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The Life of And podcast is for high-achieving women and working parents who are ready to stop living a life of “have to” and start designing a life they actually want. It’s a space where we talk honestly about the things we’re often afraid to admit — even to ourselves. The exhaustion. The ambition. The loneliness. The joy. The tension of wanting more without losing yourself in the process.
If you’re in the thick of it — feeling stretched, tired, hopeful, driven — this is your invitation to take a breath, get real, and find your way back to your own Life of And.
[00:00:00] Tiffany Sauder: 74% of working moms do not have enough time for their own interests. But I don't actually think that it's just that we don't have the time.
[00:00:08] Tiffany Sauder: I think we've literally stopped even believing any of that is possible and that the best thing I can do is love what's in front of me. And if I spend all that energy on that, maybe my dreams will just go away.
[00:00:21] Speaker 4: I'm Tiffany Souder, entrepreneur, wife, mom, to four girls and a woman figuring it out just like you. Come on, let's go build your life of, and
[00:00:32] Tiffany Sauder: I was 32 and I'd just gone back to work after having our second child. And I was at lunch with a high-powered female attorney, I'll never forget this, and she asked me, "Do you want more kids?" And I remember my answer was cagey, like vague, somewhere between like actually unsure and pretty unsure, and pretty sure she'd think I was crazy if I said yes.
[00:00:52] Tiffany Sauder: And I was al- also kind of still deep in that like I'm not doing this again season that you're always in during that first year. But I remember she didn't wait for me to finish. She stopped me and she looked at me with this deep urgency and she said, "Tiffany, no matter what you do, you be the one who decides how many children you have.
[00:01:09] Tiffany Sauder: Don't make the mistake I did and let your career decide. You'll figure it out. Trust yourself." I think about that lunch a lot, and I thought about it again in June when Pew Research Center put out a big report on working parents, because the report puts numbers to exactly what that fear I felt at lunch was trying to talk me out of.
[00:01:30] Tiffany Sauder: So I want to spend some time in this episode talking a little bit about what Pew found. Pew, sort of, short for Pew Research Center. I want to talk about what I think that report actually maybe missed as well. Like, maybe it's not measurable in what they did, but I, from what I see and observe in working with, working moms and what I see, just like what I think it missed.
[00:01:54] Tiffany Sauder: And then they also, they, Pew, put numbers to exactly what was happening for me in that lunch with that female attorney, and I want to draw a highlighter over it for you so that if you're in that season or just feeling this convergence of life and work crashing all of the time together, I, I just, I want to put some data to it and then maybe talk about, I think, you know, why it's happening.
[00:02:20] Tiffany Sauder: So that's what I want to do in this episode. at a high level, what Pew Research found is, like, there is no longer a delineation between your work life and your home life, and my guess is you're liv- if you're living this working mom life, you, you feel that. It's like they're almost transparent in the way that you go back and forth between the two.
[00:02:38] Tiffany Sauder: and they have a statistic actually that supports this. It says 75% of us are handling something around parenting while we're on the clock, while we're working. So I mean, probably the other 25% are lying or don't have kids. Like, 100% of the time during your workday, you're gonna do something as it relates to kids.
[00:02:58] Tiffany Sauder: I have some strategies that I think we put too much solving in the day and that like distracts us actually a lot and I think we can put things in place that's not quite as exacerbated. But it's true, 75% of us are saying we are handling something around parenting while we're in our workday.
[00:03:15] Tiffany Sauder: over half of us, 54%, are saying it's difficult to balance work and family. So not just that we are doing it, but that it's difficult. So if you think about 54% of us are saying, "I'm waking up every day and my core function of balancing all of these roles I've said yes to is difficult." No wonder when I ask a group of women and I say,
[00:03:38] Tiffany Sauder: If I sat across the table from you and I asked you, "How are you feeling? How are you doing?" And I was like kinda asking you as a girlfriend, they almost always are saying, "I'm struggling. I'm exhausted. I feel behind. I'm just not present." It's like because we are the, the core function of our day doing both of these, our jobs and our, and our role as parents, we're finding it difficult.
