Show notes
Zero: Me First
—Kate says her fourth book Me First: The Guilt Free Guide to Prioritising You had a “slow start” because it launched amid the first COVID-19 lockdown but it has started to gain momentum because home isolation means “people are working differently and they’re wanting to do things differently and one is putting themselves first, so it’s about Me First.”
—Sharon has noticed the “importance of values” in lockdown and that it’s been a time to reassess about how we want the next stage of our lives to look, “re-evaluating what matters to me … how you live your values can change during times like these. It’s this reset opportunity.”
—Kate: “If you look at COVID from a different perspective it’s been a gift to me where we have been able to step back and really reflect and reframe, ‘How do I feel about this life I’m living, this pace I’m working at, do my kids need to be in 450,000 after school activities, what do we love doing most?’ and it has allowed us to slow down and go back to absolute basics, almost like a global tree change in some respects, and it’s given us a chance to reframe, reprioritise our lives differently. Then it allows it to curate how you want it to look coming out the back end of this. We don’t have to return to business as usual, we can redesign that for ourselves and that’s exciting.”
—Sharon notes it’s the “new normal” and “we have to learn to adapt to this.”
—Kate says she stopped being a lawyer because she “hated” it, and her life “blurred” when she had three children under three. “My first two were 17 months apart and it was the pressure of having twins without any of the glory. “There was a period of my life when I did not leave the house because their sleeping patterns were completely different. I was pregnant as well. I was a lunatic.”
—Sharon notes that “without throwing your ex-husband under the bus too much”, it sounds like Kate was a “one man band” in the relationship.
—Kate says “to be fair, he took a traditional approach to the family unit” and was earning great money for the family as a barrister while she did the parenting, “plus I wanted to work as well so I was juggling that.”
—Sharon: “But the moment you get to that, Kate, you have to redefine the relationship and what it means to be traditional. Traditional is the woman stays home. You didn’t have traditional, you had a very successful career in law. All bets are off.”
—Kate says there were only two occasions her then-husband stayed home from work when the kids were sick. “Partly it was because if he had to be in court he had to be in court but I also had a role where I had be in Sydney or in a meeting on the other side of Melbourne but I was always the one who made it work.”
—Sharon asks how the book, which promises to free up 30 hours of time a month, came about: “I just got this real sense this was you trying to make sense of ‘how do I navigate me having quality of life when people around me aren’t as committed as I am?”
—Kate thinks it’s “typical” of professional women who work and are also mums, “and it’s frustrating and as much as I’d like to be able to solve that whole dynamic within relationships and make blokes step the hell up, I don’t know whether or not there’s a simple solution to that.” Says at speaking engagements she draws a variety of responses: some women ask how to make their husbands step up and not be an extra child, others are “quite aggressive” and ask why she didn’t insist her husband share half the load. “It’s an interesting debate because I couldn’t change that in my marriage and ultimately my marriage ended, not for that reason in particular … but once I was out of the marriage it was easier for me to actual identify that I didn’t get the help I needed and perhaps I wasn’t prepared to have that discussion.”
9.42: You didn’t need ‘help’
—Sharon says it should never have been phrased that Kate needed help: “It’s not all on you, both had sex, both produced a baby.”
—Kate agrees but says there was an expectation “from pretty much all the men around me” —bosses, colleagues, husband—except her father that she be the one to take a career break and manage the children. “To be 100 per cent honest I wanted to be the one. It would be easy for me to say ‘my bloody ex husband never helped out’ but that’s not quite true. I was the one who wanted to stay home when the kids were sick.”
—Sharon: “Women don’t let go but they need to let go.”
—Kate didn’t let go. “If he’d said on more than two occasions he would stay home I probably would have said no because I thought I was better at it, I wanted to be in control, I wanted to make sure they were okay. It’s very easy to bash the blokes but a big part of that was I wanted control of it.”
