How I Ditched Overwhelm and Burnout and You Can Too
Are you ready to finally ditch the overwhelm? This blog series will help you understand more about The TOP Program, the number one time management system for women, and how you can take back control of your calendar and schedule.
Before the TOP Program
Before we dive into the program and benefits, I want you to learn a little about me. My background is in the corporate IT space. I was a math major, and I stumbled into a career as a software quality architect, which I hadn't even known existed as a career path.
I had over 20 years where my mission was to go into organizations and help them build their software better, faster, and cheaper. That meant that I had to get good at creating and identifying systems and processes to really streamline our activities and do things as efficiently as possible.
I got married a little later in life and started a family later in life. So by the time my daughter was born, I had developed and used my methods to manage my time. And I had it nailed down. I can remember when I was single, and let's face it, naive, seeing frazzled moms out and about and thinking that won't be me, I've got my act together. And that just did not end up being the case.
I wish I had some video footage to show you of my early parenting days because I was an absolute hot mess. I had no idea that by simply starting a family, it would take everything I had in place to organize my life and flip it upside down. My systems and processes were no longer working.
My Breaking Point
I was juggling a full-time career, being the go-to parent if our child needed to be picked up at preschool, and navigating all the things that come with that. I had a pivotal conversation at the park one day with another mom that changed everything for me. I was pushing my daughter on the swing making small talk with a mom, and she casually asked me, "So what do you do for fun?" And I honestly had no answer.
I remember being floored over just being asked that question because I was looking back over the last several years of my life and was struggling to remember when the last time I actually did something was just for fun. And that was the wake-up call that I needed.
I went back home, and I remember crying in my closet for a while that night because sometimes we have to find places to be alone as a mom. My closet is mine, and I just realized something needed to change. This was not sustainable, nor was it a life that I wanted to live. The good news is it made me realize the irony of it all. I did this for a living.
I would look at the way things were being run and identify what changes needed to be made. Yet I had failed to do that for myself, so I decided to take myself on as a client and say we're going to scrap everything we've ever done. I need to discard all the systems and processes I was using and start with a clean slate. I needed to figure out a new way of managing my time, controlling my calendar, prioritizing my lists. so that I can have an answer to the question "What do I do for fun?"
How the TOP Program was Born
I wish I'd had that foresight or knowledge sooner to recognize that everything I was doing wasn't working because my life had changed entirely. Think back to childhood for a minute. We got to live pretty selfishly as kids, right? You know, we the world kind of revolved around us. And when I look back to my previous life as a single woman with a job, I had no family, no pets, no nothing. It was pretty easy to juggle life. Of course, something needed to change now that I added all these new roles and responsibilities.
That day was the birth of The TOP Program.
I spent the next several years tweaking, refining, and creating systems and processes that I knew would actually work. And what's interesting is friends and family started noticing some changes in me. And one day, I was invited to speak at a woman's group, a working moms group, and share with them my journey and teach them some of the methods that I was using.
That very talk is what launched me into saying. You know what? This is where I want to spend my time and energy. And shortly after that, I left corporate, and I am now working full time while I say full time, but not 40 hours a week. But my sole job is I'm on a mission to help as many women as I can and to empower them with the knowledge of how to manage better and control our time so that we can have the harmony in our life that we deserve.
What to Expect
In this blog series, the remaining posts are an opportunity to introduce you to some of the critical principles that live inside my TOP Program to help you understand what ultimate change and transformation you will have in your life.
You will learn how to implement the systems and processes and make them sustainable for your life. I'm going to introduce you to other women that have been through this program so that you can get a flavor of what that journey was like for them.
And most importantly, you're going to understand why this is so different from the other time management and productivity courses out there. Because I promise you, I've taken them all. And there are some key fundamental differences in my approach to this because, as women, we need to make sure that we are finding help, support training, etc, from individuals in the same stage of life as us.
