Today on the podcast, I’m interviewing Samantha Sutherland!

Samantha wants to create a world that works for working women.  Through her speaking, workshops and coaching, she leads audiences to feeling hopeful and empowered.  Her research into the effects of COVID on working women, the post-pandemic experience for working mothers called Beyond the Nine to Five, and her podcast Women at Work have positioned her as a leading expert in the field of gender equity in workplaces.  She brings 16 years corporate and CEO experience to support her work in diversity, equity and inclusion.  Samantha’s work is grounded in research and supported by story to ignite true impact.

Sam and I had a really interesting chat about what it’s like to manage our time as working mothers in the context of unequal mental load and a societal structure that pressures women to do it all.  We talk about expectations, priorities and being guided by what matters to you.  I think you’re going to take a lot away from this episode, and I genuinely think you’ll find it insightful if you’re a parent with any gender. 

Here is the transcript of my chat with Samantha Sutherland.

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Natalie: Samantha Sutherland, welcome to the Live an Intentional Life podcast.  Thank you so much for being on.

Samantha: Thanks for having me.

Natalie: Of course. So I think we’re going to have a great chat today about work and life and all the things.  But to start us off, I would love if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your situation, what you do.

Samantha: Yeah, well, I mean, first and foremost, I’m a mum to one 11-year-old boy.  It’s the best thing in my life.  And I work in gender equity.  And so I’m passionate about creating a world of work for working women.  I am a podcaster, speaker, panel moderator, workshop facilitator, coach.  I do all of that in the area of gender equity, but also like whole of company inclusion solutions.  I’m a friend.  I am an adventurer.  That’s a bit about who I am.

Natalie: Yeah, amazing.  So what got you interested in doing the diversity work and the equity work?

Samantha: Well, yes, in a past life, I was the head of risk and data at Australia’s largest energy retailer.  And then I took this very deliberate career right turn.  And I think when I look back on my life, I always was interested in equality and I don’t, but I didn’t know any of the language around it.  I didn’t know it was really a thing.  Maybe I knew it was like a thing to fight against when I faced inequality.  And that goes back as far as like, when I was five and my dad said he was going to take my brother to the cricket.  And I said, well, I want to go to the cricket too.  And the only reason he didn’t ask me is because I’m a girl and he’s a boy.  And so I got to go to the cricket.  That was a bad move, by the way.  Don’t like cricket. Didn’t have a great day.

Natalie: You regret that?

Samantha: I was like fighting for, you know, I wanted to be allowed to do what he was allowed to do, invited to do what he was allowed to do.  And then I think, you know, in the workplace, you start to see some of the things that happen that hold women back, and some of the different ways women are expected to behave, some of the double standards that women are held with.

And then I’ve said before that women who maybe have some interest or maybe no interest in gender equality and kind of understanding all of it, the fastest way to radicalize them is to give them a baby.  And then they see so starkly, I certainly saw so starkly all the barriers that face women that don’t face men. 

And that goes to relationships too, where lots of women go into relationships, it’s totally equal, there’s no kids, they both earn good money, they both share the load in the home, it’s all fair.  And then they have kids and suddenly everything is not even anymore.  And it’s not even in the home, but also how we’re seeing it work changes.  And so I think there was like a growing, an interest always, and then a growing understanding in the language around it and why it happens like this and what some of these structural barriers are.

And, you know, one of the things that I’m really passionate about in my work is when we have no idea about the system that we’re working in and we have no understanding of structural barriers, we end up thinking it as our own personal deficiency.  If I worked harder, if I was more confident, if I had more money, if I spoke up more, if I knew more, if I had studied that thing, then I would be able to do it.  If I had a better to-do list, if I was better organized, then I would be able to do it.  But it’s not about that.

So whilst it’s important that we find ways to have agency within the system, it’s really important to know that it’s not your fault, and there is something much bigger than any one of us going on here.  And I think that is helpful for working out how to navigate it and also to making us feel like I’m not a failure because I can’t do it because the system is set up to make us sound.

Natalie: Yeah, that’s so powerful.  And so knowing all of that, then how do you juggle that mental load?  Because for me, like the mental load, the cognitive load of all of these elements of our life is so much.  How do you, what’s your perspective on that? How do you navigate that?