—Sharon says it’s a sweeping generalisation but a lot of women tell her they don’t know how to let go because their partner is “fumbling about” and the perfectionist in them, the need not to be shamed, the need to be on top of it, won’t allow them to.
—Kate says it’s “too simplistic and lineal “to say there were two people in the relationship and both had sex and produced children. “It’s just so much deeper and more complex than that.”
—Sharon and her husband JP don’t have kids but have spent 17 years renegotiating marriage. “Really we were very traditional, we got married nearly 30 years ago. I did the meals … together we have come back to our values, it’s not on any one of us, he calls me out when I try to stay in control too much. It’s not on the woman to solve her need for control, but I think her life partner or husband can play a role in saying, “I think you’re holding on a little tight” and that’s what JP has done for me.
—Kate says when she was in the “dark times” with three babies under three, if her then-husband had suggested to her that she was being too controlling, “I probably would have lost my shit. Don’t poke the bear.” Adds she thinks in any relationship “we play roles … we play to our strengths. My husband did all the cooking, he was a terrific cook and I hate cooking. He did the gardening, maintenance, fixing things, managed all the finances. That was the stuff he liked and was good at. I had no interest. Then when it ends there’s these gaps. I didn’t know how to open a bank account, how do I get a mortgage, how do I budget. I’d been married for 22 years, we married really young. We play roles and when that person leaves it leaves a gap and there’s a big learning curve.”
17.30 The toxicity is in the rigidity
—Sharon says one thing taught at TCI is clear definition of the roles we play and “I think the toxicity is in the rigidity. My husband doesn’t say ‘you’re being controlling’ and I flare up, he says, ‘how about you leave that to me today?’ He’s on my team in terms of my wellbeing, not in pointing out my flaws. Otherwise it is a conflict, and I can make it a conflict, I can flare up like that, I’m the fire, he’s the flow so when he says, ‘maybe it’s time to sit down’ my reaction is, ‘No, I want to do it’. If I’m in control it manages my anxiety. Letting go and still managing my anxiety is the great challenge and he helps me with that.” Notes that Kate was told by men around her what to do with her career and family but Sharon’s major critics have been women.
—Kate: “It’s confronting and disappointing. We think of it in term of sisterhood, let’s back each other and celebrate each other’s choices and success … one of the big mistakes we make as women is our preparedness to judge each other for our life choices and bring each other down and it infuriates me.”
—Kate said she found it fascinating after her husband decided to leave her there was a “ripple effect” in her small community and people thought “if their marriage didn’t survive, what does that mean for ours?” at people in her small community: “You’re dealing with everyone’s concerns and grief about their own marriages, what the hell guys, I’ve just lost my husband.” Said three women told her within weeks of her marriage ending that she was lucky. That will never leave me .. that sadness about how these women are living. I worry about their ability to live a life that’s genuinely true of how they live their values.”
—Sharon: “Every woman listening, have your own money, it is so important, give yourself your own choices.”
—Kate: “Be yourself, have a great job you love, start a business you love, earn money for yourself. You are not an appendage.”
—Sharon says one of her major drivers is she doesn’t want to get to her dying breath and think she’s about to meet the person she could have been and should have been.
26.40: Don’t compromise
—Kate: “I turned 50 this year and it is a very reflective time and it’s about saying, ‘don’t compromise too much, this is me first, I have the confidence now. If you’re 20 or 30 or 40 I want women to read this book and have that level of confidence I have now. Regardless of what age you are, don’t always put everyone first, put yourself first, be the best person you can be and live this amazing life right now.”
