Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #68| Balance Work and Life Using Thoughtful Authenticity for Less Overwhelm
Transcript
- 0:00Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I got really good at feeling my own anxiety bubble.
- 0:03Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I mean, I come from a family of anxiety being just the standard and so right, both my parents, my kids, like everyone around me.
- 0:14Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I feel that like agita coming up in me and it's like okay, it's almost - the next layer down is I recognize that I'm reacting rather than responding.
- 0:52Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more and productive by doing less.
- 0:52Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:52Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences, and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life.
- 0:56Michelle Gauthier: Hello, and thanks for joining.
- 0:57Michelle Gauthier: Today we have a fantastic guest, Lauren Wittenberg-Weiner, who transformed her struggles as an overwhelmed military spouse into a huge company where she created thousands of jobs for people in similar situations.
- 1:11Michelle Gauthier: So Lauren has so much knowledge to share with us today.
- 1:15Michelle Gauthier: She's going to teach us how she managed her own overwhelm and anxiety, how to apply a tool she came up with called 'thoughtful authenticity' to bring your real self to work without compromising your professionalism.
- 1:29Michelle Gauthier: She gave a TED Talk on this and I love what she had to say.
- 1:33Michelle Gauthier: And then the third thing is why it's so important that we, as overwhelmed working women, share this with the women who work for us or people who we are peers with at work.
- 1:43Michelle Gauthier: I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.
- 1:46Michelle Gauthier: Hi, Lauren, thank you so much for joining us.
- 1:50Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Of course.
- 1:50Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Thank you so much for having me.
- 1:51Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm so excited about this.
- 1:53Michelle Gauthier: Yes, me too.
- 1:54Michelle Gauthier: I have loved your recent TED Talk and I want to just dig into that for sure.
- 1:58Michelle Gauthier: But before we get there, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself, and a little bit from the perspective of what you have done, and then a little about if you ever felt like an overwhelmed working woman?
- 2:11Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Well, the first one is absolutely yes, every single day.
- 2:14Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I'm Lauren Wittenberg-Weiner.
- 2:17Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I started my company basically because I couldn't get a job when we were moved overseas with the military.
- 2:24Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I had come out of the White House in DC, I'd met my husband while I was there, single, and we got an offer to go with the military.
- 2:36Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: He was a civilian at the time.
- 2:38Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: He had been active duty before but was a civilian at the time and he got an offer to go over to Naples, Italy Sounded amazing.
- 2:46Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It was right around the time of Under the Tuscan Sun and I was like, oh, let's go.
- 2:51Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: That sounds amazing.
- 2:52Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Bucolic rolling hills, all the lavender fields.
- 2:56Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And then, yeah, Naples isn't Tuscany.
- 2:59Michelle Gauthier: I've never been, but that's exactly what I would have been picturing also.
- 3:03Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Nope, it is a very gritty city.
- 3:08Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It's amazing, but it is definitely not the rolling hills of Tuscany, right?
- 3:13Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So we get over there, and I kid you not, Michelle, the first day we got over there we got off the plane, and in the military they give you what's called a sponsor.
- 3:23Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So if somebody comes and picks you up, it helps you get settled, particularly when you're overseas.
- 3:27Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And the sponsor took us the back way into the base through this alley.
- 3:34Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And Naples had these trash strikes all the time, and so there was a trash strike, because there always was, and there was a dumpster at the start of the alleyway.
- 3:46Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Well, the dumpster, because it hadn't been emptied in weeks, months, was three city blocks long and it was on fire.
- 3:58Michelle Gauthier: Oh my gosh.
- 3:58Michelle Gauthier: A literal dumpster fire.
- 4:00Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I was like, oh my God, there is a literal dumpster fire here, right?
- 4:04Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And it got worse from there because I couldn't find a job, and I had been, right, PhD from an Ivy league school, White House for four years busting my tush to kind of get somewhere in my career and then it was like full stop.
- 4:21Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I didn't do well sitting home.
- 4:24Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I also didn't do well with lower level kind of entry level positions, which is the only thing that I really could get on base.
- 4:31Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So the woman who turned out to be my business partner was a corporate lawyer and she started a company for me, basically just incorporated the company and it was a placeholder, right, instead of being a 1099, they tell you, don't do individual 1099,
- 4:47Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: you have to have a shell of the company to protect yourself, whatever.
- 4:49Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So that's what we did and it grew and blossomed from there.
- 4:53Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So we started it, it was me and then I got a contract for one and a half of us, so she came on to get away from her colicky baby and then it kind of just blossomed from there.
- 5:06Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: In 18 years, which is jumping ahead quite a bit, but over the course of 18 years we went from one and a half of us to over 350 of us and we were about 100 million in annual revenue.
- 5:20Michelle Gauthier: Oh, my goodness, that's quite a jump.
- 5:22Michelle Gauthier: 18 years suddenly seems very short.