Samantha: Well, yeah, I mean, the mental load is a huge conversation I have with many, many women that I speak to.  And closely related, but not exactly the same thing is access to quality leisure time.

So I speak to many women, first about the mental load and then about the fact that they’re on a weekend away with all their friends and the guys are all out on the boat fishing and all the women are with the kids.  Or on the weekend, the guy goes golfing or cycling for 8 hours and she’s with the kids and on Sunday, they have family time, and everyone wants family time.  So you feel like you can’t say you don’t want to do that.  And you want to go and do your own thing on the Sunday as well.  And I think those two things are really closely related.

I mean, my own personal circumstances, I’m divorced.  And so I share 50-50 custody of my son with his dad.  And he is actually, I think, in the 1% of people, of men around supporting, not supporting, about like being part of the mental load.  So he actually looks after a lot of stuff.  He does all, you know, tons of sports bookings.  He’d fit all the way through childcare.  He did all the rebate applications and working with Centrelink.  So he actually is really involved with that kind of thing. 

And I mean, one of the things that many experts that I have spoken to on my podcast have said is think about who you marry.  Like your life will be directly impacted by the person that you share a child with.  Now, obviously, some stuff went wrong because I’m divorced, but in terms of mental load, genuine co-parenting, genuinely sharing the labor, I nailed that.

I have re-partnered and I live with a partner now.  And I think the thing that happens there, and he is very good, but not in the 1% in the same way.  And I think I would say there is that I never, ever stop the conversation.  And I do find it exhausting because then you sort of have a double thing.  We have the mental load and then you have the conversation about the mental load.  And then often you have the conversation about the mental load in a way that makes sure that they don’t feel too attached.  And I find that exhausting and tiring and I’m not very interested in it.  And so not letting it go.

The other thing, sorry, the final thing I would say about that is there is, there’s a program or like a method called the Fair Play method, which was developed by a woman called Eve Rodsky.  She wrote a book, she’s got these cards.  There are some things in her methodology that I definitely take exception to.  However, one of the things she suggests is that you own a task from the very beginning to the very end, thinking about it, making sure it’s all done right.  And so I have passed stuff over in its entirety to my partner.  So he does all the laundry in the house, which is getting it from around the house, washing it, hanging it up, folding it, putting it away in the relevant places, making sure that like the sports uniform is ready when it’s meant to be ready, making sure that school uniforms are ready, making sure I have what I need.  Like, and I don’t touch that at all.  Or like maybe it’s a favourite of him occasion, but I don’t do, I don’t touch the laundry at all.  And I think there is something to like the entirety of like owning an entire process.

And then actually the only other thing I would say is to go back like to the early days of having a kid is what the research shows is that when both parents have a significant period of primary care responsibilities, so like men who also take four months off work to look after the kid, often they’re doing the second shift of that, because if, especially if you’re breastfeeding and need recovery from labour and or surgery or whatever, women don’t usually do that first.

But even if they do that second, so when the kid is six months old or a year old, whatever, they take a four month period of being the primary carer, that has been shown to change the dynamics within the family for the long term, not just in the primary carer.

So that’s the other thing is like, if you can straight away, give responsibility, like, expect them to own responsibility for it and really fight for that.  And if you haven’t done that and you’re looking around your life and you’re like, well, this is fucked, it’s not too late.  Like you still just have this one wild life.  You can choose to really lay down the ground rules and decide that it’s going to be different from now on.

Natalie: Yeah, and I think your point about the entirety of the task is such an important one because that’s where the mental load comes in, right?  It’s like you can ask someone else in your family, your kid, your partner, to do the washing.  But it’s not just going to the laundry and putting the clothes in the machine and turning it on.  It’s the getting the sport, make sure the sports uniform is ready on time, working out how many loads you need to do, what, how often stuff, how often stuff gets washed.  Like it’s so, it’s just all this cognitive demand to it.  And then you talk about that for every single other task and every other part of your life.  And it’s so much, and so if you can hand that over as a whole task in its entirety and have a conversation about that and make that just really obvious, then I think that’s so important.

