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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Women Road Warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Takaro from the corporate office to the cab of a truck. They're here to inspire and empower women in all professions. So gear down, sit back, and enjoy.
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Chapter 2: What are the biggest challenges of balancing work and family?
No topics off limits on our show. We power women on the road to success with expert and celebrity interviews and information you need. I'm Shelley and Kathy's on assignment. For many women, one of life's greatest challenges is trying to balance a successful career, a fulfilling personal life, and the demands of family without losing themselves in the process. That's difficult to do today.
Our guest has spent more than two decades navigating that balancing act while building an extraordinary career, raising a daughter, mentoring future leaders, and helping other parents find practical ways to thrive amid the chaos of everyday life. Sarah Armstrong is the author of The Art of the Juggling Act, a bite-sized guide for working parents.
It's a thoughtful and practical roadmap for managing the competing demands of work, family, health, friendships, and personal fulfillment. She draws on her own experiences as a working parent. She tackles everything from guilt and burnout to setting boundaries, finding reliable childcare, co-parenting, and creating a life that reflects your own definition of success.
What makes Sarah's perspective especially compelling is she's lived the challenges she writes about while leading at the highest levels of global business, including leadership roles at Coca-Cola, McKinsey & Company, and today is Vice President of Global Marketing Operations at Google. Sarah started her career at Leo Burnett in Chicago in media. Her work has been recognized around the world.
She was named one of Ad Agency's Women to Watch and included in Ad Agency's Book of Tens, the top ten who made their mark. So whether you're a parent, caregiver, entrepreneur, executive, or simply somebody trying to juggle the many responsibilities life throws your way, Sarah's insights offer practical wisdom and encouragement for creating a life that works for you.
We're excited to have Sarah Armstrong on our show. Welcome, Sarah. Shelley, thanks so much. Great to be with you. Oh, this is going to be an awesome discussion. And I want to say, you really have been a renaissance woman in all that you've done. Oh, my goodness. You've led by example, and you've definitely had to juggle a lot of stuff.
Yes. You know what? It's been fun, but it is a challenge to juggle in life. And I just, I feel fortunate to have been able to have the experience I've had both raising Grace over the years, but also having my career and also trying to live the fullest life possible. So it's been fun to try to figure out, figure out how to manage the juggling act for sure.
And your perspectives are so valuable. How did you come up with this workable formula? I was wondering, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself and your life's journey. Sure, I'm happy to.
So I think I actually started young in life. I was a student athlete. And I think that that actually probably were the early days of me figuring out how to juggle a lot of things in my life and figure out how to do work or how to do school and my schoolwork and go to practice and also have friends and all those things. Really, probably age 12.
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Chapter 3: How can parents redefine success on their own terms?
We study something to do in our careers, but actually how to manage your career. And then we actually don't learn how to manage both of those aspects of our life in school. And they're two of the most important things that you're going to do. And how to figure out how to do them and be healthy and happy and enjoy life. you know, that journey of being a working parent.
So that was really, as I reflected on all that I've learned over the years, my goal is to kind of pay it forward for the next generation of working parents who are trying to figure out, you know, this juggling act each day and do what I can to share some thoughts. Because I do see a lot of, excuse me, a lot of young parents who are surviving and maybe not thriving as working parents.
And I'd really love to help them to thrive.
Thriving is the ultimate goal, isn't it? And, oh, the challenges today are just incredible, and I love how you're paying it forward. You were really fortuitous, though, at a very young age. I was reading you were inspired by your dad, who was a hospital CEO, and you told yourself at six you wanted to run something. Yes. That's pretty amazing.
And you also had a powerful woman mentor at Leo Burnett, who was able to juggle a career, parenting and family. Was that kind of what got you thinking about all of that?
Yeah, it's interesting. Going back to that memory from my dad, you know, my dad has been someone I've looked up to my whole life. And I do have this distinct memory of sitting at his desk. He was a hospital CEO at the time. And I just said, I want to run something. I just had this funny, vivid memory of that at that age. And this big badashka me being this little person in his chair.
But yeah, and then I did. Renata McCann was my first mentor at Leo Burnett when I was in my early 20s, starting out my career. And there weren't, in fairness, a lot of working moms around me at that time. And in fairness, my mom worked when we were very young, but then she ended up staying home with myself and my two younger brothers. And But she juggled a lot.
I always say, being a stay-at-home mom, you juggle many things. It's just not necessarily in the same way you do when you're managing a career and leaving the house. And so I saw Renetta doing what she was doing, and I basically studied working moms in my early career to see how they were doing it, see what worked, because I knew that I wanted to both have a career and a family at some point.