- 5:24Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: 18 years seems like a long time and now I look back I'm like, oh my God, it really what it feels like yesterday that we started this thing, but we sold it about almost two years ago now to a tribe, a Native American tribe called the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, and it has been a phenomenal wild ride, both as the owner, now in the transition.
- 5:48Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It's incredible.
- 5:49Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: We're growing by leaps and bounds now again, so we grew over the course of us individually owning it.
- 5:57Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Now the tribe is taking it and the team that we built, along with the team the tribe is building over top of that, are taking it to totally new heights, which is amazing.
- 6:07Michelle Gauthier: Oh my gosh, that's fantastic.
- 6:08Michelle Gauthier: So you basically went from I don't have a job, I'm going to create a job for military spouses.
- 6:14Michelle Gauthier: And how many jobs do you think you created over time?
- 6:18Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I think we counted.
- 6:19Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: The last I had heard was we had 250 military spouses that had worked for us over time, many of those for 10, 12, 15 years.
- 6:28Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But I would say over the course of the 19 years, 18 years, that we had it - well over 1,000 jobs.
- 6:36Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Certainly there were people that had been employed over the course of, because when we left, when we sold it, it was 350 individuals that were working at that time, and I would probably even guess 1,500, 2,000.
- 6:49Michelle Gauthier: That's so wonderful, like 2,000 people in the position you were in, where they're a military spouse and being supportive of their spouse, but also want to have a career and might not have that opportunity.
- 7:01Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yeah, I mean we had everyone.
- 7:02Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: We had military spouses, we had veterans, we had civilians, we had all sorts of different people.
- 7:08Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So it wasn't - we started with military spouses and it was - we just changed up the rules, really.
- 7:13Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I mean we really, just people were like, you can't hire military spouses.
- 7:17Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Wait, why not?
- 7:19Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And oh, the military spouses don't have professional level careers.
- 7:23Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: No, they do.
- 7:24Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: No, they absolutely do.
- 7:26Michelle Gauthier: Yes, I'll count myself among that group of people.
- 7:29Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, they do.
- 7:31Michelle Gauthier: Maybe they didn't at some point, you know, at some point in history.
- 7:36Michelle Gauthier: Maybe that could have been true, but recent history.
- 7:39Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Well, this was in the mid-2004, 2005 era and I don't know why people thought that this was the case, but we really, I mean, we had one guy years ago at UCOM, which is European Command, up in Stuttgart, Germany.
- 7:57Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: We had this guy who basically said, oh no, no, I love military spouses, I love hiring military spouses.
- 8:03Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: They make great secretaries.
- 8:05Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Oh, all due respect, sir, they do make great secretaries, you're absolutely right.
- 8:11Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: They also make great comptrollers.
- 8:14Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: They also make great strategic planners.
- 8:17Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: They also make great all sorts of different you know jobs.
- 8:21Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But he refused to believe it, and this was 2010, 2012.
- 8:26Michelle Gauthier: Interesting, yeah.
- 8:27Michelle Gauthier: So so many doors that you opened, that's amazing.
- 8:29Michelle Gauthier: And then, now that you have sold the company, did it feel like a complete stop, or is it still really busy, or how does it feel now?
- 8:40Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So it's funny because people were like, y ou know, I talked to a lot of people when we were looking at selling who had sold the companies that they had owned before.
- 8:47Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Almost all of them meant for whatever reason, just because of who I knew, and all of them were telling me things about how it was going to feel after the sale, and most of it was around bluntly, it was around ego, right, it was oh, you're going to feel really bad about not being the CEO anymore, about not having the title, about people not listening to you as much.
- 9:07Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: None of that mattered to me, none of it.
- 9:12Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So after it you were like that's fine, I'm fine with that, look I've got my own kind of self-worth outside of my position right and I still have done all the things that I've done.
- 9:24Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Whether or not I have the title or not doesn't matter, yeah.
- 9:27Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So to me, the stuff that they told me was going to be the hardest was watching someone else make decisions that well, actually shutting up was actually the hardest, I think.
- 9:40Michelle Gauthier: I bet, yeah, when you're used to being the boss.
- 9:43Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So like sitting and going, because I literally the first couple of weeks in particular, we'd be in these meetings and somebody would say something and automatically just go to answer, because that was my default.
- 9:56Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But oh wait, I'm no longer the CEO, I need to shut up now.
- 10:00Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I was really bad.
- 10:03Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I got better.
- 10:04Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It's gotten much better over.
- 10:05Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I have literally like I have actually taken time to sit on my hands and push my mouth shut and be like I am not going to answer.
- 10:15Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I am not going to answer, and so I have literally trained myself not to answer or to text on the side and be like hey, I was thinking this, you might want to consider this, as opposed to jumping in, because that role just changes so dramatically.
- 10:31Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, yeah.
- 10:32Michelle Gauthier: So how, when you were building that company for those 18 years, how did you deal with the overwhelm that came along with, we should say, you have two kids, two teenagers and a spouse and parents, and you know all those things, yes, so how did you deal with that?
