In the latest episode of the Women Who Work From Home Podcast, host Michelle Rivera welcomed Jo, founder and CEO of the Balance Institute. Jo guides high-achieving women in finding balance, fulfillment, and clarity in their daily lives. Established after Jo’s own experience with burnout, the Balance Institute provides ambitious women with tools to reclaim their power and create success on their terms. Through a blend of neuroscience, ancient wisdom, and holistic practices, Jo helps women transform their lives without sacrifice.
Powerful Quotes from the Conversation
“I’ve built a business that I wish I had.” – Jo
“Magic unfolds when a woman is able to put herself back in the center of her life and say, what is it that I need to be the best version of me?” – Jo
“I am a better parent after I’ve done things for me… Who wants that version of me that’s resentful and cranky and snappy? And that is actually not the best thing for my family.” – Jo
“You can have it all. You just have to determine what your all is… if you are following what society says, then that is just a fast track to burn out.” – Jo
Key Takeaways
Jo’s journey from corporate burnout to founding the Balance Institute offers valuable lessons for women seeking to balance career ambitions with family life. The conversation revealed several crucial insights:
- The false dichotomy: Women are often presented with only two paths – being a stay-at-home mom or having a demanding career with little family time. Jo emphasizes that there is a middle path where women can honor both their ambition and their desire to be present for their children.
- Self-care is non-negotiable: Taking time for yourself isn’t selfish – it’s essential for being your best self in all areas of life. Jo demonstrates this by prioritizing her own activities like sports, using holistic medicine, CBD supplements, Collagen supplements and making her family work around her schedule sometimes. This also includes finding time for vacations as an objective, or taking mini-trips as a family.
- The trifecta of self-sabotage: Women often struggle with what Jo calls the “triple P trifecta” – perfectionism, procrastination, and people-pleasing. Addressing these patterns is crucial for women working from home. This process can ultimately lead to trauma, and addiction getting out of control if not examined.
- Understanding your brain: Learning how your brain works and why you get distracted is key to developing effective strategies for productivity and focus.
From Corporate Success to Burnout: Jo’s Story
Michelle kicked off the conversation by asking Jo to share about her family and business background.
Jo explained she has two girls aged 14 and 11, lives in Sydney, Australia, and recently celebrated 17 years of marriage. She started her business six years ago after a 20-year corporate career in marketing, where she rose quickly to leadership positions.
“I was 31 when I got my first chief marketing officer role, big team across five countries in a listed global company. So I ascended the ranks quite quickly while having little kids, juggling all of those things. And yeah, I guess we can go into my story further, but found myself burnt out and yeah, have been working from home ever since then.”
When asked about her burnout experience, Jo shared:
“On the outside, I had everything that I thought I ever wanted. I was an executive in a listed company. I had an Asia Pacific role, part of a global team. That was all my sort of career objectives, tick, tick, tick.”
She recounted having professional success, a board position, children, a husband, and a newly built home. Yet despite checking all the boxes she thought would bring happiness, Jo found herself unhappy, permanently guilty, and exhausted.
“I had this beautiful big house, I had a pool, I had the chickens, I had all the animals, I had the kids, but that came with a really big mortgage… And so you find yourself now trapped with this huge mortgage and you need to keep the big job, to better afford the mortgage and you can’t leave. And so you feel like you’re trapped in this treadmill, this life that you think you want.”
The Journey to Reclaiming Balance
Jo described her radical decision to change everything:
“I essentially went on this journey of blowing up my life. So I sold the forever house without having anything else to move into, just put it on the market and said, okay, we’ll figure it out. I left my job.”
While dealing with her husband’s mental health challenges and their rocky relationship, Jo checked herself into a hospital thinking she had an incurable autoimmune disease.
“I remember lying there and thinking, okay, this is like something has to change. I’m pushing myself really hard. I’m never stopping. I won’t let myself rest. I feel rubbish all the time, but on the outside I project this, everything’s fine, I’m really positive, but I was feeling quite dead and empty on the inside.”
After changing everything external – selling the house, working on her marriage, addressing health issues, and starting her business – Jo had an epiphany:
“I’ve changed everything else and I still haven’t found the fulfillment I’m looking for. Maybe the thing I have to change is me. I’m the common denominator.“
Finding the Middle Path Between Career and Motherhood
One of the most powerful parts of the conversation centered on the false dichotomy women face between career and motherhood.
Jo shared: “I’m not meant to be a stay at home mum. That’s not who I am. And so I saw two paths. It was you either be a stay at home mum and you look after the kids or the other role models I had in my life were women who were crushing it at work, super senior, huge jobs, but they either didn’t have children or they were college age… Or if they did have them and they were younger, they just outsourced everything to nannies.”
“I looked at these two pathways and went, I don’t want either of those. I don’t want to be a stay at home mum. That is not meant for me, that’s not my path. I’m not the best version of myself if I’m not working, but equally I don’t want someone else to raise my children.”