And so it is it's something that I think it's a much more common these days, you know, 70% of women that have children are working now. So it's a much higher percentage and you see lots of working moms in the workplace, which is amazing. But in my early career, there were fewer. And so I really was trying to study what they were doing and almost the to-dos and maybe some of the not to-dos.
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Chapter 4: What strategies help in managing guilt as a working parent?
And, you know, I think part of it is what are the societal expectations of what a working mom is meant to do and where we're meant to be. I mean, I was just talking to some colleagues the other day. They were starting to just their younger colleagues and looking at schools for their children.
And I said, you know, that's one of the most important things is you're raising your kids and deciding where your child's going to go to school because the expectations of you as a parent are different at different types of schools. And you really need to be choiceful about what pressures you're putting on yourself based on the pressures that school has for you as a parent.
And it sounds funny, but when we were looking for gracious schools, one of the schools says, we expect you to be in the library sorting books, you know, one afternoon a week. I looked at my husband on the school tour, I said, the school is not for us. That's not happening.
So, but I mean, again, this is, you know, what are the expectations that collectively are put in you as a working parent and what can you, what can you do to manage those and make the right decisions for you and your family so that you don't feel like you're constantly, you know, failing or, or, or just surviving in that, in that day-to-day management of your life.
You know, it's, it's just so important.
Well, when you think about it, parents, as soon as their feet hit the floor in the morning, they're on the run. They're working. They're taking the kids here, there. And when school's done, at the end of the day, they're running the kids here, there, everywhere else. And even on the weekends, they barely have time to just sit down and relax. They don't have parent time, you know?
No, no, I know. And I do think that's an important piece of the equation is figuring out as a working parent or as a working mom, what is that hour in the day or hour in the week? Sometimes you can't find it in the day. But what are those hours that you give to yourself so that you can recharge?
Because it is such an intense day to day, as you said, from the minute you get up to the minute you fall asleep. And I always say when you fall asleep, you have that list of things running in your head that you you know, either wanted to get done or didn't quite finish in any given day right before you fall asleep.
So I think, you know, finding time to recharge and, you know, give a little bit of time back to yourself is really important because, you know, it is definitely a marathon, even though it feels like you're sprinting every day, literally. But I do think that's one of the important things for for working parents and working moms specifically to really figure out how to do in a given week.
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Chapter 5: Why is it important to set boundaries in personal and professional life?
If you owe more than $10,000 to the IRS or haven't filed in years, call me now at 888-557-4020 or go to MyTaxHelpMD.com for a free consultation and get your life back.
Welcome back to Women Road Warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Takaro.
If you're enjoying this informative episode of Women Road Warriors, I wanted to mention Kathy and I explore all kinds of topics that will power you on the road to success. We feature a lot of expert interviews. Plus, we feature celebrities and women who've been trailblazers. Please check out our podcast at womenroadwarriors.com and click on our episodes page.
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Our guest is Sarah Armstrong, Vice President of Global Marketing Operations at Google and the author of The Art of the Juggling Act, a bite-sized guide for working parents. In her book, Sarah challenges some of the biggest assumptions we make about success, balance, and trying to do it all. The simple fact is, you can't do it all. And you have to take care of yourself, too.
Life isn't about perfection. It's about making intentional choices that align with what matters most to do the balancing act of a working parent. This applies to anyone with a career or doing multiple things in life. Sarah, I was reading that you were inspired by a quote from James Patterson, which is really a powerful quote, and I think it became a premise for your book.
Imagine life is a game in which you're juggling five balls in the air. You name them, work, family, friends, health, and spirit, and you're keeping all of these in the air. You'll soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls, family, friends, health, and spirit, are made of glass.
If you drop one of these, they're going to be irreparably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. That's pretty powerful. Could you elaborate on how this quote has guided you? I mean, it looks like that really inspired your book. It did.
It inspired my book. It was actually a quote I have always had in my office, both in the workplace, but then at my home office, now at my desk, it sits there. And, you know, I just think that we, you know, those balls are always juggling in any one given day. And I do think sometimes we have to really remind ourselves that Work will always be there. Our careers will always be there.
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Chapter 6: How can saying 'no' improve work-life balance?
And it can really have significant impact on your kids, your family and friendships, et cetera.
Women have a hard time setting boundaries, I think more so than men, don't you?
You know, I think so. I think part of it is because we want to do, you know, a little bit of we want to please, we want to make sure everything's taken care of. And also the expectation that we are kind of trying to do all of the things, you know, quite honestly, all at once.
So I think the thing about, and I say that, interestingly enough, when you set a boundary, and I generally say this to people that I'm mentoring, like when you set a boundary, you need to make sure you tell everyone around you that you've set that boundary, whatever that boundary is, because people will walk all over your boundaries because they don't know they exist.