Samantha: Yeah, so when you talk about mental load, there’s sort of three or four parts to it, depending on who you listen to.  And so one is thinking about what the, thinking about the task, being aware, we need the second one is working out the options.  Or maybe a good example is thinking about it, we need to have dinner on ways about like everyone, we need to cook dinner for the family every night.  And then the second one is assessing your options.  So we need to cook dinner.  So maybe we’ll have a roast chicken, we got one of them in the freezer.  The kids love chicken or fish fingers, whatever, what are we going to have?  And then making the decision.

The third one is executing it.  And then the 4th one is assessing the decision that was made and working out how you feed that into the future.  So an example of that might be you’re like, okay, we’ve got a chicken, so I’m going to roast a chicken.  But actually that took an hour and a half and the kids were hungry.  And so we’re not going to roast chickens midweek anymore, which is actually a decision I made in my life because of exactly that mistake.

And when you, I saw a graph like just the other day of who looks after the first two steps, like thinking about what needs to be done, being aware of the task, and then deciding how you’re going to approach it with the third step being the execution of like actually doing the thing, cooking the chicken or washing the clothes, whatever.

And on this chart, it was hilarious because every single thing that they measured in this, which is a list of 20 and 25 things.  So laundry, cooking dinner, making school lunches, all of this, every single thing, except for one, the women took the mental, like the prep thinking part of it, even if the men had a lot to do with execution of it.  And the only one that men took both mental load and execution was taking out the trash.

Natalie: I’ve seen this one. Yeah, so fascinating.  Gosh, you got to shift it.

Samantha: It’s like funny, but it’s also depressing.

Natalie: Oh, totally.

Samantha: And I think the thing is like, in my own life, I was just, and have always and will always be willing to continue to fight about it because I don’t want my life to be reduced to picking up someone else’s dirty socks.  Like, I just have no desire to do that.  I’m more comfortable living in a messy house than I am doing it all myself.

And so I kind of like, I mean, it does mean that we get into this moment where I want to burn everything down, but I won’t let it go.  And you know, one of the early interviews I did in my podcast was with Tracy Spicer.  And she says, equality starts in the lounge room before it gets to the boardroom.  And she also talked about that same idea of just never, never giving up the fight for equality in your own home.

Natalie: So given all of that, and you also mentioned quality leisure time for women, what does work-life balance mean to you?

Samantha: I mean, personally, it means that I have plenty of time with my son.  I mean, I’m aware that I probably have like a few short years before he’s a teenager and I get to see him for 20 minutes a weekend.  And, you know, things like he changed schools last year.  And so really being able to be there in the afternoons and help him get settled in and organize playdates and stuff like that.  That’s a big one.

And then the other is this thing of like quality leisure time.  Like I go to the gym, I go to the beach, I read, I horse ride.  I do, I see friends, like I do stuff that takes me out of the house and, you know, means I’m doing like filling my cup in ways that have just to do with me.  I don’t think I necessarily am like, I don’t know, I’m not so kind of drawn to the idea of work-life balance, but I think I also work for myself.  And so maybe that has partly to do with it.  I’m not, I don’t have external work drivers that I can’t control, which I think is one of the big challenges that people face when it comes to balance, like unrealistic work expectations or, you know, overwork.  But yeah, you know, I focus on making sure the things that matter to me are in my life.

Natalie: Fantastic.  So, given that, because you work for yourself, how do you then make that decision around, well, how many hours am I going to spend doing work?  How many hours am I doing leisure time?  How many hours am I doing chores?  Are you just kind of doing it until it’s done?  Like, what feeds into that decision for you?

Samantha: Oh yeah, I mean, you’re asking the question as if it’s a really well thought out thing that I’m doing and it’s not.  So I have like big lists of things that I need or want to do.  I have processes around how I do a lot of the work stuff so that I’m not kind of repeating stuff.

I don’t mind working.  It’s funny, like if I’m working for myself and I sometimes have to hop online and work till 10 o’clock at night.  It’s mine and I don’t mind.  If an employer wants me to do that, I get so resentful because I think I deserve to have my own life.

Yeah, I think I have just kind of a fairly natural flow of, I would say that I put stuff around my son into the calendar first so that I know that I can get him where he needs to be.  I very rarely work weekends, almost never work weekends.  I pretty rarely work in the evening as well.

I mean, but then of course, if there’s times when I need to, then I do when I travel a bit for work as well.  So then I’m away from, or away from the family and stuff.  But I don’t feel like I have any kind of silver bullet answer to that.