[00:04:01] Tiffany Sauder: And again, we know this, but I think this research report put some data to it. 52% say that their jobs are made harder to be a good parent. Their jobs make it harder to be a good parent. So 52% say f- my job is detracting from my ability to parent versus us seeing it as additive to it. Again, I think that's really interesting.
[00:04:26] Tiffany Sauder: I suspect if I asked you in the wild of life and said like, "What's the most important thing to you?" You would say your family. And one of the most important things we do for our families is earn a living so that we can live and do things and have experiences and have a home and those kinds of things.
[00:04:43] Tiffany Sauder: And we see that very thing that enables our family's security actually as detractive because we said it makes it harder to be a good parent. I think that's interesting. I think we need to sit in that. I think we need to pay attention to that. So these are the kinds of stats that make us look at this and say like, "Yeah, totally, that's my life.
[00:05:05] Tiffany Sauder: Of course." Like retweet, here we go. but I put a LinkedIn post together that I'm gonna pull up here, and I'm not gonna read it to you, I promise. But I do wanna use it a little bit as an outline
[00:05:16] Tiffany Sauder: their big headline was this: For the first time ever in the United States, there are more two-career families than ever before. So we've now tipped over 50% of American households have two working parents for the first time ever in 2026.
[00:05:32] Tiffany Sauder: So we've been on a, you know, a trajectory of that happening starting back, if you look at data, where like there were more women going to college than men, and, like, all of these kinds of things have started to create this moment where, all right, more households in the United States have two parents that work than one.
[00:05:49] Tiffany Sauder: So this is like an epidemic, and I don't mean that in like COVID was an epidemic. I mean that, like, this is a viral moment. This is a, this is the thing that is more true than not in our society. And if we don't make a conscious decision to figure out how do we make this social choice, this moment to, that it sometimes requires two families to work, sometimes it's a choice for two, parents to work.
[00:06:19] Tiffany Sauder: How do we make it so that it is not just difficult and detractive from the life we're trying to build? And that to me is like the heart around why I even found myself on this journey of building Life of And is like, dang, I don't wanna hate the thing that my 14-year-old self laid in bed dreaming of.
[00:06:38] Tiffany Sauder: Like, how is that where I'm at now? And I think as I look at some of the threads behind this data, it's like we are not happier for these choices, and I think that's a real bummer. And I think there's some things we need to sit and think about. I personally believe we don't have the toolbox Given to us, taught to us alongside this moment of opportunity that's happening for us as we look at expanding and growing.
[00:07:04] Tiffany Sauder: So okay, I'm gonna go back to my outline here I guess. I was going on a little bit of a tangent, but I feel like it's relevant, at least I think it is. But it's my podcast so I get to decide. Okay, uh, back to the, back to the program here. this is what I wrote down is I don't think we just have a time problem, I think we have a soul problem.
[00:07:23] Tiffany Sauder: I don't think we just have a time problem, I think we have a soul problem. I'm gonna give you a couple of data points I guess, or things that help support that. the first one is that as women, as working women, I think we've stopped dreaming. And Pew has a data point that supports this.
[00:07:39] Tiffany Sauder: It says 50% of working moms don't have enough time for their own interests. 74% of working moms do not have enough time for their own interests. But I don't actually think that it's just that we don't have the time. I think we have literally stopped dreaming of what new thing we could do, of a new place we could go, of that trip we could take, of that business we could start, of that dream that we had, of that skill we want to learn, of that hobby we want to take up.
[00:08:11] Tiffany Sauder: I, I think we've literally stopped even believing any of that is possible and that the best thing I can do is love what's in front of me. And if I spend all that energy on that, maybe my dreams will just go away. And the reason I think this is happening is because I did this too. I didn't dare dream for my job to be, take up less time.