—Asked what inspired Me First, Kate says she played it “safe” in her first book Me Time, which gave a framework to gaining back 30 hours of time a month. The new one is “a lot more opinionated” and has more of the author in it: “This is why you deserve to have that time back and when you do, this is how you should be spending it. Set and create some audacious, fantastic goals for yourself or your family or your career. I’ve been around 50 years now, I’ve worked in the highest levels of corporate, I run my own very successful business, I’m at that stage where I’m phenomenally confident and happy in my own skin, I love what I’ve created and I wish I had this level of confidence when I was 25. It’s about saying, ‘put yourself first. Understand what your values, live those values. Once you have that laser like focus on what’s most important to you, the rest becomes white noise and it’s easy to dial it down. Once you understand what you’re willing to get out of bed for it makes it easy to say no to everything else.”
30:12 The SMART Framework
—Asked the thinking behind finding 30 hours a month of time, Kate talks the five-step framework she developed a number of years ago, called SMART.
—First step is self-aware: analyse your values “and that helps you set parameters of how and where you spend your time.” Acknowledging Sharon’s comment that self-aware is “being honest with ourselves”, Kate says it’s “bigger than our values, it’s what is tripping you up, what’s challenging you. Having that clarity means you can dial down on everything else.”
—Kate talks vanilla values and the essence of your behaviour and suggests people take themselves to “that room of mirrors” and have a good look at their behaviour. “Ask the people around you what they think your values are, the way you live, work, what’s important to you. Ask yourself questions like, ‘If I was sick in bed, what would I get out for? What would I love to be complimented on? If I’m having a conversation with my best friend over a red wine, what are we talking about?’ My things I’d get out of bed for are my kids, my business and my health. Anything to do with my kids, easy yes. If people ask me to do things to do with my kids that doesn’t involve my kids, it’s an easy no. No, Kate can’t be chair of the basketball club committee for the next 800 years. Anything other than those things is an easy no: dating, catching up with friends all the time, they are just not a priority at the moment.”
—One way Sharon looks at values is “what I want to experience more of and what it is I’m not willing to experience anymore. What’s my flashpoint?”
—When Kate goes to sleep at night, one ritual is thinking whether she had a values lived day: “Have I said yes to the things that are important to me? If I’m lying awake at night it’s the times I’m frustrated, bloody hell, I said yes to that and I know it’s not something I really want to do.”
—Both talk trusting your gut. Kate: “People will say if you trust your gut and your inner lens, and if you will, your gut, it’s right but that’s not the case. Your gut is going off muscle memory and it feels right because that’s the decision you made last time and last month and six months ago. I’m very data driven. I’ll make decisions that are data driven then test it against my gut, that helps you make the right decisions. But don’t make gut decisions alone.”
—Sharon: “If you make the same decisions again and again and trust your gut, you’re relying on a flawed plan. My gut was the most unreliable indicator for the first two or three years of coming out of the black hole of not being me. 18 years ago I started realising I’m not being me and I needed to do something about it and my gut was the last place I was going to go. My gut was based on fear, intolerance, judgement, and the need to protect myself from all hurt. Listening to that I’d still be in bed ‘cos it was the only place I felt safe.”
41.40: Step Two: Don’t be ‘busy’
—Second step is Map: Kate recommends mapping a full day or two of your time to see where you’re spending it: “You can’t know what changed you can make to your time unless you know where it’s being spent. From the moment you get up until you go to bed, jot down what you do, how often you’re distracted, when you jump in and out of emails and phone calls. It’s data that will change your life. Most people who come in and work with me … they’re just pinging around like silver balls in a pinball machine, completely reactive.”
—Sharon notes Kate has worked with executives from Westpac, Deloitte, L’Oreal, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and takes them through the SMART framework.
—She’s always amazed working with really senior people that they are so bogged down in delivery they put off strategy: “80 per cent of their time should be spent on strategy. It’s about cleaning the slate, taking away the crap and white noise so they can focus on what they need to focus on. You can’t do that until you map your time.”
—Kate: “I don’t want to see the day that you’re spending on beach in Bali. It’s around what would a typical day look like if it just ran perfectly and smoothly and to your agenda.”
