Episode 57: From Chaos to Clarity: How Jodi Created a Sustainable Life
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
Jodi is a working mom with a big, blended family, a full-time job, a business, and a lot of moving parts. In this episode, she shares how she went from feeling scattered and exhausted to building systems that brought her more peace, flexibility, and presence. Systems that carried her through kid illnesses, work travel, and buying a new house. We talk about what building a sustainable life means and redefining what enough looks like. This conversation is full of honest insight and practical takeaways for any mom trying to do meaningful work and live a meaningful life.
links & resources mentioned in this episode:
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📍 You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode.
Welcome back to the podcast. I am thrilled to bring you a conversation today with my Beyond Balance client, Jodi. Jodi wears many hats and serves in so many different roles, including being the mom of a big blended family, a nonprofit manager, a small business owner, and everything in between. And while Jodi was in the Beyond Balance program, she had just about every unexpected curve ball thrown at her that you could imagine from work, travel and back to back illnesses and daycare closures to buying and moving to a new house.
Her systems were really put to the test, and in this conversation she shares the details of what that actually looks like, the things that she had to put on the back burner, and how it also motivated her to do a better job of sharing responsibilities, not just with her husband, but also with her older kids.
So if you juggle multiple responsibilities. If you wear several different hats in your life or do work or are in a field that is prone to burnout. You will relate to this conversation so much. Jodi has such a great perspective on what is sustainable and how to keep projects and tasks and just daily life responsibilities moving forward when you have these bigger life events happening at the same time, and she just keeps it real. She's not doing everything none of us are. And that's so refreshing to hear because sometimes we think that everybody else is doing more. Everybody else is doing everything. But there are different seasons for different priorities, and Jodi has so many great examples of what that actually looks like and means.
I can't wait for you to enjoy this conversation, so let's get into the episode.
Hi Jody. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I'm so excited to have you here and talk about what's going on for you all you've learned. So let's get right into it. Would you mind introducing yourself? Just tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, your kids, your family life, anything you wanna share.
Yeah, sure. I am Jody. I, , have a giant house full of family members and pets as well. , I have a husband and we've been together for 10 years now, and we have a big blended family of seven kids all in our homes and around our homes visiting on the weekends, ranging from 19 years old in college, down to our toddler who's almost.
A big family.
Yeah, for sure. Like that's like the biggest understatement of the world probably. I love it though. You just own it. It's fun. It is fun and chaotic and we're consistently like, what else would we do if we didn't have all of them to, you know, chase around and go to games and all the stuff.
Exactly. And
what are you doing for work? What does your work life look like?
Yeah, that's also big. So I, , am working in, , the nonprofit sector. I work in affordable housing, which I've been doing that for seven years. , I have a background in public health, so I do a lot of like programming and grant writing and fund development, partnership development for that.
And then I also practice as a birth doula on a small scale with my own private practice, , which I've been doing for the past several years. Then also the past couple years, I launched a doula agency called BWS Doulas, , with a colleague, and we have a team of doulas that work with us providing birth and postpartum support to families
I wanna get into all of this in a minute because you have such a unique example of. All of these different hats that you wear, different roles and how those are fluid and shifting, minute to minute, hour to hour, different parts of your day, your weeks , are often in flux. In fact, if I can share, I think it was our very first kickoff call in the Beyond Balance group, you were with someone at the hospital who was having a baby.
Right? You can't plan for that. It just happens. But I thought, oh my gosh. What a perfect example of how flexible you have to be.
Absolutely. I think, you know, I've learned so much from you and just being with the other, , women in the group so far. , and one of those big lessons I feel like was just like, there's very rarely, the perfect day or the perfect week or the perfect amount of time you know, every once in a while you'll hit a day and that's of course my favorite thing because.
I'm kind of an overachiever and perfectionist and all the things. So yeah, I love those days when I can lay down at night and I feel like I did family well. I did stuff for myself. I did work well, like check, check, check. But that doesn't always happen. So I don't wanna live just constantly in that state of , Ugh, never enough.
And I've learned so much, about how to just be content rather than trying to obtain the perfect day.
Mm. Yeah, we do all love that when our plan goes exactly the way we envisioned it, but experience shows that, especially when you have kids and multiple jobs for you, but even if you're just, listening and you just have your one job, it is still rare to have a day go exactly the way you expect it to.
.
What was life like for you when we were first talking about this group and was this the right fit for you? Did you wanna join?
What was life like and what were you hoping to learn or change?
