CaronMargareteMy day begins with a full cup of patience, and by the end of the day, once my capacity for more is depleted to almost zero, my cup is nearly empty of its patience, tolerance, and understanding. It used to result in heightened frustration and eventually a blow-up of frustration and shouting.
Now, I am able to get down on the kids’ level, speaking as calmly as I can muster, “I need your help; my patience cup is nearly empty. I don’t want to feel angry, and I don’t want to upset you. Is this what you want for yourself?” Of course, they don’t, so they invariably try to help me, which is usually just getting into the shower like I bloody well asked them to do five, ten, and fifteen minutes earlier. This is every mother’s daily reality.
I’ve learned to lean into the negative feelings that arise in my body and to name them in the moment, but doing this didn’t just happen automatically. I had to learn to evaluate moment by moment how much patience I had available and what capacity I had left for the jobs that required my immediate attention versus what could be left until later. This required me to stand firm and grounded in my anger, feel it, name it, and own it as my responsibility. This took humility and a large slice of humble pie, but its rewards have been unquantifiable in the peace that I feel in my body.
The Work-Life Balance Narrative is Flawed
There is a challenge with the work-life balance narrative that has been forced down entrepreneurial/working mothers’ throats. Balance is a flawed metric. Balance implies a static state on metric scales that sit perfectly even; however, life is dynamic. It’s not two competing forces; it’s not work and life. This is an oversimplification that doesn’t respect your actual reality.
Rather than the dual load of business management and home, it’s a multi-load architecture managed by the multiple roles that women represent: Business owner/executive/employee + mother + partner + daughter + friend + sibling + the household project manager + financial officer + chef + the event, logistics, diary manager + yourself (if there’s any capacity left). We’re expected to do it all without any understanding of what structural integrity is supposed to be like.
This is where your capacity breaks the patience jar and, in terms of emotional intelligence, your ability to regulate your emotions and control impulses. This is why I was experiencing frustration and shouting at my kids. I couldn’t control the impulse not to get angry at the kids because I didn’t know I was at capacity. I didn’t see that the structural integrity of my architecture had strained, broken, or non-existent systems not supporting its management.
It is like having 50 tabs open in your mental browser at any one time. It’s common for me to flick between tasks faster than I blink because my youngest is needing a cuddle right now, at the same moment a friend calls, and I’m cooking dinner, and simultaneously answering a random question my eldest is asking, and my hubby wants to show me something on his phone, and somehow, in the back of my mind, I’m also considering what I’ll publish to my business social profiles tomorrow and thinking ahead to the preparation needed for my next client session.
Your Capacity Recalibrated
Thinking like this is not a failure to set boundaries or poor time management. It’s life in its natural, beautiful, chaotic state. It’s completely normal. It’s not something to fight. These are the dimensions of your life that each have their own load and require a specific system to manage them.
The Load
The load is the total weight of mental, emotional, and physical energy required to maintain a dimension of your life. A high load requires constant “open tabs” in your mind, both consciously and unconsciously. It requires frequent context-switching and high emotional labour, whereas a low load occurs when a task or area of your life feels automated, predictable, and, most importantly, low-friction.
The Systems
To be able to thrive in any particular area of your life, you need systems that support your personal infrastructure. The systems are the internal or external frameworks that support the load. They are the difference between making it up as you go and having a repeatable practice or process. When you have a functional system, you have clear boundaries, delegated tasks, automated habits, and regulated emotional responses. When you have strained, broken, or even non-existent systems, you are the single point of failure. If you stop thinking about it, it doesn’t happen.
The Dimensions of Your Capacity
As a coach, I have always been my primary client. If I’m struggling, the onus is on me to utilise my skills, qualifications, and experience to figure out what is misaligned, not streamlined, or not working effectively or efficiently. When I began to unpack the triggers of my frustration, a pattern emerged. It was always around bath time. Like many mothers who hide in the pantry or spend an extra-long time on the toilet, I could feel myself needing a time-out. I could feel that my energy levels were low. I could feel annoyance brewing beneath the surface. One night—yep, while hiding on the loo—I opened my notes app and listed all the open tabs in my mind; the list astounded me.
I had all of these different dimensions of myself that all required my time, energy, and attention. They all carried a weight that my capacity needed to fulfil. They each needed a process, procedure, and system to manage, but most of them competed with each other, like an eight-way tug-of-war.