- 10:53Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: The overwhelm is real.
- 10:54Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: The overwhelm happens, it does, and anyone who tells you it doesn't is lying.
- 11:00Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Right.
- 11:01Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And so you know I got good at, I mean, I used to literally take deep breaths, mm-hmm, calm down.
- 11:08Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I need my parasympathetic nervous system to kick in.
- 11:11Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I just I do the deep breathing because that, to me, is the easiest and fastest thing for me to calm down.
- 11:32Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yes, that said, I actually would get people who thought that I was sighing when I was on call, so I got really good at doing that, but also going on mute, cause it was, and it was like they thought I was mad.
- 11:47Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Somebody said something to me about like, and my daughter does the same thing, she's like, mom, you really make me mad when you do that! I'm like, I am trying to respond effectively.
- 11:58Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I am not mad at you, I'm trying to calm myself down and I want you to learn how to do that.
- 12:02Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But it like I realized that there was actually something kind of an unintended consequence of me calming myself down is spinning other people up, and I didn't want to do that.
- 12:14Michelle Gauthier: Yes, so good to do it, good to do it on mute, and did you get to the point where you could just automatically know when you needed to do that?
- 12:23Michelle Gauthier: Because I feel like that's such a simple solution and you can often do it without other people even knowing what you're doing, but we have to realize that we need to do it.
- 12:32Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I could say I mean, look, I got really good at feeling my own anxiety bubble.
- 12:37Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I mean, I come from a family of anxiety being just the standard and so right, both my parents, my kids, like everyone around me.
- 12:48Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I feel that like agita coming up in me and it's like, okay, it's almost, the next layer down is I recognize that I'm reacting rather than responding, yeah, and so I need to stop and calm down so that I can take the next step and react.
- 13:07Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm sorry, respond, not react.
- 13:10Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, that's so good and I think for everyone listening, the thing that Lauren is doing that is a great thing for you to think about is to identify in your body what anxiety feels like and to know yourself.
- 13:25Michelle Gauthier: For you to say I come from a family of anxious people, so I am an anxious person and that's okay.
- 13:33Michelle Gauthier: I don't need to fight against that.
- 13:34Michelle Gauthier: I just need to know that sometimes I get anxious, and when I get anxious, this is what it feels like, and when it feels like this, I can take deep breaths and just take myself down a couple levels.
- 13:45Michelle Gauthier: Just curious, what does it feel like?
- 13:47Michelle Gauthier: What does anxiety feel like to you in your body?
- 13:52Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I get buzzy.
- 13:52Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I feel like I've had too much coffee.
- 13:53Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I feel like my head is - I get fuzzy and buzzy, like the word is buzzy.
- 13:59Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, yeah, that's perfect.
- 14:00Michelle Gauthier: That's interesting.
- 14:01Michelle Gauthier: I get that too, but only in my like my fingers and my hands, and then I get tightness in my chest.
- 14:06Michelle Gauthier: So I find that when I ask people how certain feelings feel, there's usually a similarity, even though everybody's is different.
- 14:12Michelle Gauthier: So that's a good one.
- 14:14Michelle Gauthier: So, for everybody listening, just think about what that is for you.
- 14:16Michelle Gauthier: What does it feel like when you're anxious?
- 14:18Michelle Gauthier: And when you can notice that you're anxious, you can just do any kind of breathing.
- 14:22Michelle Gauthier: Square breathing is a really easy one that I definitely recommend.
- 14:26Michelle Gauthier: I'll put a link for how to do that one, but I think any type of breathing is good.
- 14:37Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, okay, so that is a good tip.
- 14:38Michelle Gauthier: The reason why I wanted to have you on today is Lauren has recently done a TED Talk on thoughtful authenticity.
- 14:42Michelle Gauthier: First of all, I want to know how it was to do a TED Talk, because it sounds kind of terrifying.
- 14:46Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It's terrifying.
- 14:47Michelle Gauthier: It's terrifying, oh my gosh.
- 14:50Michelle Gauthier: So I want to know about that.
- 14:54Michelle Gauthier: And then the thing that I loved so much about your talk and I don't think this is giving too much away by saying this, but you talk about kind of bringing your real self to work, but not too much, and it just makes me think of the anxiety and overwhelm that we get as women when we have to present in a certain uber professional, or like, I don't have kids kind of way, and how stressful that is.
- 15:18Michelle Gauthier: But then overcorrecting to the side of just being an open book is maybe not the right way either.
- 15:25Michelle Gauthier: So I just I loved your approach and I thought it would be useful for our audience to know.
- 15:30Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yeah.
- 15:30Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So first of all, it was absolutely - I love speaking.
- 15:33Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Like I get so much energy out of speaking but I have always been a kind of off-the-cuff speaker.
- 15:42Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I actually had an early, early speaking failure when I was in graduate school, where I read off of a script, because that was what all the professors at Dartmouth used to do, is they used to read their lecture word for word off of a script and I bombed it.