Natalie: Oh, no, of course.  And so it sounds just very natural around, well, I need this at the moment, this needs to be done, but actually I need this for myself.  And it’s really just kind of flexing between those things.

Samantha: Yeah.  And I mean, I guess if you’re trying to create like, some insight that helps people who are actually listening.  If I’m coaching somebody, I guess my questions would be around, do you feel like you have enough time to yourself and to do your own thing?  And if the answer is no, because of course, for women with kids, it’s often no.  Well, then what’s the stuff that you feel resentful of?  What’s the stuff that you’re doing because you think you should do it?

What’s the stuff where sometimes we can’t, you can’t necessarily be a little automatically, but there are sort of social expectations and judgments around stuff like how clean your house is, where women get judged in a way that men don’t get judged.  And so I’d sort of see if you can question if there’s anywhere like that.  Like, am I spending an hour tidying the house because it has to be clean?  But why?  Like for who?

And then the other thing I would look at is like, where are there glaring inequalities within your home?  Because the reality is, people who are working and have small kids, like if you have two working parents, which is most families in Australia, even if one parent is doing part-time, nobody feels like they have a lot of time.  Nobody feels like they’ve got a lot of leisure time.  Nobody feels like they’ve got balance.

But what you can look at is like, it doesn’t feel fair to me what’s happening within the family dynamic. Like one of the biggest breeders of resentment, I think, is when women are at home folding the socks and looking after the children and the guys are on the fishing boat.  That’s a problem.

If you’re both in it together and you’re both working at it, or he gets time on the boat and you get time on the horse like me, or I mean, he’s not on the boat, but I get my time on the horse.  Or like, you feel that they are supporting you, supporting the family, then it doesn’t have to be 50-50.  Like that’s not necessarily the goal.

But I would look at where does it feel like they have access to, for example, quality leisure time and you don’t, or they get to sleep and you don’t.  I had a podcast with Chrissy Swan talking and she, I don’t know enough about her.  I think she must have been working in radio and so was getting up really early in the morning to get to work.

Natalie: She was, yeah.

Samantha: Right, but then she also was like patting her son to sleep every night, so she was staying up really late.  And she said, I decided I could no longer be the last one to bed and the first one out of bed every day.  And I was like, right on, like the load has to be shared in a way that doesn’t see one person, you know, floundering for the benefit of everybody else.  And I think there’s a really strong message culturally that good parent, good motherhood and being a good wife are both about subservience to everybody else around us.

But actually, I also had a woman speak once who said, I felt like I had to fall on the sword of motherhood.  And what she meant by that was she needed to give everything to her children.  She needed to be constantly available for them.  She needed to do attachment parenting.  She needed to never ask for anything for herself.  And then she said, but I realized if I fell on the sword, well, then no one was going to be there to look after the kids.

And I think that’s such an important reminder that one, if we do sacrifice ourselves to everybody else, eventually we crumble.  But also before that, we often feel really resentful and then we’re angry.  And when I’m with our kids and with our partners and at work.  And so wherever you feel resentful and angry is a place to look at, well, what needs to change here?  How can that be different?  And then there was something else I was going to say, but it’s flown from my mind.

Natalie: Yeah, that’s okay.  Look, I mean, and it sounds like you’re really driven by your priorities because you say the first thing you want to put in is time with your son.  That’s your number one priority.  And then, but then if you ask people what their priorities are, they might list a whole bunch of things, but they often don’t say me.  You know, they’re listing all the external things, my son, my family, work, whatever it is.  They’ve got to remember that you’re the priority as well for exactly that reason.  Like if you don’t put your own oxygen mask on first, you know, if you’re falling on the sword for motherhood, then it’s not going to be sustainable.

Samantha: Well, yeah.  So when you look at statistics around all of this kind of stuff, around like the impact of marriage, the impact of kids on women’s happiness and health and everything, what they have found is that every measure of well-being, financial health, physical health, amount of sleep you get, weight, happiness measures, everything goes down in women and goes up in men.  And so there is this transference within a marriage from the woman to the man.

And I kind of just naturally didn’t want to do that.  And so there’s some costs to that, right?  There’s increased friction in my life because of that.  But I would take that and the horse ride over not having the friction and not feeling like there’s space for me in my own life.