[00:08:33] Tiffany Sauder: I didn't dare dream that I could have more time with my kids. I didn't dare dream that I could start something new. I didn't dare dream that I could have time, um, to m- you know, I don't know, meal prep. I, I n- I just said I didn't have time to dream that those things could happen. And so the best thing I could do was to make what I had what I wanted because then I didn't have to sit in the disappointment of not getting what it was that my heart really desired.
[00:08:58] Tiffany Sauder: And I think part of this feeling like we are sitting in difficulty, part of feeling like my job is just making my life harder, is that we are not taking the time to delight our souls. We are not taking the time to chase growth. And I don't mean in the sense of like two hours of meditation and you become a professional pickleball player.
[00:09:20] Tiffany Sauder: I mean of the 15-minute flavor. I mean of the, uh, the flavor of minimums and sustainability, and I'm not gonna go into all of that sort of vocabulary, but you know if you've been following me for a while, you know what I mean. That is what I mean. if you get 100 women, 26 of them have time for something that they love or their own interests, and the rest of us are just doling out our time and energy almost robotically.
[00:09:51] Tiffany Sauder: And honestly, it just, like, makes me so sad because I have lived there before. and I want us to pay attention to that, ladies. I think that that's a soul problem kind of a thing, not a time problem, because we all know we have time for what we prioritize. So that's number one. I think we've stopped dreaming. Number two is Our achievement mindsets are actually working against us. So again, this is like kind of in the same vein. If it's not a time problem, it's a soul problem. I, I know every single one of you who's listening to this, you're an achiever and you have been your entire life. If I could go back at your yearbook, there's some award that you won.
[00:10:26] Tiffany Sauder: If I could go back to watching you at recess, you were, you know, putting together a club of some kind. Like you're a leader and you're an achiever and that's what you want out of life. But as a result, when we can't do all of something, we don't do any of something. It is not enough for us to take a seven-minute walk if we can't get 10,000 steps in.
[00:10:47] Tiffany Sauder: It's not enough for us to make one meal a week if we don't have time to meal prep the whole thing. It's not enough for us to go see a girlfriend one day a month if we don't have the time to do it every week. Like we won't be satisfied with just a little bit. And I think as a result, the achievement mindset works against us when it's like, I don't have time to do everything, we don't do anything and we just sit in the mundane, we sit in the routine, we sit in the monotony of what it is that we've built because it is absorbing every minute of our lives.
[00:11:20] Tiffany Sauder: And so we don't think about how can I maybe just marginally get a little bit of what it is that I need so that our hearts and our souls can be fed?
[00:11:29] Tiffany Sauder: The third one is Some of you are not going to like this one. But the third one is we hoard the mental load because it becomes our identity. We don't have a time problem, we have a soul problem.
[00:11:42] Tiffany Sauder: I'm trying to prove that to you. So we hoard the mental load because it's become our identity. This is a couple of stats from Pew Research that support this. 63% of moms in dual income homes say they carry more of the daily parenting, okay? 63% of moms in dual income households say they carry more of the daily parenting.
[00:12:03] Tiffany Sauder: But I think if we're honest with ourselves, we don't necessarily want to let this go. Being needed, being important, being the only ones who can put our kids to bed, being the ones who the kids ask for, being the ones who knows, uh, where the stuff is in the fridge, being the ones who knows where the jerseys are, being the ones who knows, the routine of when the sheets are changed, being the ones who know becomes our identity.
[00:12:29] Tiffany Sauder: Being needed, that dopamine hit of, "Oh, hey Mom, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, what do you need? How can I help?" we make ourselves the hero in our own lives in these little micro moments that are playing out over and over and over again, and that makes us feel important. And that is not a bad thing to be important, but when we start to build the structure to feed our need to be important because we don't be- feel seen by ourselves, that starts to become a racket that we're training everybody in our lives to be a part of.