- 16:02Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It was the worst talk I think anyone in Hanover had ever given, probably.
- 16:08Michelle Gauthier: I kind of doubt that.
- 16:09Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But I literally finished the lecture and one of the I was like, does anyone have any questions?
- 16:14Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And one of them was like yeah, can you go over that again?
- 16:17Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm like which part?
- 16:18Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And they're like the whole thing.
- 16:20Michelle Gauthier: Oh, that makes me just sink in my chair.
- 16:27Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And I'm 21 years old.
- 16:27Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm the same age as most of the kids in the class.
- 16:29Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm like I'm going to die.
- 16:31Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: This is awful.
- 16:31Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm never going to like I'm never showing my face again.
- 16:33Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I had never given a talk that was memorized since then.
- 16:38Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So this is now 30 years later almost, and I was like I have to memorize like word for word, memorize this talk, and I don't want it to look too scripted, but it has to be scripted.
- 16:53Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So it was so out of my comfort zone and I was so terrified the entire time.
- 16:58Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Hopefully it didn't come off like that.
- 17:00Michelle Gauthier: No, it did not come off like that.
- 17:02Michelle Gauthier: Tell us a little bit about the behind the scenes.
- 17:05Michelle Gauthier: So does it have to be exactly to the minute and they have to know exactly what you're going to say.
- 17:11Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So, you don't have to be exact, right, but you do have to give them a script and you have to keep, as you update anything, you have to keep giving them the script.
- 17:21Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: They generally are looking to know exactly what you're going to say, and ours was.
- 17:28Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It was a TEDxEustis, which is outside of it's, kind of between the Villages and Orlando in Florida, so a bit rural.
- 17:37Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It was a phenomenal experience.
- 17:39Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Phenomenal experience, much more so, I think, than most TEDx's.
- 17:43Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: They're really good at editing, so if you kind of bombed at any point or forgot something, they would actually edit it through.
- 17:52Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So there were a couple of people who got really, really nervous and kept stopping.
- 17:56Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: You can't tell from their video.
- 17:58Michelle Gauthier: Oh good, okay, I feel better knowing that.
- 18:01Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yeah, I didn't know that until like the day before.
- 18:03Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And then I'm like, oh wait, you could actually edit my video?
- 18:06Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Okay.
- 18:07Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Oh, now I'm feeling much better about it.
- 18:08Michelle Gauthier: Yes, I'm going to be okay.
- 18:10Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yes, that would make me feel better too, but I was terrified, yeah, so, but it was fun, I mean, and it was, I mean I wrote the whole thing.
- 18:18Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So if somebody asked, did somebody write it for you?
- 18:20Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: No, I wrote the whole thing.
- 18:22Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It was a blast to do.
- 18:25Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I had - they gave me a coach who was phenomenal.
- 18:28Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: She was a kind of acting coach generally, and she brought her husband along, who had done a TEDx a couple of years before, and so the two of them together were amazing.
- 18:39Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I did thoughtful authenticity, which essentially is, somebody put in the comments,
- 18:44Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: this is basically saying, read the room.
- 18:46Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And I'm like, yeah, that's kind of like the psychology version of read the room, right, but really thinking about not having to position yourself so that you pretend you don't have kids, because that's ridiculous, right, not feeling, you know, when you are overwhelmed to be able to say, hey guys, I'm feeling a little rough today, this might go a little badly or whatever, and showing kind of the mess behind the curtain to a great extent, which I am a big fan of doing, partially because I can't live my life without doing that, because I am a mess behind the curtain, right, and that's okay and that humanizes you and it makes you actually, I think, a much better leader, but I can be very different on this podcast than I would be on even a different podcast, right?
- 19:38Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Like you and I can have a different conversation than I would for a national security podcast.
- 19:46Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It doesn't mean that I'm inauthentic on the National Security Podcast and more authentic on this one, it means that I am thinking about the audience in which I'm presenting myself and regulating kind of what presentation of my authentic self I'm giving.
- 20:03Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, that makes so much sense.
- 20:05Michelle Gauthier: And I'm thinking of an experience that I had when I was working in the corporate world and I had a sick child home with me.
- 20:13Michelle Gauthier: You remember those days, it's like, how am I going to do all of this today?
- 20:18Michelle Gauthier: And she had the stomach flu and I was literally trying to take care of her and be on a conference call at the same time.
- 20:24Michelle Gauthier: And now, with the age and experience that I have, I would just be like, hey guys, I've got a sick kid, but I had this just huge fear.
- 20:32Michelle Gauthier: I don't know even what it was like, how they would perceive me or that I wasn't dedicated enough to my job, or something like that.
- 20:40Michelle Gauthier: So I guess, how do you know what the sweet spot is between that?
- 20:47Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It's a really good question.
- 20:48Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It's a gut feel to a great extent.
- 20:50Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Also, I mean, you have to know your audience, right?