And, you know, also, like I said, within that recognition that when you have really small kids and work, no one feels like they have a lot of time.  So it’s more like, do you feel resentful about the disparity?  And do you have tons of time to go riding for four hours?

Natalie: Yeah, absolutely.  So I believe that people’s belief about time really heavily influenced how they use their time as well.  And I wonder what your mindset around time is.  You know, you hear people say, I’m so busy, I’m so busy.  But I wonder what your experience with that is and if it’s changed over time or evolved over time?

Samantha: So tell me more about what you think about time.

Natalie: Yeah, so I feel like a lot of our actions are governed by what we say to ourselves.  So if you’re going around going, oh, I’m so busy, I don’t have time for that, I don’t have time, I don’t have time to self-care, I don’t have time to go horse riding, I don’t have time for that.  And that really, I think, prevents people from pausing and taking a step back and looking at their lives and looking at the way that they do things, questioning that, looking at their week, talking to their partner, all of those things.  And so if you’re not addressing your mindset, you’re kind of on the back foot already.  Like you’re not even able then to make those changes.  And so I wonder some of the things that you say to yourself about time.  A lot of people, you know, you ask, oh, hey, going and you see someone, how are you?  Oh, so busy.  So busy.  Do you know what I mean?  Especially as mums, working mums as well.

And so I wonder if you have ever really thought about that or kind of what your perspective is about the mindset of time.

Samantha: I mean, I definitely agree that how like that our mindset affects our experience hugely.

I think that one of the areas where I think about this effect a fair amount is the expectations gap.  So Brene Brown talks about this really well, and she’s talking about, she’s like going to her lake house with her husband and maybe three kids are going along or something like that, or maybe four kids, like her two kids and friends or something.  And for a weekend, maybe, I don’t think it was even very long. 

And she was packing a bag and it was on the bed and she had three books out.  And her husband kind of looked at the books and was like, what do you think is happening this weekend?  It’s like, well, we’ve got four kids coming with us to the lake for a weekend.  And she was like, yes, you’re correct.  And she said in her mind, if she was going on her own, she would not have even packed one book because her expectation would be that the entire weekend she would be looking after children, preparing things, making sure no one drowned in the lake, like just being present with them and being busy.

I mean, busy is like a loaded word as you just said, but like her time would be filled with things that had to do with the logistics of having four kids in the lake house.  Because her husband was going, she was like, well, I’m going to have some leisure time.  I agree there should be some leisure time for both parents in that situation.  But it’s unlikely that in one weekend, she’s going to get to read three books with four kids there.  And I mean, like, I couldn’t even read three books with not a child there and I just sat down and read for the entire weekend.

And that expectations gap, I think, is an interesting thing to consider because if she had gone with the three books and not had the conversation with her husband, she would have got there and been so pissed off that she didn’t have time.  I’ve read 1/4 of a book, ridiculous.  I thought I was going to have some time for myself and you didn’t do anything, right?  But the reality is 4 kids at a beach house with her lake house, even with two adults there, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to get done.  And but her expectation, so she would have been annoyed if she read 1/4 of a book.  But if she’d gone on her own and taken no books, fine.  Or if she’d gone and taken one and read 1/4 of a book, she was like, I read 1/4 of a book!  You know, I had four kids there with me.

And so that, I think that expectations gap is a useful way to think about some of this stuff.  I mean, that’s not quite the mindset of time, but I think it’s a key tool in my toolkit is like, what are my expectations?  Are they reasonable?  And more like, do they take into account the context of the circumstances?  Like dream big, but that’s a bit different to the expectations.

I do think that our culture, like applauds busyness.  And I think we have this like kind of interesting tension of we applaud busyness and we devalue motherhood.  And so saying I’m really busy can be a way for mothers to totally unconsciously, totally subconsciously give like regrasp some value within a society that doesn’t value motherhood.  And I mean, I guess I would say if you are really busy, I mean, so for sure, some people are like, I’m genuinely busy, I have no idea, I’m doing all this stuff.  We’ll assess it.  What are you doing with all that time?  What’s making you feel so busy?  Can any of them be let go?