Over time, and with practice, I summarised these dimensions (in no hierarchical order) as:
Professional Identity
There is a cost to your capacity when you need to switch between contexts and roles, especially when you work from home. There is a mental tax of oscillating between strategic decision-making and domestic micro-management. When you move from business director to snack provider to partner within the same 60 seconds, it is difficult to maintain a cohesive sense of what you need across the conflicting roles, especially when you don’t have boundaries and systems in place to cope with their demands.
Environmental Logistics
When your office is within your home, it is not easy to differentiate between the logistics of the workspace and those of your home. It is common to experience persistent cortisol stress responses (with the bonus of guilt) from the unfolded laundry and the dirty dishes not yet in the dishwasher each time you take a break from work to make lunch or a cup of tea. Made worse, if your home office isn’t optimally set up to produce your best work, you will feel a spatial friction that causes a continuous sensory overload. A broken system in this dimension means that your physical spaces are a drain on your cognitive energy rather than a battery for it.
Emotional Regulation
Like an internal thermostat, this dimension measures your capacity to return to baseline after a stressful event. Whether it is your toddler having a heightened emotional moment or a potential client deciding not to proceed, measuring how quickly your nervous system recalibrates requires you to observe the emotions without being consumed by them. Functional systems strengthen the ability to carry the load while supporting you to cope with the challenges to your mental health and emotional wellbeing. Strained or broken systems in this dimension will result in fear-looping ruminations, which perpetuate the inability to regulate your emotions.
Physical Vitality
In this dimension, we move beyond your fitness level to evaluate if your body is a safe, energised place to house your ambitions. This dimension measures your biological reserves, that is, your sleep quality and nutritional support, as well as your physical resilience. If your body is constantly stressed, fearful, anxious, on edge, tired, and/or ill, your mind cannot access higher-level strategic thinking and cannot operate functional systems, no matter how well they’re designed.
Social & Relational Tethering
This dimension audits the invisible labour of domestic work, as well as that of intimate and family/friend relationships. Here, we are measuring whether these connections are a source of net-gain energy or net-drain negotiation, obligation, or forced responsibility, and whether this mental load provides a supportive social safety net. A strained or broken system in this area pulls you in every direction without a clear way to decline those activities that do not serve your highest wellbeing, which includes how you’re being supported to manage and maintain the invisible labour of the home and child-raising responsibilities with your partner.
Financial Sovereignty
This is not about your business P&L or balance sheet; it is about your internal sense of independence and security that comes from financial stability. You have a right to rest. By measuring how your financial position affects your nervous system, you can determine whether you have sufficient structural safety to take a day off or experience the freedom not to work when your child is ill. A strained or broken system here produces a state of constant fear and ill ease, whereas a functional system feels like peace of mind.
Social and Spiritual Alignment
Without a connection to the why of what you do, you are simply a machine running towards a finish line that doesn’t exist. This meaning doesn’t just apply to your business; it ought to apply across other areas of your life, too. Your spiritual wellbeing, social responsibility, and connection to community are all functions of leading a meaningful life. This dimension measures the alignment of your core values, strengths, and your sense of purpose. A broken system here results in being high-functioning but also empty or devoid of relevance for the effort you’re making. A functional system here is the deep sense that what you do matters.
Cognitive Bandwidth
Here reside the open tabs of your mind. This is the dimension of the 4 am anxiety loop in which we measure the volume of unfinished business, unmade decisions, and repressed emotions stored in your mind and body at all times. The load of this bandwidth is the difference between feeling on top of every dimension or overwhelmed by it all. A functioning system here is the ability to experience grounded presence in all that you do.
Audit Your Capacity
It would be ignorant and naive to believe that the chaos of your life is going away. It’s not. As your business grows and your children age, the challenges only become more complex; however, you do not have to respond in survival mode. You can be grounded and present.
I’ve pulled all of this together into a downloadable PDF that you can use to audit your own capacity. It’s available via the pop-up screen on my website. [If you’ve already dismissed the pop-up while reading this, no worries, just copy the URL to a new incognito window and wait 30 seconds for it to pop up again].
The goal of the audit is for you to measure your capacity, its load, and determine if you have functional, strained, or broken systems. The results will be telling. You’ll begin to see areas of your life in a way that you’ve not previously considered. Trust that you’re not alone in this, though. We can work together to recalibrate one or all of these dimensions to enable you to achieve true grounded presence in all the dimensions of your life.
There is no need for you to just cope and survive; you can recalibrate to thrive.
Your Coach,