- 20:53Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I guarantee you, in that circumstance, you knew that the people probably would have been okay for you to say, hey, Josie's home is sick, I'm here and I'm working, and I'm here with you.
- 21:06Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But if you hear something in the background, please, I'm really sorry.
- 21:14Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Right, but in some contexts you can't do that, and if you find yourself in those contexts too often, you might then kind of start thinking about, is this the right place for me?
- 21:21Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yeah, if you can't be authentic, look, you can't be a hot mess all the time.
- 21:26Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: If I'm just focused on me, I'm not a terribly good leader anyway.
- 21:29Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Right, I need to be focused on my people, I need to be - so I can't be, like you know, throwing all of myself out there all the time.
- 21:37Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: That's narcissistic, right, that's just being a jerk, but it is hey, I want you guys to know, and particularly as a leader, I want you guys to know that I'm struggling with this back here, because it gives you an opportunity to allow them to say, hey, I'm struggling here too.
- 21:52Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yes, yeah, then you can actually manage that.
- 21:56Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I have a new assistant for the you know for uh, who just started maybe a month ago, and she I had said, hey, can you come do this for me?
- 22:05Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And she was like, and she didn't say anything at first and said, yeah, I can make that happen.
- 22:11Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And then she kind of stopped and she was like - I think she had actually watched my TED talk before she started with me - and she said you know what my husband's going to be on travel next week.
- 22:21Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I am so sorry.
- 22:23Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: If you need me to, I will get a babysitter, but I really hadn't planned on it.
- 22:28Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Go, I don't need you.
- 22:30Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: This is not time sensitive, right?
- 22:32Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But if she hadn't done that, I wouldn't have known and I would have just been like, okay, because I need you here at some point to do this piece, but I don't need you here right now.
- 22:43Michelle Gauthier: Right this moment, yes, and so she told you.
- 22:47Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Exactly.
- 22:48Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Her being authentic, her being clear, and saying hey look, my priority is this job, but I'm going to have to move some stuff around.
- 22:57Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Is that okay?
- 22:58Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Like, if you need me to, that's fine, right.
- 23:00Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Then she was able to do it.
- 23:02Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I didn't need her, and so it made it so much easier for both of us, because I would have been I mean, I would have felt horrified if I found out three months later that she scrambled and paid for a babysitter, for no reason.
- 23:18Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, when it wasn't actually top importance to you.
- 23:22Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, that is so good.
- 23:23Michelle Gauthier: And I feel like people in that example that I gave it was my male boss and his male boss, and so I think that, but they were both dads.
- 23:33Michelle Gauthier: But I think that my brain just told me they're not going to understand this pressure and I want them to think of me the same as they think about the guy on our team who doesn't have any kids.
- 23:44Michelle Gauthier: And in reality, I don't even think that was true.
- 23:48Michelle Gauthier: I think it's a good reminder for us to question.
- 23:50Michelle Gauthier: Essentially, my brain made up that story and I believed it, and so I think, pausing, like your new assistant did, pausing to just say is this really true, or can I just tell the truth and see what happens?
- 24:06Michelle Gauthier: It's such a smart idea.
- 24:11Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Well and again, if you're starting to feel like you're in situations where you can't be your authentic self ever, not all out there all the time, bring your whole self to work all the time, right, you don't bring everything to any relationship or any situation because you can't have your entire self out there at all times.
- 24:30Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It doesn't work that way.
- 24:31Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: You can't be kind of all there so figuring out what you are and what you can bring.
- 24:39Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But if you find yourself holding back huge parts of yourself in a consistent pattern in a situation, then maybe that's another signal to say wait a second, this is the wrong situation for me because I can't be authentic.
- 24:54Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yes, right, and I think in the long run, that's what you ended up coming up to is, wait a second, this corporate life isn't the right life for me.
- 25:02Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And maybe if you had turned around - and I'm not questioning your decisions in any way, shape or form, certainly - but if you had turned around at that time and said, hey, look, I got a sick kid at home and they went, okay, what do you need from us?
- 25:16Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: How can we help?
- 25:17Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Right, and it had no impact on your career, you might have been able to if you wanted to stay in that position.
- 25:25Michelle Gauthier: Totally agree with you.
- 25:27Michelle Gauthier: I think that just seeing that it was me creating a story that may or may not have been true, and trying the other way to approach it, the truthful way.
- 25:38Michelle Gauthier: I personally think we always feel - everybody feels differently, just like we were talking about the anxiety thing.
- 25:43Michelle Gauthier: But I think we always feel something when we're being inauthentic, and in that moment I was hiding something and I was trying to pay attention and trying to do both of these things at once, and I think that always feels bad, and so had I known then how to tune into that and be like wait, something's off.
- 26:00Michelle Gauthier: What do I need to change here?
- 26:02Michelle Gauthier: What do I need to say or do differently here?
- 26:04Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: That's where my overwhelm would often come.
- 26:07Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I mean, look, there were some times when I just got overwhelmed because there was just too much on top of everything.
