Episode 244: Try This When You’re Feeling Out of Balance with Tiffany Sauder
If you really feel in your heart, “I can't wait till my kids grow up,”-- what you mean to say is how do I solve for the and? How do I solve for joy with my children and the thing that fuels me so that I can be available for the joy with my children moments?
Tiffany Sauder is a wife, mom, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, podcast host and keynote speaker. She founded the marketing agency, Element Three, 18 years ago and ever since she and her husband have been building their companies and their family on the exact same timeline. That means four kids, three businesses and two careers, all building towards one abundant life.
We are going to talk about what happens inside a household when a woman is truly ambitious, loves her family, loves her children and wants to make a concrete impact in the world. We discuss what to do when you feel out of balance and define what balance looks like. Tiffany is constantly pushing the boundaries on a courageous pursuit of a life of “and”.
Business environment serves personal growth
Tiffany says entrepreneurship is just this massive process of discovering yourself – your real motivations, your real, a real understanding of your talents and gifts. She says she loves the pressure the business environment affords her.
“I think that business has taught me the value of honesty, of an honest look at how things are going, an honest look at the quality of a relationship, an honest look at like how I feel,” says Tiffany.
For Tiffany, she is at her best when she’s creating opportunities for other people, and business is the most sustainable way for her to do that.
“You talk about putting more money in the hands of women. I feel like my job is to like show that you can do this,” says Tiffany.
Tiffany says she and her husband had to admit a new start when they started moving forward. She says it was easy to prioritize people outside the home than each other at one point.
“You keep commitments to strangers. You say kind words to strangers. All the things that are good hygiene for a relationship you don't do in your own marriage,” says Tiffany, who came into what she calls her “second marriage” with a fresh look at one another that was hard to do when someone is so familiar.
Defining the feeling of balance
For Tiffany, the question of balance started to come up. She would often hear an exhausted “I feel so out of balance.”
Tiffany recognized there were seasons in her life where she slept four or five hours a night, but no part of her felt tired. And she started to realize that balance wasn’t connected to time.
Her definition of balance is the intersection of your priorities and your values and being “out of balance is when we begin to behave in ways that are not aligned with our priorities.
For example, let's say health is a priority, but you’re having trouble eating foods that are real. You're not making time for movement. You're not making time for personal reflection. You begin to say, “I am so out of balance.”
But what if you said to yourself more specifically, “I am not honoring in my choices, my priorities.”
“When I'm just like ‘I'm so out of balance,’ that feels like I'm a reactive victim to this concept that other people are sort of putting on me instead of saying if I fell out of balance, it probably means I am violating a priority or I'm pursuing a priority at the expense of a value,” says Tiffany.
She says it doesn't mean the choice to choose this priority was bad. It means that you’re doing it to a degree that is violating what you really care about. In that sense, balance isn’t about time or having more of it.
“I think what you want is to say, I want to be doing things that are moving towards the things I care about. The adventures I want to have. The stuff I want to create value around. The causes I want to serve, the people I want to have adventures with, and I want to do those in a way that are aligned with who I am as a human being, which is our values,” says Tiffany.
She says rather than telling herself “no”, she makes a not-now list. This has allowed her to avoid the common phrase from many entrepreneurial mothers, who say, “I can’t wait until my children are older.”
That phrase means there are things you want time for that you don't know how to create time for today. You want to enjoy them and not feel like you’re giving up something that is important to you as well.
How do you capture for yourself? What do you need? Tiffany says she has to be very selfish with her exercise time, and her children know it.
“I don't apologize for it when I'm gone. I don't apologize for the fact that sometimes my kids are 10 minutes late for school when my husband is traveling and I need to go lift. … That is what I need to be able to give as much as my day and my commitments and my priorities need me to give. And they know that this is important to me, and we are going to all manage this,” says Tiffany.
She says when anyone adds children to the mix, sit down with your partner and decide what your values and priorities are. What does “being there enough” actually look like? Quantify it. It means you want to know how much space you have for other priorities and other things that you want to do that keep you in balance and aligned.
Implicit expectations vs explicit agreements
Tiffany does an evening wind down with her family, so they can start fresh the next day. For their family, this involves cleaning the kitchen counters, running the dishwasher, emptying trash, and doing a 10-minute “pick and put” where they pick something up and put it away.
The process came from implicit expectations vs explicit agreements – meaning no more implying what Tiffany wanted to see happen without actually telling anybody.
“I had never told the family. I had never published it to them. And I had never said, it makes me feel loved, seen and supported when you guys run this because it is a gift to me in the morning to walk out and feel like it's a fresh start, like it's a fresh power up. So if you love me, if you want to respect me, and if you want to show me love, this is what you will do,” says Tiffany.
She believes explicit agreement is important in healthy family dynamics.
Life of And Academy
The waitlist is open at the LifeOfAndAcademy.com for Tiffany’s four-week course to help two-career families get on top of the life of and, and begin living in a way that feels free and abundant and present.
Mentioned in this episode: The Nordic Theory of Everything by Anu Partanen
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