I’m delighted to introduce a guest post by my wife Lisa Florit – executive coaching associate with our business (as well as general all-round Florit Legal cheerleader).
As specialist in-house legal recruiters, we frequently see how the demands of a high-powered legal career can impact work-life balance – especially for women juggling professional and family responsibilities during term time and over the long summer break.
Lisa’s expertise in coaching women leaders offers some valuable insight into managing the often-invisible ‘mental load’ that many working mothers carry. As a former corporate HR Director and working mother herself, her perspective is particularly relevant to talented female in-house lawyers in our network who are trying to balance highly successful legal careers with family lives.
In this post, Lisa delves further into the concept of mental load – that constant, often unnoticed burden of planning, organising, and managing family life that frequently falls to women. She offers some practical strategies to recognise the issues, redistribute responsibilities, and ultimately achieve a more balanced and fulfilling life.
Whether you’re struggling with guilt over working during school holidays or feeling overwhelmed by household management, this post provides actionable advice to help navigate these challenges and optimise your work-life harmony.
Lisa runs a successful executive coaching consultancy. You can connect with her on Linkedin.
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Picture the scene…
The school summer holidays have started. The children are delighted, their frazzled mothers (and some fathers) maybe less so.
As a working mum your carefully planned term time routine is thrown into disarray for at least 6 weeks. Way before the long school holidays even get started you were planning how to navigate this period of the year.
Were you the one who planned the family holiday again this year?
Were you the one who booked the kids into holiday clubs and co-ordinated play dates?
Are you the one who feels guilty about working whilst the children are off school?
The juggle and the guilt are real. I spend many hours of my working week supporting mums through these challenges. One of the biggest issues for women is the mental load.
Do you carry the ‘mental load’ in your household?
It’s the burden of remembering, and usually also doing, all those tasks required to keep a household ticking over. In many cases this is shouldered by the woman of the house. Are you the one who plans, who notices, who anticipates, who researches, who worries? Are you constantly thinking of everything to ensure the smooth running of the household? Are you the “Knower of All the Things” in your house?
Invisible work
This is often invisible work because no one really sees it, but it is constant, consuming and exhausting. We do thousands of tiny tasks without anyone noticing at all.
Did you answer yes to those questions at the beginning of this article about the juggle and guilt? If so you’re carrying a lot of mental load.
Through years and years of social conditioning, women have been taught that their primary role in society is that of the caregiver, and that career and self are secondary. Conversely, men have been socially conditioned to view their role as one of provider and breadwinner. I do see this starting to change but very slowly – our conditioning runs deep.
This mental load, that so many women carry, goes beyond doing everything, it’s about remembering everything – what a burden!
Often we don’t realise we are even carrying this mental load.
We saw our mums doing it, we see other mums doing it and we feel a huge pressure towards perfectionism, feeling that we’ve failed if we don’t do it all.
We are conditioned to help others, we don’t like to say no and can feel reluctant to delegate. We want the best for everyone and we want to look after them.
Transition Points
A key point at which I see an increase in the mental load is on returning to work following maternity leave.
When baby comes along and mum stays at home, sometimes for up to a year, the way you run the household is different from before. Then when you go back to work you still carry the load from when you were at home full-time. Maybe you reallocate tasks between you and your partner, but still somehow you’re carrying that mental load. It seems that the majority of women also feel that it is their responsibility to stay on top of their children’s activities.
We take on the CEO role of our family.
What I often see as a result of this mental load are worn out, angry and stressed mothers, who spend time berating themselves for not doing better!
Enough! Let’s stop this.
How about if this time next year you didn’t feel like you were the one who organised everything so you could manage the school summer holidays?
Take action with these practical tips
First step – recognise what’s going on in your life – ask yourself if you are carrying the mental load for your household.
If the answer is ‘yes’, let’s have a look at what you can do about it.
Try the following practical tips:
- Write out your mental load, everything …and take a long hard look at it.
- List out daily, weekly, monthly, annual tasks so you actually know what needs to be done – quantify it. Everything from insurance renewals, to kids clubs in the summer, to emptying the bins.
- Discuss with the others in your household to assign these tasks to all members of the family, kids included depending on their age of course. When you do this make sure that you really have them take responsibility for the task not just delegate, then step away and don’t check up that they’ve done it – well, maybe for the kids but not your partner.
- Have regular family meetings where you can continue to refine who does what in your household – what a great example to set to see Mum and Dad taking equal responsibility.
- Know when to ask for help – this applies to both partners. There are times when work is really busy and you don’t have time to complete all your household tasks, at times like this it’s ok to ask for help.
Taking this approach requires some extra time up front, and some potentially challenging conversations at home, but it’s worth it to enable you to focus on just your share of the mental load not the whole thing.
If you’d like some more support to reduce your mental load you can take my Mental Load Self-Assessment
You can also book in a no-obligation call with me, to explore how we might work on this together.
I hope you are jetting off somewhere lovely over the summer, as you listen to the safety announcements on the plane, remember why they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first – if you run out of oxygen then you can’t help anyone else. Taking care of others depletes you, you must also take care of yourself – reducing your mental load is a huge step towards this.
Enjoy the summer. 🌦️
Lisa.