—Three problems she has when working with professionals: They’re not planning to succeed, they don’t have a big five-year plan, they’re not controlling the agenda. They’re being 100 per cent reactive to the loudest noise.”
—It “drives” Kate nuts when people say “I’m so busy,” she says. “It’s this badge of honour, ‘I’m in the busy club’, and it’s not actually something we should be boasting about. Because every time you tell someone how busy you are … really what you’re saying is, ‘I’m so unproductive.’ And that’s what people judge you on. So if people ask how you are, say, ‘I’m great, I’m terrific, I’m enjoying what I’m doing, I’m in the moment, I’m having my dream day, I’m focused.’ You’ll have a better conversation coming out of that.”
—Sharon suggests we all commit “to resigning from The Busy Club” to join a better club like I’m Living My Dream Club: “There are so many more interesting ways to perceive a day rather than I’m busy. It’s so banal.”
—Kate says the “negative concept” of our busy-ness is “contaminating our children and we’re making them busy. Think about our kids and all of those after school activities and rushing around and how many things you ran them to on the weekend, pony club softball, dance, accepting every party invitation—we’re creating a new generation of busy-ness.”
—Sharon: “And getting significance from it. There’s a lot of studies that show … just be careful where you get your significance from, if you draw your energy or significance from bragging about things that lead to you feeling unproductive, it looks good on the outside but the inside is just brittle and really struggling.”
49.12 Step Three: Finding Our Gold
—A is for Analyse: This is where you take your time maps and every task you’ve performed and put it into four categories: musts, wants, delegation or rejection: “Your delegation and rejection is where we find our gold, our 30 hours. It’s about teaching you how to delegate at work, break time down and categorise things. And we cost how you spend your time.
—On the home front delegation falls into two categories: outsourcing (“look at the maps and see everything you’re currently doing that you’re prepared to pay an expert to do—my three rules are they will do faster, better and cheaper”) and insourcing is things that people you live with can do for themselves that you don’t have to pay for (“clean up your floordrobe, unload the dishwasher, cook dinner, feed the dog, walk the dog, put away all your crap … this isn’t a hotel.”) A lot of high-achieving women she works with are “really bad” at insourcing: “It’s almost like they have to compensate for the, ‘Oh, I’m not at home as much so I’ll come home and do everything for my kids ‘cos I don’t have the time to give them quality time.”
—Kate: “We also want to bring up our kids to be independent and resilient and capable.” She says get them to make their beds, “and as long as the doona is off the floor I’m happy. Don’t remake the bed in front of the kid because then you’ve just totally demoralised them in terms of their effort. The five year old isn’t capable of smoothing their doona so it’s going to look like the front cover of Bed, Bath and Table but by the time they get to 12, 13, 14 they will be doing a good job.”
—One of her mantras is, “Family is a team sport.” Everyone has to chip in. “I laugh on the inside and sometimes have laughed loudly on the outside as well when I have speaking engagements someone will put their hand up and say, ‘I love the idea of outsourcing but they’re not old enough yet’, and I ask, ‘How old’, ’13 and 15’ …. There’s a deeper problem. It’s you.”
—Sharon recalls living on a farm for a year growing up, and milking cows at 6am when she was 12. “It was just what I did. I was empowered by the responsibility.”
—Kate says the second part of home front delegation is “look at what your habits are costing you. There are different cost lenses for each task you perform: financial cost (she recommends an app called Harvard Meeting Calculator which will tell you your hourly rate), opportunity cost (what you give up to do a certain task), emotional cost (how you feel about how you’re living) and physical cost: “In terms of financial cost, if your time is worth $50 an hour and you spend an hour on Facebook every day, it is $18,250 of your time a year. Ask, ‘is this the best use of my time?’”
—Sharon adds a caveat that it’s a “gentle process of discussion, moving the boundaries one at a time” with insourcing: “’Maybe it’s time you could have a go at that, you’re more than ready, I’ve been holding you up.’”