This resonated deeply with Michelle, who responded:
“I love that you’re bringing that up, that sort of like dual option that every women, like, I don’t know how we, like, how did this happen? How did women somehow get sold this weird idea that it’s like, you either have this really incredible career that’s really fulfilling or you have children and the two just could not work together.”
The Importance of Boundaries When Working From Home
Michelle asked Jo about her transition to working from home, and Jo emphasized the critical role of boundaries:
“I think when you’re a mum working from home, there’s a few things that you need to be really, really strong with if you’re going to be successful. And to me, the key thing you need to learn is boundaries.”
Jo explained how procrastination takes a different form at home:
“When you’re in the office, [procrastination] can be I’m going to go for a coffee or I’ll go and walk over to someone’s desk or go to the kitchen. And when you’re at home, that procrastination looks like I’ll just stick on a load of laundry or let me empty the dishwasher. Let me make a start on dinner.”
Without boundaries, Jo warned:
“Working from home can become I think incredibly dangerous because there is no boundaries between work and home so everything just bleeds together and it feels like you’re always on so you can never switch off and you can also never focus.”
The Triple P Trifecta: Self-Sabotage Patterns in Women
When Michelle asked if teaching boundaries was part of Jo’s work with women, Jo introduced her concept of the “triple P trifecta” of self-sabotage:
“Absolutely, boundaries is a really big piece of what I do because what I have found is that as women, we are really, really good at self-sabotaging… those triple P’s are perfectionism, procrastination, and people-pleasing.”
Jo explained how these three patterns work together:
“They leak a lot of our power. They cause us to self-sabotage and they suck our joy and fulfillment from life.”
Michelle noted that many women feel these traits are fixed parts of their personality that prevent them from successfully working from home. Jo countered this belief:
“It’s conditioned into us from a really, really young age. We are a generation brought up to be that way. And for a long time, I thought particularly the perfectionism and my high standards and my ability to push myself… I thought they were my positives. I thought they were my strengths, but anything that you lean into too much can become toxic.”
Embracing Failure and Rest in Business Growth
When asked about challenges she faced while working from home, Jo highlighted two key lessons:
- Being prepared to fail: “When you start your own business, that comes hand in hand with fear because your business will only ever grow to the size of the problems that you can handle. Which means unless you grow yourself, your business will never grow.”
- Valuing rest and recovery: “Recognizing that my rest and recovery is just as important as my productivity.”
Jo admitted that rest is still a journey for her:
“It’s been a long journey, a long journey for me to learn that one. Cause like you, I like going and I like doing things and a lot of my identity was attached to achieving and how much it could get done.”
She emphasized the importance of integrity in her business model:
“If I’m building a business that teaches women how to avoid burnout but if I’m working 80 hour weeks and not taking care of myself, then that would make me quite the hypocrite and you shouldn’t listen to a thing I say. So I am my own biggest guinea pig. I’m my biggest success story.“
Creating Space for Self-Care
Jo shared how she gradually incorporated self-care into her life, starting with playing netball:
“I thought, you know what? I’m going to play netball at 3.30 on a Saturday afternoon and the kids are gonna come and watch me.”
She later added soccer to her schedule, despite initial doubts about fitting it in:
“I’ve just played two seasons of soccer as well. So now I’ve got soccer in my life. I’ve got Saturday sport in my life… The more I’ve learned about taking care of myself, it’s not that I now have to halve the time, the pie gets bigger.“
Jo emphasized the importance of modeling self-care for her children:
“I say to them, I’ve spent many, many, many hours of my life watching you do all kinds of things… You can now come and watch me. So, and you know, it’s absolutely, to me it’s role modeling that mum has needs, mum gets time, the whole family gets to work around mum.”
Productivity Hacks: Working With Your Brain, Not Against It
When Michelle asked about productivity hacks, Jo explained her approach:
“Everything I do is mindset and strategy because I have found that if you try to just implement a tool without actually understanding how your brain works and how you’ll try to not use the tool, then it doesn’t work.”
Jo shared her favorite productivity technique, the Pomodoro method, but with important context about why women often struggle with focus:
“As women, [we] have what we call diffuse awareness. So a woman will walk into a room and we’ll see the dirty sock on the floor. We’ll notice that the window needs cleaning. We’ll see the cobweb in the ceiling. And we’ll notice that that kid over there is a little bit sad.”
This evolutionary trait that once helped women keep their families safe now makes focus challenging. Jo recommends:
“If we want to focus on a task, we are much better off just training our brain to say, right, 20 minutes, focus, ignore the sock, ignore the kitchen sink, focus on this next thing… When you understand what your brain’s trying to do, you’re then not at war with yourself.“
Parting Advice: Define Your Own “All”
Jo’s final advice for women wanting to work from home while raising children was powerful in its simplicity:
“You can have it all. You just have to determine what your all is and that sacrifice is inevitable, that you can have your health, your relationships, your hobbies. You can have it, but you need to determine what that is because if you are following what society says, then that is just a fast track to burn out.”
She encouraged women to take time to discover themselves:
“Take the time to work out what you want to discover who you are and to work on yourself and everything else starts to fall into place.”
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