Podcast Episode #8
Working Motherhood Isn’t One Path: It’s a Thousand Small Choices
This episode invites you to zoom out and answer one powerful question: How do you want your life to be different 12 months from now? When you’re juggling work, home, relationships, health, and everything in between, reflection can feel like a luxury, but it’s the starting point.
A big reason moms feel stuck is the pressure to do it all without dropping anything: excel at work, be fully present at home, maintain relationships, and still find time for yourself. That impossible standard creates guilt and emotional strain, and the episode emphasizes that emotions like anxiety, shame, and resentment are not personal failures, they’re information. They’re clues that something needs to change.
One story shared highlights this truth through a working mom navigating profound loss, rebuilding her life through support, education, and new community, and ultimately creating meaningful work rooted in what she learned. The takeaway is not that you need a dramatic reinvention, but that there are always options. Slow down, explore alternatives, journal, talk to someone safe, and share the invisible load with your partner so you can make choices from clarity, not survival mode.
HERE ARE THE 3 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:
1️⃣ Ask: what do I want in 12 months?
2️⃣ Emotions are signals, not flaws.
3️⃣ There are options. Get support.
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“Abundant are the alternatives for those who seek them.”
Full Transcript
Tia Graham (00:04.238)
How do you want your life to be different 12 months from now? Are you hoping that your circumstances change so that you feel better, more content, more happier? Or are you ready to do the work so that you change and then your life changes for the better? What do you dream about right now?
for your career, for your relationships, your health, your growth, your parenting.
Write about your dreams, talk about them, and commit to them. And are you ready right now to reimagine your path? You can build a version of working motherhood that truly fits you.
Being a mom is the greatest and most challenging job for a human. We care so much and of course the stakes are high. My incredible life coach, Cherie, always reminds me that the fastest path to God is raising kids and running a household. I feel it, do you? And as a career person, you're contributing to society, you're contributing financially.
and you're setting an incredible example for your children. The problem is that working moms can feel stuck due to the circumstances of their life and the society that we live in. So let's talk about this problem a little bit. You might be so busy that you do not have time to really stop and think.
Tia Graham (01:58.264)
How could I be living and working and thinking differently? You are just trying to keep your head above water. You and I and other working moms are put in boxes by society, by our families, and even by our subconscious beliefs, so many of which we're not even aware of.
We want to be present at home. We want to have more time for ourselves and friends in our marriage. And we want to grow our career, our impact and our income. Rest feels impossible and guilt shows up no matter what you choose. You know your capabilities and you're connected to this big ambition, but you have this feeling that there's not enough bandwidth.
to achieve what you want to achieve, your career dreams. Your organization may offer limited flexibility and little understanding of caregiving demands, which makes regular parenting feel like rule breaking. With all of this and so much more, it can be hard to reimagine your path. It could be super challenging to think about
With the same circumstances, how can you change to make life better? Let me share a story about one of my dear friends and colleagues, Karen Guggenheim, who is the CEO and co-founder of Wahasu, which puts on the World Happiness Summit. Karen is a ambitious working mom with
two young children and she has an incredible career in public relations and her husband also works. He is sick with a pretty bad cold, kind of turns into a flu and he after several days goes to the doctor, goes into the hospital because his symptoms are not going better. And without any warning,
Tia Graham (04:18.402)
The doctors make a mistake and Karen's husband passes away suddenly and unexpectedly.
Her working mom life, her entire world, her circumstances, change for the worse overnight. She is in complete shock, overwhelmed with grief and sadness.
Tia Graham (04:52.462)
and she remembers being on the floor of her bathroom sobbing uncontrollably sobbing
And this is a few weeks after her husband's passing. And her mom is there in the house with her and her two young children. And her mom comes into the bathroom and finds her there. And she looks up at her mom and says, why me? Why me? I can't go on.
And her mom turns to her and says, why not you?
This happens all the time. Why not you?
And she wipes her eyes, she's kind of in disbelief about what her mom is saying.
Tia Graham (05:52.503)
And her mom says, need to make choices to take care of yourself and be there for your children. You cannot let go. They need you. And of course, it is so hard for months and months and months and months. And even, you know, over the first year, it is so extremely hard. She is working.
She is caretaking and trying to keep some type of normalcy for her sons and for herself. She makes the decision to go back to school and to get her masters at Georgetown. This is a huge investment in herself. And she says that that choice and the relationships and the friendships and the new path
that she set herself on saved her. The energy and support and vitality and love that she got from her new classmates and new friends replenished her soul and her spirit. And little by little, she got her life back and went on to create one of the biggest
positive psychology organizations in the world.
Tia Graham (07:26.506)
Abundant are the alternatives for those who seek them. You have many alternatives and paths in front of you right now if you take the time to slow down and see all the different possibilities. I always say there's not just path A or path B.
There's always seven different paths if you slow down to see what's available for you as an ambitious working mom. If you are feeling stuck right now, I want you to talk to others about what's making you feel stuck and what you want instead.
Talk to your spouse, talk to a coach, talk to your therapist, talk to friends, talk to coworkers. Talk about exactly how you're feeling stuck and what you want instead. And some other actions that you can choose to take are spending time listening to yourself, spending time journaling about how stuck you feel and what change you want.
meditating and noticing what you're thinking, noticing what you're feeling, noticing what you're feeling physically, the somatic sensations without judgment, just noticing. You also can choose to create a vision board of what not stuck looks like and feels like with words and pictures. And
Another choice you can make, which we've talked about on previous episodes of this show, is sharing more of the invisible mental emotional load with your partner so that you have more time and space to get unstuck. You don't have to be doing everything.
Tia Graham (09:44.04)
Roll strain research show that when a working mom's internal standards like the mom I should be clash with what's realistically possible, anxiety, shame, and self-criticism spike. And if you are feeling a lot of anxiety, shame, guilt, and self-criticism, that's OK. Don't.
feel bad about yourself for having painful emotions. These emotions are information. And this mismatch between expectations and reality make working women underestimate how much their circumstances, like policies at work or in the government, childcare, societal norms, et cetera, are boxing them in. And the more that you
yourself the more stuck you feel even when a lot of the real leavers live outside of them. Follow me on Instagram for more support and inspiration at Tia E Graham. You're an awesome working mom. See you on the next episode.