—Kate talks manipulation: “I’d rather you be the mum or dad who constantly nags, as opposed to the mum or dad or constantly does.”
59.05: Step Four: Reframe, reframe, reframe!
—R is for Reframe: It’s where you decide exactly what you’ll outsource, insource and reject. Reject includes “silly stuff” we do by habit, including the classic example of people checking their phones within ten minutes of waking up. “You’re living a completely reactive life because your messages, emails, everything on your phone is someone else’s to do list. It’s not yours. That’s people saying, ‘I want, I need, Can you’ and you just lost control of the agenda within ten minutes of waking up.”
—Sharon says if she falls down that rabbit hole of constant accessibility, “I can feel myself getting anxious. How to trigger my anxiety is tell me emails where I could let people down. I don’t have emails now coming to the house, no mobile devices where I can be contacted.”
—There’s also partial rejects, which are things “you do need but you could be smarter about how and when you do them. Yes, I do need to shop for food but not in peak hour, or I could shop online.”
1.01.10: Step Five: Implementation Time
—T is for take control which is “where the rubber hits the road. Start delegating, insourcing, outsourcing, rejecting, focussing on your musts, which are your values-led behaviours and making enough time for Me First, which are your wants. I want to go jogging, I want to see my dad, I want to sleep in. Whatever you want, we need to build ourselves into our calendar and make time for ourselves, then we need to turn up.”
—Sharon notes things that get in the way of putting ourselves first are imposter syndrome, busy lifestyle syndrome, super women, saying yes to everything.”
—One of Kate’s big bugbears is imposter syndrome. “We need to cure it. I have beautiful, amazing, incredible 16-year-old daughter and I won’t want her growing up with a sense of being an imposter. It’s an epidemic and every single one of my clients has it in some level or has doubted their abilities to be in the role they are in. I wrote an article about this recently and it went berserkers on LinkedIn, about how I feel I contracted imposter syndrome after I had had my kids … once you have kids it’s kind of open slather, every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks they can comment on your ability as a mother or your parenting style or your decision to work full time or not at all, or breastfeed or not at all, or put them in creche, or not at all. Everybody has an opinion and that starts to undermine your confidence, then once that starts it leaches into your working life.”
—Her strategy for beating it: “Sit down and really reflect on those feelings and ask where they’re coming from. Make a list of amazing things we achieve, write down those wins every day on a sticky note then stick them on a board, and at the end of the year you’ll see it covered in sticky notes. I want you to talk about it with other women, let’s not pretend we’re all coping and post these stylised shots to social media which undermine everyone else. Let’s talk about the shit days but most importantly talk to yourself the way you would talk to your daughter when she expresses those feelings of self-doubt.”
—Sharon: When we start talking about imposter syndrome we have to be a little vulnerable. It’s about, ‘I have a suit of armour on, please don’t notice’. Be okay with feeling a little vulnerable. The moment we run away from the feeling we’re back to imposter syndrome. The moment we reject an emotion we’re rejecting part of our ourselves.”
—Kate: “I’m constantly winging it but my greatest achievements … have always come from moments when I’ve pushed myself past that feeling of being fake. You’re only going to have your greatest life on the other side of that line.”
—Sharon: “Trying to get in touch with what it was for me … was getting reference points of where I was capable and where I was willing to learn. I looked at success and that really helped me, but looking at reference points where I was willing to be curious, imposter syndrome faded away. What got me to the place where I felt good about myself was the process of being open to learning and something different until it faded away and became irrelevant.”
—Kate: “Understanding the process is great and so important because then it’s replicable and you can do it again and again.”
—Sharon congratulates Kate on how she changed the trajectory of her life so she could experience it the way she wanted to, in what is a very empowering story. We looked at relationships with ourselves and others, we walked through the SMART process, imposter syndrome, insourcing, outsourcing: “The dynamics of how to insource within the family, that’s pretty well redefining families if we do that well and with grace.”