I wanna say that we were going into the holiday season which is like always a season that's bringing up lots of feelings. , it was of course busy for us and we were also in the process of, , looking for a home, like buying a new home, which we're thankfully now in, but it was just the combo of .
All the school stuff for all the children. , our kids play basketball, so we had four boys in basketball on three different teams. And basketball is just like more frequent. So it's like multiple games, multiple practices throughout the week. We're always missing some ones. And then, oh yeah, Christmas that we celebrate, is in the middle of all of that.
So it was just this kind of perfect storm of just so much. And, . I think like a blessing and a curse of my natural kind of bend, I guess is I'll just work harder. I'll just do more, I'll just put my head down and make more money, do more things rather than pausing and reflecting on. Okay. Is there opportunity to.
Change some things that would actually make me feel better and make me feel less exhausted. I think I was just like incredibly tired after that season and I felt like, yeah, I know some things. Obviously you don't get to this point without having some systems in place.
I'm not just floundering and never at the right place, right. I know some things, but I need someone. With skills and expertise and outside eyes to just take a look at everything I have going on and be able to share some thoughts. And I felt like you totally get the career part, the family part, and how we can make that all work.
And I don't know that a lot of people can understand that blend and how that's important to incorporate it all.
Yeah, it is such a unique experience. Just like motherhood. We could say in general, right before I had kids, all sorts of judgment, all sorts of ideas, and then you finally live it.
I. And it's, wow, I had no idea. There's really no way to prepare it. And then when you return to work or you run a business or you do any of these other things, it is again, stepping into this experience that is so unique and so nuanced. Even you compared with my experience compared with the others in the group.
We all are doing things slightly different, but there is that thread. Of what we're all looking to do, which is, we wanna do well in our careers. We wanna have an impact. We love our families. We wanna be there for them. We wanna show up, we wanna take care of ourselves, we wanna be around and we wanna feel good, nobody wants to just double down or work harder or push through like you were just describing.
Yeah, and it just, it's not sustainable, it's just not healthy or good for you all. But as also you burnout and in this field that I'm in, the nonprofit sector for sure, there's lots of burnout there and in the birth. Space as a doula. There's a lot of burnout there and people don't really last and sustain in this work that's not even including running an agency, which is more of , a small business with a team.
, and it's just not sustainable and I love what I do, so I wanna keep being able to do it all.
Yeah, I love that word. Sustainable. What have been some of the biggest things that you have taken away from what you've learned, what you've implemented, what has changed for you?
. I just think in addition to what I've already said, like broadly the breaking things down into smaller pieces and really taking a close look. Has been incredibly helpful. So for example, yeah, I have a to-do list. I had a couple to-do lists when we began in different places. , and maybe not a process for when I look at those to-do lists.
So like I think one week we focused just on that to-do list and that was a really big week for me because. It's important. , I have so many different kind of things to get done and in different places given all of those different roles and hats that I wear. And so things were scattered, so I was making progress on things, but it felt very scattered.
None of it was streamlined, and it never felt like I was actually moving the needle in a way that I wanted to. So a couple things you taught us in that week was like, okay, like going down to those bite-sized pieces, drilling down, where are you keeping things, when are you looking at it?
Like all of that stuff. And I, , do use, , a system with Trello, the app, Trello, just kind of management thing. And I've been using it to, until we did that, , had that week I had been using it for like more large scale projects, which had been working well, but I did not use it as like a daily kind of planner piece.
I just kind of lived by my calendars and what was most in my face and Oh yeah. On a to-do list on my notes app or when my business partner would say, Hey, what's up with this? I'm like, okay, I'll do it now. Like that. Kind of flying by the seat of my pants for some tasks. But, , you suggested, what if I had a Trello, board for my to-dos and had it split out by all of those different kind of roles?
So I had one for family, one for my agency, one for my personal business, me personally, like as a category, which is important. And then I could, use the tasks and pull them onto that running to-do list for the week, and that has just been such a game changer.
And you were, I mean, you mentioned this earlier, but I have to say it again because you did that consolidation work and then you added a whole bunch of to-dos with going through the home buying process, which you have done.
In the entire time we've been together, including moving house with all of the kids. . All of that, which is this influx of to-dos. And I know it's been a lot. Anybody who's bought a house or even just moved knows it is a huge, massive project that is just so exhausting. Mm-hmm. But I do wonder what would've been the state of affairs.
Because the house things they're just the things that are right in front of your face all the time. And what would've happened to everything else?