- 26:14Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But a lot of times it was when there was something layered over that chaos.
- 26:19Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And the chaos was there just because I was pushing too hard on too many things at once and oftentimes they would all pile on top of each other in ways that I couldn't function and handle.
- 26:31Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But when there was an inauthentic layer on top of that, when I felt like I couldn't be myself, when I felt like I couldn't raise my hand and say wait a second, there's something wrong here, that's when the overwhelm came, as opposed to just the chaos management.
- 26:48Michelle Gauthier: Yes, exactly, and those are like two different causes, one of them much more solvable than the others, I think.
- 26:56Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- 26:59Michelle Gauthier: I also think I want to circle back to your point about being an authentic leader and setting examples for people, because I have another example from the corporate world where I mentioned to I don't know, she wasn't my boss, she might have been like my one over one boss or something but I mentioned something to a woman about how I was traveling and my kids were both small and how it was just a struggle.
- 27:22Michelle Gauthier: And she just looked at me and she said, oh my gosh, I live here and I'm working here and I cry on the way home from work a lot of nights.
- 27:29Michelle Gauthier: And she just left it at that and I was like, oh, thank you, thank you, because you feel like you're holding this secret struggle.
- 27:38Michelle Gauthier: I'd bring my kids a blanket of theirs or something with me in the hotel and I'd be so sad and missing them, but so loving my career, and just for her to say that look where I am and I cry all the time on the way home.
- 27:52Michelle Gauthier: So I think, both as working for someone and leading someone, we can use our authenticity to create just so much better relationships and better situations.
- 28:04Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I feel like there is something to be said, for when I was coming up in the working world, nobody talked about it.
- 28:11Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Everyone was like you can have it all.
- 28:13Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: This was the post 80s, but with the big shoulder pads, Working Girl, whatever, and it was either you, you couldn't have it all or you could have it all, but it was always like it's your fault if you don't do it right.
- 28:27Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And nobody showed us any sort of way that it didn't work for them, until I found a couple of people who were like no, no, no, this is really flipping hard, right, and it was.
- 28:42Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I kind of looked at them and I was like, oh my God, thank you.
- 28:47Michelle Gauthier: Yes, exactly, thank you.
- 28:50Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I think before the generation before us, right, they were just you got to go, you got to be perfect.
- 28:59Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: There's only one seat at the table, so it's going to be me.
- 29:02Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm going to have sharp elbows, I'm going to knock out everyone else, so I'm not going to show any weakness whatsoever.
- 29:09Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm going to be as masculine as possible and never show any of the other sides of myself, because there was such a scarcity mentality.
- 29:18Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And then I had someone - the chief statistician of the United States government - which scared the bejesus out of me when I first met her, because I was like, oh my God, this woman.
- 29:27Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And she was perfect, like her hair was perfectly coiffed, her makeup was perfectly done.
- 29:32Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: She always wore like St.
- 29:34Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: John's suits and nice, like, you know, really expensive heels, and she was intimidating as all get out, until she opened her mouth and it was like here you go, here's what this is, this is hard, it's supposed to be hard.
- 29:48Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And like tell me what's going on.
- 29:50Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And she mentored men and women over, I don't know, 40, 50 years in the government and I'm pretty sure half of the senior, senior, senior people in the government were mentored at some point by Kathy because she was really open about it.
- 30:05Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: She didn't sit there and look perfect - she did, but she wasn't, and she showed it.
- 30:11Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And I think, as leaders now it's really I find it really imperative for us to be open about the way that this goes, because it's really really hard.
- 30:23Michelle Gauthier: Yes, and you have so much more trust in someone who can just say that like, yeah, I struggle with that too.
- 30:30Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, oh, I love that, I love that.
- 30:33Michelle Gauthier: And I feel like there are so many people listening who are either in the position to be the example or to take the example or to pass it along.
- 30:41Michelle Gauthier: And I agree, we're in a unique position.
- 30:43Michelle Gauthier: I feel like, from my family's perspective, I am doing the job of my mom and my dad.
- 30:48Michelle Gauthier: My mom stayed home, she took care of us, she made us dinner, all that stuff.
- 30:52Michelle Gauthier: My dad went to work and I feel like we're one of the first generations, if not the first generation, to have the opportunity to do both.
- 30:59Michelle Gauthier: But those were two separate full-time jobs and we cannot do two separate full-time jobs.
- 31:05Michelle Gauthier: So something has to give somewhere and I think being truthful about that is so powerful.
- 31:09Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yep, I've been doing a bunch of writing lately and that's one of the things that I was just playing with the other day is this idea of so what is your priority with all of this?
- 31:22Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Because, yes, you have, and you have to make some of these things your priority, right.
- 31:27Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Your kids are your priority.
- 31:28Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Sure, absolutely.
- 31:30Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: All of our kids are our priorities.
- 31:31Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Not everything about your kids is your priority, right?
