measure your worth based on how much you get done, but your kids do not feel love through checklists. They don’t feel love through how much you get done. They feel it when you are with them, really with them. And that’s what creates closeness. And the beautiful thing is it doesn’t require hours of extra time. It just requires you to show up in a different way. Next week in the next episode, the final episode of this series, I’m going to be sharing with you the ways that I’ve shifted into becoming a calmer, more joyful and connected mom specific things that I do in my daily life that I hope will inspire you to try with your kids as well. These tools have been life changing for me and I want to be an example of that. If you are not having the motherhood experience that you want and feel like there’s got to be a better way to do this, that is what I am here for, to help you make motherhood easier and more fulfilling. So with that, I will talk with you on the next episode. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose Membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.