EPISODE TAKEAWAYS:

- Mama, you deserve a life you love.

- No matter what your background, your financial level, the biases you face, or your past experiences, this is still the episode for you.

- Prior generations focused on accomplishment or effort as most important when it comes to being successful, but there’s an even better measure of success: joy.

WHAT'S INSIDE:

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Hey! It's Dr. Whitney and I am back again with another episode of the Modern Mommy Doc Podcast. Today we are talking about the fact that you, yes, YOU deserve a life that you love. Now don't turn me off just for saying that. Do not press stop on this podcast episode. Give me a minute to explain, because I know that a lot of you, when you hear that think, "No, that's not for me. That's for rich people. That's for people who have an advantage. That's for people who don't face oppression. That's for people who don't face racism. That's for people who have privilege." Listen, you are 100%, right? There are so many people out there that are suffering at the hands of others, based off of factors they cannot control at all, based off of things that have happened to them, based off of circumstances that have been set up for them, based off of all kinds of injustices, so many of which I, myself, of course have never faced, right? You face injustices. Other people have faced injustices. Some have way more than others have, but I would hate to rob individual human people from the idea that they don't have potential that is beyond their circumstances, whatever those circumstances are.

I know that in building resilience for working moms, for moms in general, for human beings, means they can elevate to the life that they were meant to live. Now, what does a life that you love mean? Does that mean it's rainbows and unicorns and sunny days, and you live in a mansion and you have a maid and you have caretakers to do every single thing for you? Does it mean you don't lift a finger or you just sit around all day, with manis and pedis? No. So, see that's the catch, too. I don't mean a life that's perfect. I don't mean a life where you don't have to work hard. I don't mean a life where you don't have troubles or chaos or stress. I mean, you deserve a life where you find joy, where you find fulfillment, where at the end of the day, you go to sleep and you feel like, "Yeah, I did it. I love my life. Okay. It's hard. There are struggles, but I'm working through them. I know how to ride the waves of my life. I know how to battle the storms of my life. I have agency. I'm not in control of every single thing that happens to me, but I am in control of the trajectory of my life."

Now, I want to take you back to my childhood and to what was taught to me and really an entire generation about what is (basically) the meaning of life and what's possible. That sounded deep, but it's true. So thank goodness, my parents were absolutely not in the camp of what matters most is your accomplishments. I think a lot of parents though, of my parents' generation were, I mean, that was kind of the name of the game 30 to 40, 50 years ago. It was like, prove your worth to me. Did you get into a great college? Did you ace all of your tests? Did you land an amazing job? That was the marker of success. It wasn't about what it took to get there. If you got there, that's what mattered most.

Then there was a whole generation of thought that came behind that that said, "Actually, what matters less is your accomplishment. What matters more is your effort. It's your grit. It's your ability to really work hard every single day. And that's definitely the attitude that my parents had and definitely the attitude that I took for myself. In fact, I remember writing college essays and incorporating this into my medical school applications and thinking this to myself, constantly in my relationships and in my work endeavors. I thought "I am not the smartest person in the room, but that's okay because I'm the hardest working person in the room. If you need me to do it, I will do it. And it doesn't really matter if it kills me on my way to doing it because I need to prove that I'm the most committed. I need to prove that I am putting in the most effort."

That sense of responsibility toward every single task that I took on was equally unhealthy to this idea that you had to be perfect in terms of the end outcome because I had to be a perfectly good, hard worker. Sometimes I was exhausted. Sometimes I didn't want to be a hard worker on that day. I don't want to shirk my responsibilities, but I knew that by continuing to grind, by continuing to keep on going, no matter what, that actually I was working harder, but not smarter. I was working hard, but not effectively. So I would watch other people in their professional endeavors, in their personal side gig jobs that they had or in their side hustles, or just even in their entrepreneurial businesses and think, "Why is it that I'm working harder than everybody else? And everybody else is getting ahead faster. And I don't just mean financially. I mean, I'm up all night doing work and other people are telling me, sorry, they can't answer my phone call or my email because they're on vacation and I'm never experiencing that myself."

How does it make you feel in the long run when you are someone who is a very hard worker but can't stop? That makes you feel resentful and that makes you feel burnt out. That makes you feel like you have to keep on doing the work, but you're looking at everybody else like, I'm clearly working harder than you. And you feel jealous of those people that, in the end, seem to be having an easier time, and that resentment digs in like a bad seed. It doesn't do anything for you as a person. It definitely doesn't do anything for the person that you're jealous of. And it keeps you stuck.