- 31:35Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I used to hate, hate, hate the spirit weeks at school because the bar was here and I love my sister-in-law.
- 31:48Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: She's amazing.
- 31:49Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: She has a daughter who's right around my son's age and she would take these photos of spirit week and my niece would be in like head to toe head to toe in red, white and blue, whatever it was, and it was like out of a Pinterest or like a JCrew ad or whatever.
- 32:11Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And I was like that's never going to happen for me and you know, it's okay for her to have that as a priority.
- 32:17Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It was awesome.
- 32:18Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: My niece loved this stuff.
- 32:20Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: My sister-in-law enjoyed it.
- 32:22Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yeah, it killed me.
- 32:24Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So if you can make the determination of what your priority is right without it being, yes, your kids are your priority, but you have to get more granular than that and go okay.
- 32:37Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And then just how do I manage all of those priorities and do I have to knock other things that I thought were my priorities down the priority list, because I can't do everything all the time?
- 32:50Michelle Gauthier: Yes, yes, yes, a hundred times, yes.
- 32:52Michelle Gauthier: That is exactly it.
- 32:55Michelle Gauthier: I love that and I love how you're not saying either one of those is wrong.
- 32:59Michelle Gauthier: They're just, where do you want to spend your time?
- 33:01Michelle Gauthier: If that's what really makes you happy, then that's great.
- 33:05Michelle Gauthier: Go ahead, do that.
- 33:06Michelle Gauthier: Or if it's something that you just have to do right now, do that thing.
- 33:09Michelle Gauthier: I love it.
- 33:10Michelle Gauthier: Well, I don't want to keep you too much longer, but I have two questions.
- 33:13Michelle Gauthier: I want to ask you that.
- 33:14Michelle Gauthier: I ask every guest.
- 33:15Michelle Gauthier: So the first is what is something you do to make yourself feel better?
- 33:19Michelle Gauthier: Like a quick fix for feeling better or more calm when you're overwhelmed?
- 33:30Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I take a bath.
- 33:30Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I don't care if it's a fancy one.
- 33:30Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I like, yes, I would love like the Epsom salts and the you know, candles and whatever, but I don't care, I just - if I need to get away I will, and my husband has gotten to the point where he's like, go take a bath.
- 33:43Michelle Gauthier: Please, for the sake of all of us.
- 33:45Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yes, yes, you're driving all of us crazy.
- 33:49Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Go take a bath, yes.
- 33:51Michelle Gauthier: Yes, that's so great.
- 33:52Michelle Gauthier: You know exactly what it is, and is it, do you have no sound, like you're not listening to something or using your phone, or whatever you're just -
- 34:02Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I don't use my phone.
- 34:02Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It just literally takes me.
- 34:04Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It just takes me out of the situation.
- 34:07Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: It usually takes me out of the chaos of whatever is going on and I think, really, what - I'll get myself out of wherever I am.
- 34:15Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'll put myself in the car and start driving.
- 34:18Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'll take a walk, I'll do whatever, but it's just getting myself out of the situation.
- 34:23Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So the bath is at least, although my kids are not terribly good at boundaries even in the bathroom.
- 34:28Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So like they'll walk in and be like, mom, what are you doing?
- 34:30Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm like naked in the bathtub, right.
- 34:34Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Teenage kids, including a son, and he's like mom, can you -?
- 34:39Michelle Gauthier: I'm like, I know I'll just be like, give me one minute! I thought this was a toddler phase, but it isn't.
- 34:50Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So that's usually what I - it'll take me out of it.
- 34:53Michelle Gauthier: I love that.
- 34:53Michelle Gauthier: That's a great one.
- 34:54Michelle Gauthier: Okay, and then what is something that you do consistently to do less on purpose or to save time?
- 35:06Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I outsource everything I can.
- 35:07Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Well, first of all, I outsourced cleaning my house from the time I got out of graduate school and had a paycheck.
- 35:14Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I was perfectly happy to eat ramen for a lot longer if I could get somebody to clean my house every two weeks.
- 35:21Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And I still do that and I can't imagine.
- 35:23Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But I outsource really everything.
- 35:26Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I mean if I can.
- 35:28Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: You know, we had an au pair literally up until my kids were, last year, so 14 and 12, I still had an au pair, my daughter.
- 35:37Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: No, she was 15.
- 35:38Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: My daughter revolted after I said okay, the other au pair left, we tried managing on our own, I was like this is not working, I need somebody to help me do something.
- 35:48Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And she was like I'm not getting an au pair, I'm 15 years old mom.
- 35:51Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And I was like, all right, well, this is not for you, it's for me.
- 35:54Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- 35:56Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And so we're making do with help from you know, extra drivers, and whatever instead of an actual au pair.
- 36:05Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But I mean I had that for 15 years, right, somebody doing, and it it was that over schools or preschool or whatever camps you know after school, because they would do all the other stuff too.
- 36:18Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yeah, right, it wasn't just drop them at school, and then I still had to do all of the laundry.