Don't know. Yeah. , I think a lot of stuff would've gotten done and I would've felt badly about it or business would've suffered a little bit or, tasks definitely wouldn't have gotten completed.
But I felt good and a lot of the stuff that needed done the same time as the home, like ending the home buying process was kid checkups and well visits and those were things that just weren't getting done. The visibility into. My personal taking a walk or working out or reading my personal feel good stuff and my family's kind of maintenance stuff.
Were the things that were suffering more than anything because the work stuff gets done because the work stuff is paying the bills, right? I have to get that stuff done. , I need to pay people, I need to complete grants because they have a deadline or whatever, but. The annual well visits, things like that just get pushed and pushed.
And I was actually shockingly able to accomplish all of those visits for my youngest three plus some like specialty visits, which would've never happened if I didn't have that kind of structure in place. And it wasn't visibly right there. On its own little family board. So when I go to pull items from my work, lists, yes.
Great. But then I have that family board and my personal board, right next to it which is just like visibly there making me think about it more. I.
Making the invisible visible so that we can then make those decisions about what do I have the time for? How important is this? A lot of those are just as important as the deadlines and the paying the bills kind of work.
But because we don't have them there in our face and the same way all of the work stuff is, it is just so much easier to forget.
And I think it just contributes to the mental load of it's, and something else you, you taught on was this idea of feeling like, I'm working all the time.
I'm working all the time. But when you actually time track and take a look at that, which we did track our time, , you actually are able, it's illuminating to see that maybe you're not working as much as you are thinking about work. That has truly resonated with me. I.
I am working a lot, just given those things. Right. And in the way being a small business owner, the boundaries are loose because of all the things. . However. More than I am actually working on stuff. I am thinking about working on stuff. And that perspective shift, it makes me personally just feel better about my balance between work and life and realize, no, I'm not just working all the time.
I'm not a martyr or victim to, my jobs, but I'm just thinking about it. So maybe I just don't think about it until I'm sitting down to actually do it. And then I have that. Free brain space to focus on me and my family and just enjoying my life and not just thinking about work.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's recognizing that the difference between thinking and doing, and then you've taken it to that next level of. Okay, well maybe I can just trust that the next time I sit down at my laptop or I have my phone because I'm nap trapped or whatever. I can pull it out and intentionally work and get some of those things done, but I don't have to think about it right now.
That's not actually doing anything. And instead, I can be having a conversation with my kids in the backseat or sitting down to talk with my husband while we're doing something or just looking around in my physical space, in my real life and being here and that that can change so much of how we feel.
I think the word that stuck out to me that you just shared was trust. , can I just trust that? What needs to get done will get done. And honestly, if it doesn't get done, then I just didn't have time for it. Like that part , is big for me and I think that's what has made me feel better about my weeks.
It's not just , oh, I have this system to track it, but I am only putting on my to-do list for the week, what I have time for. And then even stuff comes up. But what I can do is I can just . Push that thing back off of my to-do list onto that master list that it needs to live on. And then I have another week, God willing, that's the whole point.
And I'm not feeling like, oh, I had all these things on my to-do list that I never got to. Which feels you feel like a failure, like you're not getting done what you need to get done.
What has changed for you or what does it look like now? , in terms of time for you, you mentioned there is that personal list of things for yourself, and I'm sure that you'd love more than what you can do with all the kids and their activities , and the various jobs that you have.
But , what does that look like for you? I'm curious.
I mean it's, I feel like I've chosen my personal time to go towards my house this last month because a lot of it's still a personal choice and so a lot of home renovation planning stuff, and that feels fun and good. I have been reading more, which is good, and that was a goal I set with our time together.
, walking has been kind of a challenge, but. It's there on the list and it's just reorganizing and fitting time in. Those are my big categories, but I think what's making me feel better, even if I'm not exactly moving the needle in a couple of those goal areas, it's that, , I know that I'm making a choice with my time, which is something that I think was another.
Big week for me that you covered was that, , you're making a decision, you're making a choice with how you spend your time, and again, you're not a victim to your calendar. , I think that it's so easy to fall into that because we are all busy, most people are very busy, and it can feel like your calendar is running you, especially when you have children or they get sick, forget it, throw everything daycare's closed, like everything's ruined, which has happened to me so many times during this time with you.
Yeah. Which is shocking 'cause it never really used to be that big of a thing. I feel like we somehow skated through, but it all came like a ton of bricks these past two months with kids sickness and school closures. , but still it's just like, okay, it's time to pivot. I think that this process has allowed me flexibility to figure it out , and realize not all is lost if something comes into play.
