The Toxic Habit Ambitious Women Must Break: Stop Trying to 'Earn' Your Rest

Are you trying hustle hard enough to “earn” your break? To earn some rest, some relaxation, to book some kind of self-care? You know how it sounds. “Just a few more projects / tasks / emails / dollars earned / months until…”⁣ ⁣

Here's the truth about waiting "until": the amount of work will always expand to fit the allowable time. There will always be more work to be done, and more humans to serve. Your boundaries --the ones between you and working 24 hours/day, 7 days/week -- are the only ones that exist.⁣ "⁣Until" won't show up on its own.  

If you’re trying to “earn” self-care by “getting everything done first,” or serving everyone else first, you’re going to tip over dead before you’ve “earned” it! ⁣ ⁣I know that sounds harsh, but I say it that way because I’ve seen it happen, IRL. 

I used to have things backward in my head. I always thought that resting and self-care were for people who didn’t have the stamina. Or for high maintenance people. Or for weak people. And for sure for the self-indulgent types. And then I watched someone I love be swallowed up whole by the dis-ease that takes over when we don't step away from a life of deadlines, demands, toxic stress, and the never-ending list of things to do and people to serve. ⁣ ⁣#newprospective

If I'm being completely honest, even that didn’t change my behavior right away. But it definitely woke me up, and planted seeds that would later grow within me. It showed me the truth. I still had a lot of unlearning and rewiring to do, but little by little, as it sunk in, I made changes. My life looks a lot different today than when I first started trying to do this ambitious career mom life thing, and that's mostly because I had a genuine fear of what would happen to me if I continued to refuse to take care of myself -- body, mind and soul. 

Life for ambitious women isn’t meant to be a contest of who can suffer the most and longest without making a noise. ⁣That’s not ambition, it's self neglect and it's a toxic habit. It’s rampant in our culture, and it has a massive price. The ultimate cost.

This isn’t soft sided or fluffy. You can see and understand this in all the world around you. Everything requires maintenance so it doesn't break down, so it can function at top capacity. And our bodies and minds are not exceptions to that rule. ⁣YOU are not an exception to that rule.

Resting -- like really resting to the point that you've actually recharged your internal batteries -- is as necessary as all the other shit in your calendar that you keep prioritizing higher. ⁣

There’s a simple, obvious solution, girl: STOP trying to “earn” it and just SCHEDULE IT! ⁣ ⁣ Schedule some rest, some R&R, some self-care, whatever you call it. Schedule time to recharge your batteries. Block it out as nonnegotiable. Not once in a while. 

Daily.

Weekly.

Monthly.

Quarterly.

Little things and bigger ones, all year long, forever, without end, amen! 

Stop withholding it from yourself “until...," because the “until” may never come. The better you get at taking care of yourself, the better you'll show up in the world.

Here are a few of my favorites:

•  hot baths
• sleep in days
• spa days
• Mom's Weekends Away

The journey of an ambitious woman is not for the faint of heart. It requires things from us, over and over and over again, that we believe we won't be able to give. It either calls us forward, into our highest selves, or breaks us down into shattered versions of ourselves.

Which do you chose?