- 36:24Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: They did everything, which was amazing.
- 36:27Michelle Gauthier: That is amazing.
- 36:28Michelle Gauthier: Oh my gosh.
- 36:29Michelle Gauthier: What a lifesaver when you're the CEO of a huge company.
- 36:32Michelle Gauthier: I don't know how you would have done that.
- 36:34Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: There was no way.
- 36:34Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And then the other thing that we do a lot of is extra mommies is what we call it in our friend group and like it is, just, you know, my one of my best friends had gallbladder surgery the other day and so we just scooped up the kids and they were at our house and that was okay and you know, we were just nice, right.
- 36:55Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And then my daughter, who's 15, who's lovely and wonderful and amazing and overwhelmingly exhausting at times because she's 15 and we butt heads she called one of my other best friends and she talks to her all the time and she turned around and said mom, can I go to Sam's house?
- 37:13Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: For Sam lives in Texas, we live in Florida.
- 37:15Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: She was like, can I fly to Sam's?
- 37:17Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And I called Sam.
- 37:18Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm like she wants to come to you.
- 37:19Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: She's like sure, send her over.
- 37:21Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So she's going for four days to sit with Sam.
- 37:25Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: And, by the way, Sam is taking her shopping because I can't do it anymore, okay.
- 37:31Michelle Gauthier: Okay, awesome.
- 37:32Michelle Gauthier: So this sounds like a free solution in terms of it's really just your community of friends and you guys are just having each other's back and knowing you can do it.
- 37:41Michelle Gauthier: I love that.
- 37:42Michelle Gauthier: Those are two great answers.
- 37:44Michelle Gauthier: Thank you so much.
- 37:45Michelle Gauthier: I want to wrap up with all the info so people can follow you.
- 37:49Michelle Gauthier: So I'll definitely put the link to your TED Talk, which has like half a million likes or something.
- 37:54Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: now, right, yeah, it's almost 500,000 views in two and a half months, which is crazy.
- 38:00Michelle Gauthier: That's crazy.
- 38:00Michelle Gauthier: Oh my gosh.
- 38:01Michelle Gauthier: Congratulations.
- 38:03Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yeah, so I've been.
- 38:04Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So I'm, I'm reinventing all of the stuff that I'm doing and doing all of the like, Instagram, all the socials, all the Instagram that - I haven't fully gotten on TikTok yet.
- 38:13Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm there, but I'm not doing anything yet cause I just can't do it.
- 38:18Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: That's a tough one, but the one thing I have been told is I need as many likes and comments, not just views.
- 38:28Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So if anyone watches it, please comment and please like it.
- 38:33Michelle Gauthier: Hey, good to know, Good to know.
- 38:34Michelle Gauthier: That would be really really helpful.
- 38:37Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I have a new website, laurenwittenbergweiner.
- 38:39Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: com, and you can sign up for my newsletter, which is going to start generating lots and lots of content.
- 38:46Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Like I said, I'm writing a lot more, so a lot of the stuff that Michelle and I were able to talk about here, I get to kind of put out there in thought pieces.
- 38:57Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm going to be doing videos.
- 38:59Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm going to do all the stuff that you do, Michelle.
- 39:00Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I'm like taking inspiration from you and all the stuff that you do to be well.
- 39:04Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: But yeah, so follow me on all the socials and sign up for my newsletter, and there should be something more substantial in the writing realm.
- 39:17Michelle Gauthier: We won't say the word.
- 39:22Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I am writing a book.
- 39:22Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I don't know if I'm supposed to tell anyone that or not.
- 39:24Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I am writing a book, so it should be - i you follow me on all the things, I promise to announce it as it gets closer, but it is so much harder than I thought it was going to be.
- 39:34Michelle Gauthier: Oh, I can't imagine.
- 39:35Michelle Gauthier: I think everybody says, I'd love to write a book.
- 39:40Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I, for years, for 30 years, wanted to write a book.
- 39:42Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: I didn't have anything to write about, but now I do, and so it's actually harder to keep it shorter rather than like I've got way too much content for it.
- 39:51Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Yeah, I bet.
- 39:52Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: So rewriting now, but it's been really fun.
- 39:56Michelle Gauthier: Okay, good, yes, will you come back when your book's out?
- 39:59Michelle Gauthier: I'll read your book, we can have a little book club on the podcast and introduce it to people.
- 40:04Michelle Gauthier: Okay, perfect, I love it.
- 40:05Michelle Gauthier: I love it.
- 40:05Michelle Gauthier: Wonderful, well, thank you so much for being with us and for sharing your wisdom with all the rest of the Overwhelmed Working Women.
- 40:13Michelle Gauthier: I'm glad you're in the same boat with us Always.
- 40:16Michelle Gauthier: We're all here together, always.
- 40:18Michelle Gauthier: Thank you so much.
- 40:23Lauren Wittenberg Weiner: Thanks, Michelle.
- 40:26Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 40:27Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthiercom.
- 40:34Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.