This is a season, being in a new house, wanting to, and choosing to focus , the time that you have that maybe would've gone toward walking or working out. I. That you can choose right now because it's fun and you're excited and you wanna just have it more settled it can go toward those activities.
And then again, trust. That it's still there, you still have eyes on it, it's still a goal of yours and you will fit that back in when you're not quite so engrossed in the new home. Things
For sure.
I also, if you wouldn't mind, I think of so many of the conversations that we've had so far.
In just sharing responsibilities as well at home with your husband, and you have made, from my perspective, some progress there. You've been curious about, well, what does this look like? How can we share this? What are the conversations I'm learning so much here, how can I bring this back to the family and , what could this look like, especially now in our new house?
I don't know if anything comes to mind for you of what that has been like or what has changed maybe?
, so my husband and I are very opposite and personality type, and our jobs are very opposite too. So he works in manufacturing and he's, , a manager. , so his days aren't really planned, in production.
It's just what's in front of us? What happens now? , what orders need to go out, et cetera. So. That's the exact opposite , in my work with the exception of the birth work. But a lot of my stuff is scheduled meetings and chunks of work time and I can plan out.
So there's always been that weird, , lack of, , I don't even know the word for it, like where our calendars and the way our roles just don't really align very well. So we've struggled to, . Have space to plan for some things. He also is running on a warehouse floor all day long.
He's not sitting in front of a computer looking at his calendar for what he needs to do next. And I am, and so that part has been challenging, and so it wasn't an easy task. Which seems easy. It seems like it should be easy, but literally just getting him access to the Trello board and like to my family board.
. And we've started to map out different house projects and we have a card for each room in the house and we're pulling in ideas on things we wanna do or, even the move, we had a board, like a board for the move and. He's checked in. I'm still managing, piloting the process, but he's more active and a participant in that way where usually it would be me handling all of that mental load and just bringing it up to him.
The other thing he's totally taken on since I was pregnant with our youngest was laundry. We came to this point where I had made the comment , what would you do if I didn't do the laundry? What would happen? Right? And he's like, well, I would do it, it just maybe wouldn't be on your timeline, right?
So I was exhausted and, , nine months pregnant, I think in the summer and was like, okay, I'm just gonna stop doing laundry because this doesn't feel manageable with my energy level right now. And he just started doing it and he just kept doing it. So he's in charge of the laundry.
, since then. Which has been a nice split. So we've made lots of progress on splitting those household chores and also are working to put the process in place of , when do we just talk about the things? And that's something I'm trying to work through now with just kids at our feet all of the time.
Like the actual discussing of things is just hard to get done with all of these, children that need things.
Yeah. . , when you start doing this work as you have been doing, it is easier to just do it for ourselves, ? We can manage our own calendar, manage our own Trello board, our own running list, and if you have a partner at home, a co-parent, we wanna share that. We wanna make that visible. And you bring up such a good point that not everyone has a partner or a spouse or a co-parent who has the luxury in a lot of ways of sitting behind your computer all day, having access to the calendar, being able to log into Trello. Your husband.
, that's not his reality. And so it is about taking the fundamentals, the framework, and then thinking about, okay, well what does this look like when we cross over, when we combine, or for him? And it's not gonna be the same as. , if I can send something to my husband in the middle of the day and be like, Hey, please add this to your calendar.
Right? That is our dialogue. But for you, it is about carving out that analog time in a way, . When he's not on the floor , to think about, okay, if we have five or 10 minutes, let's just preview the calendar together, what's coming up? And that is really what so much of this about is just.
Can we have visibility into what is coming so we're not always flying by the seat of our pants, responding to whatever is right in front of us, being like, oh crap. We forgot that we have this thing tonight. Who's gonna drive so and so to this thing? , and it is nuanced when you have a partner like you do, where it does have to be a very different experience than just doing things during your workday from behind your computer.
Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me has just been the communication piece. I can own the calendar and I think a lot of times we try to force the shared kind of responsibility of something rather than just owning it. But I own the calendar and that's a big thing to own, and he is.
A great secondary person to hop in and, okay, let me add this, and, okay, do you need me to pick them up because you have this appointment with the little one. But I think that there's freedom and just saying , okay, I own it, and then where are the spaces where we actually do carve out to review it or what are the tools we use to review it when you do have time, which is oftentimes when we're just together and not when he is as at work obviously.