But if you've told them about that boundary and you ask them to help you protect the boundary, then they feel equally accountable to help you with that. And no one can protect a boundary that they don't know about. So that's one of my big things for women specifically. is to say, you know what, these are the hours I'm trying to carve out, for example, with my kids at night.
And I'll give you my own personal example. When Grace was growing up, I actually had on my calendar, blocked on my calendar from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at night, and it said Grace time. Now, it happened to be her name. It also worked well for what I was trying to do. And I said to my assistant, look, no one... touch that time.
That's when I'm getting Grace dinner and we're getting ready for bed and we're reading and that's her time. And I said, if someone, because I've been in a global role my entire career. And I said, if someone wants to talk to me, I'm happy to talk to them at 9 p.m. after I put her to bed, or I could talk to them at 8 a.m. the next morning after dropping off her carpool.
But those hours, that sixth date, were not touching. And I can tell you that over the course of her growing up, I maybe took one call during that sixth date. I mean, it was so protected. And I just share that because I think sometimes we don't think we can do that. And even in high demanding careers, I do think we need to do that because otherwise,
you know, you're not able to be pleasant with your children and be there even for just the day-to-day of, you know, bath time or dinner time or whatever the case may be. So I'm a big believer that both studying them, you know, communicating them to those around you and then really protecting them is really important.
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Chapter 7: What role does a support network play in achieving balance?
And I feel the same thing even with our mobile phones, obviously. And these days, the challenges are mobile phones are almost like the remote controls for our home. So it's a much harder thing to put them in a cupboard. But I did also have a charging station inside a cupboard.
So that when I came in for those couple hours with Grace, I put it in the cupboard, you know, and I thought, you know what, if someone needs to reach me, I'll look at it at eight, you know. Because I really believe, so strongly believe that our children deserve for us to be present when we're with them. And that's the technology in our lives pulls our attention away from them.
And they don't deserve that. They don't deserve to have to share the attention that we're trying to give them with a piece of technology. And it's interesting because I am proud to say, and I look back and this really took a lot of willpower, but in Grace's growing up, up until she was 15 years old, she never saw my works off top.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. Because I would pull it out after she was asleep. And so I really believe that I didn't want, because I already worked a ton, Shelley. So, I mean, there was a lot of working going on. So I didn't want the few hours that I had with Grace to be associated with her seeing me and my work laptop together.
Now, in the hybrid world that we all live in now and a lot of the work from home dynamics we have, that's a harder thing to do for parents. And I know, so saying that, it's not maybe as realistic today to say that, especially if people have home offices.
But I say, you know, if you have a home office situation, close the door, you know, or put it, you know, even if you don't have an office and you do work at your kitchen table, Put that laptop in a drawer, in a cupboard somewhere in the hours you're trying to focus with your children and spend that really precious time with them because they only get a couple hours a day with us.
And I just really feel strongly that they shouldn't have to share it with your laptop and your phone.
And they need that kind of interpersonal interaction. They need that nurturing because that's going to shape them as adults.
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Chapter 8: How can parents create meaningful family traditions?
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Welcome back to Women Road Warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Takaro.
We're talking with Sarah Armstrong, Vice President of Global Marketing Operations at Google. Sarah's book, The Art of the Juggling Act, offers practical wisdom for anybody who's trying to manage the competing demands of work, family, friendships, health, and personal fulfillment.
One of the most memorable ideas she has involves five balls that we're all juggling and why only one of them can safely be dropped. And that's not family, friends, health, or yourself. Boundaries change. are super important. So is self-care and setting time aside for our loved ones and ourselves. That's part of our boundaries.
Sarah, I also see that you reject the whole concept of having it all, society's definition of success. I think that we're always trying to achieve this, I don't know, utopian lifestyle and goal. That really does seem kind of ridiculous, doesn't it? What does having it all mean?
Well, you know, it's interesting. I would say that the interesting thing about having it all is that, you know, it's something that it looks very different for different people. So what does having it all mean to you? You know, I just I think having a universal definition of having it all is not realistic.
And, you know, I also believe that you might be able to quote unquote have it all, but you may not have it all. You know, it might happen at different stages of your career. And so, sorry, in terms of your life. And so I think that we have to just stop spending time comparing ourselves and trying to live up to societal benchmarks of what having it all means.
That's maybe when you say that I reject the concept. I just think you have to think about what you want out of your life and then define what having it all means to you. And that equation, what those components are of your life and how you want to live them, is absolutely up to you to define.
And I think the societal pressures that we put on ourselves of what that picture looks like is what I think has a lot of women specifically feeling like they're not delivering on this
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