[00:13:05] Tiffany Sauder: And we have to free ourselves from saying, "Oh my gosh, my self-worth is completely independent of the fact of whether my kids need me or not." In fact, we make it even worse by saying, "Oh my word, if they ask for me one more time, I'm literally gonna ra, ra, ra," and we say something unkind about the people that we love.
[00:13:23] Tiffany Sauder: But when we've built the environment for them to need us all the time because nobody knows where things are, there are no systems in the way stuff is operating, there's no training inside of our homes of how to do things so others can help, then yes, you become the most important person in the room and you become resentful because of that.
[00:13:42] Tiffany Sauder: And I think that's a soul problem thing. So yeah, of course you don't have time to pursue your own health. Of course you don't have t- time to pursue your own dreams. Of course, of course you don't because you've made yourself so important to the daily infrastructure that runs your home and everybody else's life around you that you start losing the capacity and the energy and the urgency to do that for yourselves.
[00:14:09] Tiffany Sauder: And again, this is one that I know because I have been there. Like I know it feels, it's like chasing the busy every day instead of the important, and that's such a cliche, but it's true. So, we hoard the mental load because it becomes our identity. It's a really big deal. I think the white space is scary.
[00:14:28] Tiffany Sauder: When we outsource or ask our family to help or say, "No, I'm not gonna do that anymore," the white space of not knowing what to do with your time is terrifying. And when we don't allow white space to build, we don't have time to actually dream and grow and change. Because as I observe at 46, I've got 1,000 years of kids still in the home, but as I start to see some of my peers, women who are in their 50s who had kids a little bit younger say, "They're not here anymore.
[00:14:55] Tiffany Sauder: Who do I become now?" We have to build our identity alongside our families. We have to be continuing to grow and to change alongside these seasons our kids are going through and changing so that when the moment comes where there is time for you, you're not starting from scratch.
[00:15:14] I wanna take a quick moment to thank my partners at Share Your Genius. For the past four years, they have been an incredible part of my journey. Behind the Microphone, Share Your Genius is a content and podcast production agency that helps leaders and brands bring their message to life.
[00:15:28] Tiffany Sauder: So, whether you're trying to find your voice, develop a content strategy, or get your leader behind a microphone, they're gonna help you make it simple, strategic and impactful.
[00:15:36] Tiffany Sauder: I don't remember how many I said there were, but I think there's two more.
[00:15:39] Tiffany Sauder: this one is every interaction we have is filtered through our role. Every interaction we have is filtered through a role. So to our husbands we're a wife, to our kids we're a mom, to our teams we're a leader, and somewhere along the way we stop being a person who has their own collection of contributions and experiences, and we've trained the people around us to see us only in those roles.
[00:16:04] Tiffany Sauder: So, for example, if your kids just see you as a mom and not a person, they will only request things of you that are mom-related. When your kids also see you as a person, they too will ask you, " Mom, how was your day? Where are you growing? What are you afraid of today? What's in your calendar this week that makes you nervous?
[00:16:25] Tiffany Sauder: I'm proud of you, Mom. I see you doing these things." When they see you also as a person and not just the role that you play for them, it totally changes the conversation and it changes the space you have to be present inside of those relationships and not just the role you play.
[00:16:45] Tiffany Sauder: So th- this is the thing. Every interaction we have is filtered through a role. That, we can create that where it's like, "Hey, what can I do for you, kid?" Instead of sometimes sitting down and saying like, "Hey, can I talk to you about what I'm working on? Can I talk to you about how I'm growing?
[00:16:58] Tiffany Sauder: Can I talk to you about how that was like when I was a kid?" Same thing with our spouse. If everything is through the lens of how do we operate together instead of who am I and how do our identities know one another and who we are, it's a totally different type of presence in your life.
[00:17:18] Tiffany Sauder: It's a totally different type of place where you have a role to play on ... Not a role, that you are a person on the stage of your own life instead of just playing a role every single time.