Yeah. Yeah. That comes back to choice, ? You talk about choice with your time. What am I gonna do? How much do I actually have time for? And also choice in terms of what do I own versus what do you own? What does this look like? Do you care? I care a lot. Just making those decisions in advance.
Having visibility into what's coming. I mean, it sounds so simple when I say it out loud, but trust me, we are not all doing that. People are not doing that, and that is why we feel rushed and frantic or like we don't know what's happening.
Mm-hmm. For sure.
What are you. Continuing to work on. So you've had a lot of success so far.
You've also had a lot of curve balls and unexpected things come up for you large projects. I expect that some of this work will be ongoing work for you. What are you continuing to work on or what is next for you?
So two things. , I would say engaging the kids more so my kids do have. Chores, but they didn't have a lot of chores.
We did just move though to a much bigger house with a lot more space and.
It's just utterly impossible for me to, pick up or my husband to pick up after them, nonstop. It's just too much. So, ,
That's. Gonna be a learning curve. And it is a learning curve, but I think it's helpful, again, to free up more of my time, more of my husband's time. Like we're in a season that is really challenging, just not even for the older, you know, the middle two, but the youngest one being almost two, .
He's still in that physically exhausting space and mentally he just requires a lot because he's a little guy. So, we're trying to find ways to live in our season and just live in that, but also we need some time for ourselves. So I think part of that is freeing up some of our time by engaging the older kids more to help out.
, I love that and I love that you recognize it's a practice, right? We have to continue to remind and encourage and support, , until you do, get to that point where it does become just what they know to do without that reminder.
Yeah. And the other thing I'm working on is more professional related.
, I worked through this during one of our weeks with you, , where I have a week where there's a birth or there's a sick kid or something. I. And how do I manage the rest of that week? Because that was a real pain point for me, was the reentry. I, I think of it as like when you're coming back from traveling on a trip and it's like, okay, reentry time.
, so how do I clear my plate some if I do have a sick kid or a birth that I'm attending, so that I am reentering back into more normal life, easier. So one of the practices that I did was like make a short list. , on what are the things that can wait? , and I think you asked this question like, what is , the amount of time it takes you to get back to, your normal?
And I was easily able just from thinking about it to say , okay, three days. Like three days from a sick kid, daycare closed, or a birth three days. And so what can just. Move three days out rather than being within that three days. So that might look like social media for our business. Like nothing is going to change in three days.
That can wait. So automatically. No social media posting, no pressures there for three days. Meal time. That's always a thing, ? So if I didn't meal prep before the birth or whatever it is, then we need to pull from our . Quicker, healthy order out kind of nights, or my husband handles it, or we pull from the freezer.
There's options there, but what is not gonna happen is me cooking, so that needs to wait. So those kind of things, I think I'm still refining, obviously, but that practice has been helpful so far.
. And when you put it into that perspective of it's three days. Yeah, what can wait for three days if I don't do this, within the next three days, is the sky going to fall?
We tell ourselves or we feel when we're tired because we've been at a birth or we've been up with a sick kid feels like forever and our brain wants to tell us, yes, the sky is going to fall, your whole world is gonna collapse if you don't do this thing. But to have those decisions made in the way that we walked through, what are the minimum baselines here?
What are the things that I do and I don't do, can just be that reminder of its three days.
Yeah, and then it makes me not resent my work or my kid from being sick or the daycare for being sick, like whatever that is . I think I could easily before that fall into that kind of resentment, leading to burnout cycle.
If I'm not making adjustments in my personal life, there's a reason that. Relationships and health suffers when you live an on-call life, whether you are in healthcare or a midwife or a doula, it's hard on your body. And if you don't build in those practices, I think that's one of the big reasons it's hard to sustain.
Hmm, that is such a good point. Something we should all think about. Whatever that version is for you. This has been so fun to just hear your story, hear some of these examples, think about what you're working on. I love these next steps for you, and a lot of it is just continuing to practice and bring more visibility and create more space for you.
It has been, such a joy to hear. Thanks for sharing. Thank you.
It's been so great being a part of the group and working with you. You have such a helpful insight and skills, so. Appreciative.
Thank you. Thank you.
📍 Thanks so much for listening to the episode enrollment for my time training and coaching program Beyond Balance. The one that Jodi was a part of is opening up on July 31st. You can learn about all of the details, including a special early bonus by signing up for my live class on July 31st at 12:00 PM Eastern, 9:00 AM Pacific.
Head to themothernurture.com/class to learn more.
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