Welcome to Work, Family, Me | Conversations with Maude

Welcome to a series of conversations with working women from a variety of cultures and industries hosted by Maude Burger-Smith, an experienced women’s burnout prevention and leadership coach, a certified sex, love, and relationship coach and curious feminist. Maude works with women around preventing burnout and healing high functioning depression and in this introductory episode she introduces the "work life me" series of conversations. 

Over the next few months you will hear interviews with deeply caring, money earning, co-parenting women about how they handle dishes, guilt, finances, childcare, planning and health in the REAL WORLD. 

These behind the scenes conversations are shared to help working mothers generate ideas and solutions to cope in these socio-cultural paradigms with countless pressures and expectations on women and real life demands on time, energy and finances. It’s so effing hard out there. How are others doing it? And still smiling in their IG pictures??

The show offers global perspectives on dealing with modern-day pressures and is always based on practical strategies and an expansive, non-judgmental approach. Episodes are released bi-weekly and last for approximately 45 minutes. To listen to this episode click here Welcome to work family me | Conversations with Maude

“Welcome to Work, Family, Me, a series of conversations with women from around the world who have both money-earning jobs and children at home. We will be talking about managing work commitments and hours, family finances, domestic chores, child care, planning and help in a socioeconomic structure that assumes and expects a lot of mothers and to be honest, it's kind of set up for the 1950s. 

We often call this situation of both working and parenting for women a juggle. I'm making little air quotes here, but I feel like that's not really an accurate verb because the stressful part is that there's nothing we can actually let go of at any given time. Also, isn't it interesting that we describe working and parenting as juggling or balancing for working mothers and for working fathers, this is just living life. 

My name is Maude. I'm the voice behind the mic and it's so lovely to meet you. I'm excited about sharing these conversations with women as a way to give you ideas of doing things differently, strategies, coping and that feeling of community.

I'm an accredited women's burnout coach with a background in senior leadership within the corporate world and a mother of two children. I'm passionate about women feeling alive in their bodies, confident in their workplace, secure in their finances and comfortable and entitled to relaxation and hobbies and moments of joy and pleasure in their time here on Earth. That's a revolution in itself.

Capitalism thrives on women overworking, under earning, and buying stuff to make themselves feel better. I usually work virtually with women one-on-one around building the self-trust and confidence required to buck the trend and prevent burning out. I'm also a certified sex, love, and relationship coach. And once a year, I run a sexual wellness course for women called UnShame. 

In my experience over the past years in one-on-one coaching, highly intelligent and hardworking women. I found that their job is often the easier part of their day. They are competent. They can get stuff checked off. It's managing everything else in addition to work that is burning them TF out. The second shift, as some call it. To be honest, and as you may have noticed by now, this podcast is kind of born out of frustration. We often hear and read about the progress women are making in the workplace over the last 50 years. We do not see the same level of conversation, research, studies, and change around men showing up in the domestic realm. According to the International Labor Organization, women around the world still perform 76% of the total hours of unpaid care work, including domestic duties. 

In order for women to work and be financially independent, they need to have the time and energy to do so. So many women I know and work with have checked the external boxes of success. They have the job, the house, the kids, the partner, the car, and they are running on empty. They are struggling with strong inner criticisms, feelings of guilt, resentment, and anxiety, in addition to the exhaustion of deciding, planning, and doing all the things. How can this change? What can we do differently here? As women in our 30s, 40s and 50s, we're at the forefront of the tension between careers and domestic support, or the lack thereof, in a way that generations before us have not been. 

So this is me inviting you to listen to Work, Family, Me as a way of tapping into the lived experience of other women from around the world. These are honest conversations about what it involves to quote-unquote have it all on a granular level. Who does what? What works well? What sucks? I'd love for these series of conversations to allow you to normalise the challenges and remind you that this is not a you problem. This is a global situation.

I hear so many women criticise themselves for not coping or feeling like they're not doing a good enough job. When we can look at this as a global sociocultural phenomenon, it can take it out of the personal blame and shame remit and into a more neutral situation that we can then create change around.

I'd love for you to listen to how other women are managing their time, energy and focus and take ideas from different cultures, backgrounds, ages and industries and implement what would make your life just a little bit easier. Give yourself permission to do things differently from the norm, whatever that is in your family, community, organisation and culture. I'd love for you not to feel alone in that situation of holding, work, emotions, families, teenagers, laundry, present buying, soccer tours, tax bills, we're all here with you. And lastly, I'm going to be providing some practical tools and strategies from my coaching background, studies, psychological framework, stress management experience. You can always feel free to take those or leave them where they are.

Thank you so much for being here. I've really enjoyed thinking about and curating these interviews with money earning, deeply caring women around the world. And I think you're gonna get so much value out of these conversations. New episodes of this podcast will be released every two weeks. Most of those will be interviews, some will be solos. Please do two things right now to help these conversations reach and support more overwhelmed women out there in the world.Goddess knows that there are a lot of us.”

Thank you so much for your time. I can't wait to share these chats with you.

More information about working with Maude is available here: https://www.coachingwithmaude.com/work-with-me