I thought I was missing the summer

I went into a coaching call last week convinced I was overextended.

To be fair, I still think I am.

Between the book launch, client work, podcasts, interviews, travel, and the ordinary logistics of four kids, one of whom has had a particularly heavy season of medical appointments, it has felt like there is always one more thing I should be doing and never quite enough time to do it. There is reality to the math problem of working motherhood.

But I also know there is more to the story, as did my coach.

She asked me to walk her through everything on my calendar between now and launch day. So I did. I listed approximately 2000 tasks and finished with: “I think maybe I need to do more. What stone have I left unturned for this book launch?”

Even as the words were coming out of my mouth, another part of me knew how absurd they sounded.

Because if there is one thing I have learned about launching a book, it is that there is always more you could do. Another podcast to pitch, another email to send, another person to ask to share it. The list does not end because there is no natural definition of done.

And yet, without really noticing it, I had quietly started using “more” as my measure of enough.

I have been thinking about that conversation ever since, partly because it is exactly the kind of trap I spend so much of my work helping women recognize. We are remarkably good at noticing where we fell short. We are perhaps painfully aware of the email we didn’t send, the project that remains unfinished, the bedtime we missed. We (and I am very much included here) are much less practiced at noticing where we actually showed up.

After that coaching call, I found myself looking back over the week with a different question. Not only, “What didn’t I get done?” but, “What actually happened?”

And what surprised me was that the story I had been telling myself wasn’t quite true.

I had been carrying around this feeling that the book launch had swallowed the summer whole, that I was pouring so much into work that everything else had faded into the background. But when I slowed down enough to look, that wasn’t the whole picture.

One afternoon I stopped working for an hour because one of my sons wanted to go for a walk. Another day I paused at lunch to play a game with another teenager who happened to be home. I got a text telling me that one of my kids had gone out of his way to help another camper, and instead of immediately moving on to the next task, I let myself sit with it for a minute and feel proud. And I stopped to dance to Mamma Mia! with my daughter before bed.

I also worked that evening and missed dessert with my family because I was leading my monthly women’s leadership incubator. The conversation was thoughtful and moving and delightful. It was the kind of group coaching experience that reminds me exactly why I care so much about this work and what it can mean to help one woman see her life or leadership differently.

While I worked, my husband cleaned up the kitchen. I stayed on the call. I missed dessert, and I was also deeply glad to be doing the work I was doing.

All of those things are true.

It wasn’t balance in the sense of every priority receiving an equal share of the day. It was a series of choices, and some of those choices were hard.

Something is getting squeezed right now. Mostly my inbox, my kitchen counters, and any illusion that the laundry is ever going to fold itself.

But what struck me is that I had been keeping score all week, and I was only counting one side of the ledger. I was noticing the places where I had not shown up exactly as I wished I could, while overlooking the places where I had.

That does not erase the tradeoffs. There are tradeoffs, especially when you are going after something that matters. But I do not need to add guilt and shame on top of choices that were already difficult to make.

That part is optional.

I think this is one of the quieter forms of healthy striving, and one that I am very much still learning myself. It is not about asking less of ourselves or pretending we can have everything all at once. It is about paying attention to the stories we tell ourselves about how we are spending our lives.

Sometimes the story is, I am putting everything into work right now.

And the fuller truth is that you took the walk. You played the game. You danced in the hallway. You stayed on the call because the conversation mattered. You missed dessert. You worked hard. You loved your family.

You made a series of imperfect choices that reflected what mattered to you in those moments.

There will always be another thing I could do for this book before it comes out. I am sure I will think of three more before I finish writing this sentence.

But I do not want to spend this season remembering only what I did not do.

I want to remember the walk and the game before lunch. I want to remember the pride I felt reading that text about my son, and the women on my screen saying something honest enough that the whole conversation shifted.

I want to remember that, even in one of the busiest seasons of my professional life, I was not absent from the rest of it.

I was there.
Not everywhere, and not for everything.
But perhaps more than the story in my head was allowing me to see.

P.S. One thing that will be taking me on the road in this next month is getting to have these conversations LIVE! Join me for a book tour event over the next few weeks​—details here.