How to deal with the biz mama guilt

"If you do that ONE MORE TIME, I'm going to.....!"

Familiar? Shouty mama, frustrated mama, guilty mama.... she goes by lots of different names, but she's every hardworking business-owning mama’s shadow sister.No matter how much we adore our kids she raises her head from time to time. For me, with an 8 and 5-year old, those times are getting out of the house in the mornings and getting them in the bath at night. I have a ridiculously short fuse and can go from 0-10 on the Richter Scale, erupting in seconds! And here’s the thing - when we shout we often actually GET the result we're looking for and the kids do what we ask... we might think great, at least they’ve listened finally.

But what they’re actually doing is learning “when mama really means it, she shouts.” And subsequently, they don't actually do what we ask UNLESS we shout and when they want to get their own way, they shout too.

Of course, we don’t intentionally get up in the morning saying to ourselves “if Tommy won’t go in the bath tonight I’m going to yell uncontrollably at him” But if we're being completely honest, some days it just happens. Why? The obvious answer is frustration. Often it’s the last straw in a series of irritations throughout the day. We’ve been busy working on our business all day, we’re tired, sometimes hungry or thirsty but don’t want to stop to meet our own needs, or perhaps our patience has been tested one too many times by the blue screen of death.

And here's the thing... our anger feels totally justified in the moment.

It’s a reaction to another feeling that disempowers us - not being in control. Anger and shouting make us feel powerful again, even just for a brief moment. When we set boundaries, routines and rules, and our kids push against them (which is part of their normal childhood development), our mental model of what we think should happen gets disrupted. It feels wrong, unfair, defiant. Our inner cavewoman senses potential danger. Physiologically this scenario triggers our ‘fight or flight response and our bodies experience a burst of energy to help us prepare for ‘battle’. We breathe more rapidly, blood rushes to our muscles and our skin, our attention narrows and locks onto the target of our frustration.

We explode. We feel justified. We feel in the RIGHT. But it doesn’t last.

That brief moment is quickly followed by the stomach-sinking feeling of mama guilt as the other part of our brain responsible for judgement and perspective kicks in. And that guilt often develops into its shadow emotion - shame. We can feel guilty about something that we've DONE that we wish we hadn't done ("I wish I hadn't exploded at Tommy when he slammed the door for the 10th time"), and then shame about ourselves as a person ("what kind of mother am I that I can't control my emotions in front of my kids?!").

But more than making us feel bad, these thoughts don't serve us. Here's why...

Guilt and shame hide in the shadows of our lives, trying really hard not to let us show them to anyone - this is particularly true of shame. Shame tells us that we'll be rejected, pointed at, laughed at. It tells us we need to hide too. Shame puts pressure on us to meet some idea of motherhood perfection. That perfectionism hits us from all sides when we’re muddling through trying to do the best we can. This is particularly true as business owners when we’re juggling multiple roles in our lives...Plan a new product range, help with homework, meet with a client, order groceries, fill in our tax return, bath & bedtime routine... the multiple decisions we take every day to rattle the cage of our insecurities.

Because we don’t get given a MANUAL for this stuff.

Despite all the ways that we’ve been liberated as women there remains this pressure that we put on ourselves, often unconsciously, to be PERFECT. We hold so tight to patience, winding ourselves up until eventually it escapes and we explode. It sucks. We need to recognise it and give ourselves a big FREAKIN break.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take action.

When I’m working with my coaching clients we use the Situation - Thought - Emotion - Action - Result model (STEAR) to become more self-aware. The situations we face every day lead to thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves, which create our feelings, which create our actions or reactions, which, ultimately, create our results. Well, shame leads to a particular kind of reaction - INACTION. Have you ever noticed that when you feel guilty or ashamed you feel really bad about it but then distract yourself away from it? Wave hello to our inner cavewoman again. When we feel ashamed she's all up in our head saying;"What's with all this pain? Let's go seek some pleasure and do as little as possible while we're at it. Now, where's that ice cream..."

But that INACTION keeps the cycle going.

If we keep doing what we've always done, we'll keep getting what we've always had, right? And that creates more evidence for feeling guilty and more evidence for feelings of personal shame - "I did it again, it must be true, I am a terrible mother!"It’s completely possible, over time, to transform those feelings of guilt and shame by changing a fundamental part of the STEAR model - our thoughts. But in the heat of the moment when the toddler is spreading peanut butter on your Mulberry handbag and your 10-year-old is stressing out because they can't get the fractions to add up and you're late for a meeting and your partner asks whether you've got time to iron a shirt and you just realised you haven’t ordered milk and he just took the last drop.... yeah, thought change isn't always easy. So let's assume we're going to meltdown occasionally, shall we? We're all human. We all react to situations that push our buttons. How do we make those feelings of guilt and shame go to work for us rather than against us?

Here are my 4A’s steps for getting back on track when mama guilt strikes:

#1 Acknowledge your feelings

Don't let those feelings of guilt and shame sulk in the shadows. Shine a really bright light on them. Get curious about them... how do they feel in your body? What are they telling you to do? What do you want to feel instead? To do instead?

#2 Awareness = Power

Take one or two days and study yourself. Become aware of your trigger points... when does the shouty mama version of you show up most, what time of day, where does it happen? You could keep a journal or just scribble down the key moments on a post-it.

#3 Act the adult

In the heat of the moment, we might have acted just like our kids, but we are the adult. Step up and own up. Kids actually forgive and forget much more easily than we do! And we're teaching them that it's OK to make mistakes as long as we own up to them and make a plan to try really hard not to let it happen again."Mummy got really cross and shouted. I'm going to take a deep breath to calm down and then I'm going to say I'm sorry and we're going to talk about why this happened."My 8-year-old told me one morning recently through tears of frustration that her brother was driving her crazy and she didn't know how to control her temper."Me either sometimes," I admitted. "Why don't we try really hard together?"

#4 Action - make a plan with SIMPLE steps to follow

Don't let shame lead to inaction. Instead, take purposeful action by working backwards from your trigger points. Here are some ideas to get you started...

What can you do 15 minutes before to prepare yourself? Deep breaths, listen to music, remind yourself how much you love your kids, get some perspective... whatever works for you.

What can you do to prepare your kids? Sometimes, kids (particularly young ones) get so absorbed in their activities they literally can’t hear us asking them to do something. I find if I get down to my kids' eyeline, get their full attention and tell them it's bath time they listen to me much more than if I call across the room. Explain what you expect from them, explain the consequences of certain behaviours calmly and quietly, make it a game... try out some different strategies and see what works for you.

What can you do at the moment? Have a plan for what you could do at the moment if you feel your body responding to those frustration or irritation cues - how could you do to distract yourself? Count backwards from 10-1, take 4 deep breaths, smile, sing, walk away until you feel calmer... again whatever works for you. I have a client who carries a beautiful shiny pebble in her pocket at 'crunch time'. When she starts to feel frustrated she takes out the pebble and focuses on it, how it looks, what it feels like. It breaks the moment and reminds her to get a sense of perspective. You could get the same effect by putting your hands on the kitchen counter or the side of the bath.

There isn't an instant cure for mama guilt. And that shouty mama inside you is going to show up from time to time... but if we use those feelings to fuel a commitment to action that will make it less likely to happen again, we can probably make her stay as brief as possible.