I remember I was having a conversation with a friend and I was talking about the output that I was putting out to my patients in my clinical office and also to my business partners. I was saying how much I was paying everybody and how I felt really strapped and how I felt like I was constantly kind of on the precipice of something big, but then never really reaping the benefits. Always almost there, but never really finally making it.

This friend encouraged me and said, "Whitney, in the end, if you 'made it,' would that look like you working as hard as you are now?"

I was like, "No."

So then, she asked me, "What's going to make it, if your M.O. is to constantly work and produce and be in motion now, different when you finally get there? Are you going to be able to actually enjoy it? Are you going to be able to actually sit and rest and say, okay, made it? Or will it be incredibly hard when, in the eyes of everybody else, you've already made it, to actually enjoy success, to enjoy your life? And isn't that the mark of a life that you love — that you're able to rest in some moments and that you're able to savor your accomplishments, if they're financial, if they're relationship accomplishments, if they are things that you've done in terms of the goals that you've set for yourself? Where is the joy in just resting and being in that moment for a second before you move on to being fierce again, to just being there being present?"

And she challenged me and she said, "So what if now you practiced taking a little bit. You give, you give, give, give, give, give to everybody else. What if you practiced taking now?"

I said, "What do you mean?"

She said, "I mean like, what if every time that you got paid by an organization or that you received money for your business, or that you got a paycheck that you set aside, even a hundred dollars from it (or $10 from it, it doesn't matter)? This is the amount that you say, this is my take. It would mean you're not consistently reinvesting all of your money all of the time. What if on your days that you have set aside for your work at Modern Mommy Doc, you said 'I'm setting aside an hour. That's just for me to do what I want to do. That's not about getting anything done or doing anything for everybody else.'"

I thought that was not going to make a difference at all, but you know what? It totally did. So I started practicing, taking and receiving. I started practicing receiving first, which then I thought about the entire schema of the Centered Life Blueprint fits in perfectly, right? That's what I'm asking you guys to do. When we think about the circle of our Centered Vision, what are all the things that we care about the most we want to spend our time, our energy, our attention on? What's at the very center of that circle? It's YOU. And if you don't have you, if you haven't taken good care of yourself, you could know what your priorities are, you could know what your center points are within that circle, but being able to navigate that circle with any level of aptitude is going to be really, really difficult.

If you've taken time to pause and to rest, you will actually be more productive and more effective as you're trying to make decisions. There are plenty of times when you're trying to decide, does this align, or does this not with me (or when you're trying to problem solve about something that's a total time suck for you or trying to problem solve about a relationship issue that you're having). Guess what? If you know yourself well enough; if you've taken the time to be with yourself and to receive for yourself; if you know what that feels like, because you've done it often enough, that is going to be the thing that gives you the power to, with energy, make decisions to problem solve. You'll be able to find solutions that actually work for you, and to find the life that you love — to get to a place where, at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, at the end of the year, you say, you know, I felt pretty good about that.

There were some rough patches could have done without during COVID (to put it lightly). I could have done without my kids being out of school this entire time. I could have done without a bunch of stresses. But man, life throws things at us, it's going to happen. I also could have done without the gender biases and the gender inequities that face me every single day as a woman in the workplace (not my workplace, specifically, but the workplace at-large). I could have done without the financial stress that my husband and I hit three to four years ago and had to crawl out of, I could have done without that. Right. But despite those things, I'm able to find a life that I love on the whole. And I know that's a shift in your thinking from what you were probably taught is the end goal in your existence.

If I meet with my mom for lunch and say, "I've made it. I found joy," she'll go, "Yeah, great. So tell me what's happening with those contracts and those deals."

And I'll go, "No, you don't understand. I just found joy. I've decided that the things that I am going to invest in, either bring me joy now or make it possible for me to have more joy in the future. That's my litmus test for if I'm going to commit to things right now: In the present or in future, does it give me and my family and my little ecosystem joy? Because when I have joy, my light is bright. I can share it with other people. I'm going to be a better doctor. I'm going to be a better parent. I'm going to be a better volunteer at the city council or whatever is your jam.



You know what I mean? I'm going to actually be a stronger advocate for other people's joy and justice for other people and fighting against the inequities of the world and the unfairness of the world. If I have first found joy in myself and decided that my life, my joy is worth fighting for, Mama. I want to give you the message that your joy is worth fighting for. That joy is an end goal. That's enough that if you decided that's your number one priority and all ships point in that direction for you, that I would be your biggest cheerleader. I'd be over here. Like, yes, you got it. Right. Cause I know that joy just ripples out to everybody else. I love you guys. Thank you so much for being here this week and I'll see you next time.

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