So we were talking before we started recording about Elizabeth Gilbert and in, I think it’s in Big Magic, she sort of wrote about this idea that there are women who are like, I want to be a writer, but I can’t be comfortable sitting down to write until the house is cleaned and the kitchen’s been dealt with, the breakfast’s been dealt with and stuff.  And she challenges people.  And I would echo that that challenge to flip it.  You can’t do anything else until you’re right if that’s what matters to you.

And so I’d be looking at where are the things that are keeping you busy, that are being driven by external expectations and other people’s values, and then re-look at what actually really matters to you and put your focus there.

Natalie: Yeah, I love that answer.  That’s great.  So just to kind of change tack a little bit, I’m wondering if you set goals and how do you stick to them?

Samantha: I do set goals. In fact, I’ll show you my goal sheet here.  I might not be able to lift it up.  So I set goals every year.  I love setting goals.  It’s, I feel like really excited by having lots of goals.  And I do, I’m just about to show it up and show you this is like my 2025 mind map.

Natalie: Oh, it’s like a full mind map.  It’s in color and everything!

Samantha: It’s an A3 page and it has five different categories in it.  And so my categories for 2025 are courage and consistency, that’s specifically related to work.  And so I have a challenge, another challenge up on the wall to take 100 risks and chances.

So one that I’ve taken so far is that I have my own podcast women at work and I invite these gender equity specialists from Australia, around Australia to come and talk to me.  And I did a conversation with Dr. Rae Cooper, who’s incredibly impressive and funny and interesting.  And so if you haven’t heard her, totally go and look her up.  And I invited her to apply to do a South by Southwest panel with me.  She has not replied yet, however, that’s a risk.  That’s a thing that we don’t always feel like we can do, right?

And then consistency is because I’m like, I get excited by novelty and I want to do lots of fun things all the time and always get bored doing the same thing.  But actually to build a successful business, you need to have some consistency within it.  And I actually learned some of that from our shared teacher, Samantha Nolan-Smith, who is incredible.  So that’s category one, encouraging consistency, which is my banner for work this year.

Category 2 is adventure.  And, you know, being a nature, traveling, seeing friends, going camping, doing a lot of hiking.  My third category is connection.  And so then I have to self to my son and to others.  And so I have stuff in there around what I’m doing to connect with my son, stuff around listening to Pema Chodron, who’s a Shambhala meditation, a Shambhala monk, who is my teacher.  And then stuff around friendship connection, like hosting people 10 times.

My fourth one is vitality.  I’ve put under there strong of body and mind.  And so I have like stretching, going to the gym, sleep, nutrition, getting massages, that kind of stuff. 

And then my fifth one is creativity.  And so how am I like really going into my right brain this year?

And so what I tend to do is write like 100 goals and then I feel happy with however many I’ve ticked off by the end of the year.

Natalie: I love that so much.  I actually just, I love that you have 100 goals that you have like so many, because I feel like some people say, oh, just have like one to two goals.  And I love that you’ve also done them into the categories as well.  And I actually just did a podcast episode, I’ve just recorded it, it came out about a month ago, and challenging people to set more goals.  And like you say, set this huge number, and even if you don’t get to 100, you might get to 90 or 80 or even 50, but that’s way more than one or two.  So I love that.

Samantha: It depends on your, like the psychology for you of whether you achieve it.  So some people, if they wrote 100 down and they achieved 99, they’d be like, what a failure.  Whereas I’m like, if I do 25 of them, great.  I did 25 more than I would have done if I hadn’t thought about it.

And what I find as well is like, I do look at it during the year and kind of check in with it.  But I also often find, I said at the beginning of the year, don’t look at it again.  And at the end of the year, I’m like, oh, my life did tilt in the direction of what I said was important to me.

Natalie: Yeah, fantastic.  So you don’t track them at all?

Samantha: Sometimes.

Natalie: Or, you’ve got your beautiful mind map just up in your office.

Samantha: Yeah, I mean, like I do, I sort of, not really.  I am this year, what am I doing?  I’m writing down the names of the books that I’ve read.  My goal is 20 years.

Natalie: Nice. 

Samantha: Oh, good.  And I…  Yeah, no, I don’t track them.

Natalie: But I feel like that’s, that your mind map is so pretty, you could just put it up and it would just influence you just by having it there in your environment every day, you know.

Samantha: Exactly.

