Ambition And Motherhood Are a Magic Combination with Dr. Anne Welsh

Morra Aarons-Mele (0:00)

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When I'm with an audience giving a talk, I often ask them to give me the first word that comes to their mind when I show them this sentence. People expect me to be.

What do people expect you to be? And especially if I'm with a female audience, although I get it with men and women, it's always terms like professional, competent, the place to go for answers, capable, compassionate, responsible, right? Really adult and not too joyful expectations. Today, I interview Dr. Anne Welsh, who is a therapist, a psychologist in private practice. And she has written a great book called Ambitious Mother. And it is about motherhood and ambition, which is a tough sell because most of us are sort of taught that it is very hard when you're a mother to have a career that's super ambitious and that you totally love and we're not, you know, stressed and miserable. The narrative around working motherhood is kind of crap. Well, she's here to change all that and we talk about it. And I want to start the show with an exercise that she offers. And it is about reclaiming your identity from all those expectations. So we'll start with that exercise and then get into my interview with Dr. Anne Welsh on motherhood and ambition.

Anne Welsh (4:08)

So many of us are walking around with a million shoulds, right? Again, I know you've talked about this a lot on your show, right? All the expectations that we have of ourselves. And I suggest that we do a closet clean out. So just like if you were going to do a closet clean out, you throw everything on your bed and you'd label, here's where I got it from. Here's what is itchy. I'm going to get rid of that sweater. These pre-pregnancy jeans don't fit. I'm going to pitch those, right? And the only things that go back in your closet are the things that actually fit you in your body right now and your life, right? Those are the only things that go back in. Everything else is out of the closet. It's just clutter in your brain.

You can do that with your identity, right? So you write down all of the roles that you're holding, mother, sister, friend, daughter, spouse, leader, et cetera, and you write down every single expectation that those roles carry. And what I find is just doing that, there's usually like an exhale, just of, oh my God, I'm lifting a lot of myself.

And then you go through and you only suckle the things that actually you believe are important for you to perform that role well. Not the thing that Aunt Susan said, not the thing that that grad school professor said, not the thing your mother said or Pinterest or Instagram or whatever. What do you believe in the subjective state, looking at it right now, is actually true to be a good mother or to be a good sister or whatever it is. And those are the only things that go back in your closet. And then as the guilt and the judgment and self-criticism shows up during your week, if it's some of that clothing you got rid of, you just label it. Oh right, that's Ann Susan. I don't actually buy that. I don't need to. And you kind of put it away. And again, it's easier for me to talk it through than to do. It's a little deeper than that. But I think the idea works, right? Of just labeling all the garbage we're carrying around with us all the time. And particularly as mothers, there's a lot of it.