While we typically interview accountants and moms for the podcast, this episode is slightly different. In this episode, we interviewed the spouse of a CPA and a mother of 3 with a baby on the way.
Lara Johnson has developed a successful career over the last decade while marrying a busy CPA and raising her 3 (soon to be 4) kids. After seeing the unique challenges moms face while “juggling it all,” she became a Certified Life Coach to help moms navigate the emotional, mental, and physical load they carry of their home and family.
Hundreds of moms have used the skills and techniques she has developed to create success at home and with their families so they can thrive at work. In an effort to better serve the motherhood community, Ms. Johnson launched the “Mom on Purpose” podcast earlier this year. As a coach, podcast host, consultant, writer, and speaker, Ms. Johnson is an advocate and educator for moms that are ready to stop living reactively and start living on purpose.
During the interview we discuss:
- Lara’s husband was in public accounting for the majority of their married life so she has a lot of experience being married to a CPA
- When they got married, her husband was in college for accounting, giving her an early, and often shocking, insight into being the spouse of a CPA
- As the spouse of an accountant, the advice she offers to accountants is that accounting might be your world, but it’s not your family’s world
- She shares that the family of accountants is doing their best to understand the stress that you are under, but at the same time, they exist outside of that
- It’s important for both accountants and their spouses to step outside of their roles and come together to discuss the challenges their each facing
- We discuss how important it is for accountant moms to give themselves a mental transition from accountant mode to mom mode
- If you don’t give yourself that time to transition to mom mode you become easily overwhelmed
- She jokes that it’s super easy to stop yelling at your kids – you just need to close your mouth – which of course is easier said than done
- The reason why that’s so difficult is for two reasons – the internal stress and what’s happening in our brains, and the external stress with deadlines, to-do lists, and everything else
- The truth is that we complicate the external stress with everything that’s going on in our brains
- Once you get clear on what’s happening in your brain, you can stack circumstances in your favor
- But if you keep trying to change circumstances without understanding what’s happening in your brain, you’ll never get relief
- We discuss how the question, “I don’t know how you do it all?” is such a detrimental question to ask a working mom because most of us are not doing it all as well as we’d like and we have a lot of guilt and shame around that
- The truth is that we don’t have to do it all, not should we
- While it’s important to be strong, independent women, it’s also important to ask for what we need and to ask for help more often
- She shares that there are 4 steps for how to stop yelling at your kids – address the mental noise, create a game plan for the internal stress, focus on what’s necessary, and creating moments of connection with our children
- She explains each of these steps more in depth, but the most important thing to remember is to not beat yourself up when you yell at your kids; instead become aware of what’s happening and what you can do differently from a proactive instead of reactive mindset.
- We need to be gentler with ourselves allowing each new day be an opportunity to be kinder to ourselves
- You can find out more about Lara Johnson and her podcast, “Mom On Purpose” HERE