Natalie: Amazing.  Now, I’d like to ask people, what does living an intentional life mean to you?

Samantha: Well, I think it’s, I mean, how shall I answer that?  What does living an intentional life mean to me?  I think the first part of it is being aware of what matters to me.  And so that’s that mind map.  But I also have done studies into matrescence, which is the period of transition when women become mothers.  It’s like the adolescence of motherhood matrescence phase.

And in that phase, often our values Having a baby is such a seismic shift in your life, and nothing can prepare you for it.  I don’t think nothing anyone says could be enough to be like, Oh, this is exactly what I thought it was gonna be, and because of that, often then our values get really thrown up in the air.

A really common thing that I hear from women, which is probably where a lot of your questions around balance and time management and stuff come from, is they were a real go-getter at work before they had a baby, and they really still want to have a really interesting, meaningful career where they do interesting work, but they no longer want to work 12-hour days, which means they don’t get to see their kid.

And so, well, how do those two values fit together now, where I have, I still have career ambition and I want to do interesting work and I want to spend time with this little human that I’ve created.

There’s the thing that I talked about, you know, at the beginning where you sometimes suddenly bump into all these barriers at work that you didn’t know were there.  And also sometimes in relationships, it suddenly like throws up this inequality.  When you know what your values are and you know what matters to you, then it’s much easier to like turn your life towards those things.

I definitely think life is so busy in our distant modern life that if you don’t have any idea where you want to go, well, then you just get buffeted by everyone else.  Hey, you should do this job.  Oh, okay.  Hey, there’s all this stuff to your home.  Oh, okay.  Hey, society says you need to make sure your floors are cleaned every week.  Oh, okay.  Hey, people are going to judge you if you have dirty clothes on.  Oh, okay.  And you just get buffeted around by what everybody else thinks is important. 

But if you are like, okay, well, what matters to me?  What matters to me in my life, in my year this year, are taking courageous steps in my business and being consistent enough that my business can continue to grow and thrive.  Having adventures and being out in nature and really connecting with myself in nature.  Strong connection with the people around me, especially my son, but also my friends, my family, my, you know, I’ve got a brother and a sister and my mom’s still alive and my partner, like how do I connect with them in meaningful ways?

And then sort of underpinning that, I would say, is a vitality piece so that I’m healthy enough to enjoy all of that.  But because I know that those things are important to me, well, then I’m not going to spend the weekend like scrolling on my phone or cleaning up the house.  I’m going to go for a hike.  I’m going to go camping or I’m going to invite friends over or whatever that thing looks like.

And so I think it’s that, I think the other thing in an intentional life for me is there are like feelings that I have when my life is getting out of balance.  And so I might feel resentment.  I get impatient and angry.  I can, depending how out of balance, I can start to feel a bit like hopeless about my ability to change that.  And when I’m in balance and my life is sort of aligned with what matters to me, I feel full of life.  I feel really funny.  I feel connected to the people that around me.  I have a lot of energy for doing the things that matter to me.  And so part of an intentional life for me is like, where am I on the scale of extremes from impatient and shouty to like totally zen?  And what needs to happen to move towards that?

I think, you know, actually, sorry, the final thing I would say about living an intentional life for me is goes back to what we have been talking about already, which is this idea that it’s okay to put yourself at the center of your own life.  And so for me, there’s a piece around that as well.  My intentional life is not to just make other people’s life easier.  It is to centre myself in my own life.

Natalie: Beautiful.  Sam, can you tell us where people can find you?  Tell us what you’ve got going on at the moment.

Samantha: Yes.  The number one thing that I’m looking for at the moment is more opportunities to talk and moderate panels for International Women’s Day.  So if you work in an organisation where you’re interested in talking about anything to do with gender equity, please get in touch.  My podcast, Women at Work, is just about to launch its fourth season.  So there are playback episodes already up.  And so come check me out there.  And then my website is my name, samanthasutherland.com.au.

Natalie: Well, thank you so much, Sam.  Listeners, it’s time for my favourite quote, it’s by Mary Oliver.  “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See you next time.

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I thought my chat with Sam was so insightful, allowing us to look at time management through many lenses. If you would like to go further into managing your time after working through your dreams and ideal lifestyle, it’s time for you to join TIMEWISE.