[00:17:28] Tiffany Sauder: The last one is we've lost the ability to, to feel things fully I'm thinking a lot about this topic right now, a lot about this topic. We've lost the ability to feel things fully. The constant distraction, the mental tabs that are never closed, I think it has, dulled our senses. Like, we eat without tasting, we go outside without feeling the air, we laugh without really feeling it in our souls.
[00:18:01] Tiffany Sauder: like we sit in the sun and we forget about ... Like, we just sit and think about what we forgot to do. We don't think about ... I don't know. We don't feel the sun hitting our skin. We don't feel the warmth of the air. We don't feel the softness of the chair. Like, we've literally just dulled our senses because we're so in our brains thinking about how to be productive.
[00:18:22] Tiffany Sauder: my husband has read this book. I have not. I'm gonna give you a summary of it, which is totally exactly what I do, is I don't read things and then I talk about them. But I'm working to do that, which is gonna be even more hilarious than what I'm about ready to say. But there's a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, and it talks about how we are constantly in our think fast motion.
[00:18:43] Tiffany Sauder: Think of it as like the fast-twitch muscle of our thinking and decision making. And the thinking slow is where our neurological ability has the ability to think about strategy and long-term consequences and play out the longer term of how it's all gonna go. And We train those two aspects of our brain, and they have proven scientifically that when we work on the thinking slow, it creates better decision-making in the thinking fast.
[00:19:13] Tiffany Sauder: But when we just stay in our thinking fast, we don't actually get to better decision-making. So that's the point of the book, which is hilarious, again, because it is a thinking slow thing to do to sit and read the book. It is a thinking fast thing to do to give you a summary of the book, which is horrifying.
[00:19:30] Tiffany Sauder: But I'm just being honest with you about where I'm at in my own journey with this, because I am such a high-twitch person. And the practice of slow twitch in any place in my life is incredibly painful, and it is so weird that that is true, but it is true. and so when I think about this idea that there has never been more of a blurred line between our work life and our home life, like they're connected, when I think about the fact that increasingly more and more of the population is living that tension, when I think about the fact that 50% of us, over 50% of us say that collision, that intersection, I see that with difficulty, and we're living in this fast-twitch- not present, distracted way.
[00:20:27] Tiffany Sauder: And we measure all these things and say, "Everybody kind of hates it." I look at this and say, "I think we can do better than this. I just think we can do better than this." It's part of, I think this is at its core what I'm trying to help change when I look at the world through the work that we're doing at Life of And.
[00:20:47] Tiffany Sauder: Like, I wanna create, I, I think we've created a toolbox that gives you the ability to create systems that relieve some of this, that we are pursuing practices and time and priorities that give us connection to our values and the thing that we, not just the things we want to create, but who we want to become.
[00:21:09] Tiffany Sauder: And to me, this toolbox is about helping us pursue what it is that we want in a way that doesn't tear down and destroy. And so I, I don't know. I didn't really mean to turn this into a, uh, advertisement about Life of And, though I guess you are on the Life of And podcast. Um, but I, I just think this is interesting.
[00:21:30] Tiffany Sauder: To me, it started to put numbers to the things I see. I feel it intuitively, and this report was, was just, like, wildly helpful. So the last thing I wanna close this out with, I guess, is, um, I'm pulling up here on my phone. This is like the bridge back to my starting story around I was sitting across the table from this woman, and I'm telling her, "I don't know what I wanna do.
[00:21:54] Tiffany Sauder: My kids are young. I'm overwhelmed with what I have right now. I can't imagine expanding my family." And Pew broke this out into one of their questions. It asked parents based on how old their kids were some questions. And they asked them, the question was, if being a parent makes it harder to advance at work.
[00:22:13] Tiffany Sauder: That was the question. And then they bifurcated the data, they segmented the data based on how old their kids were, and I think this is very interesting. Among parents whose youngest was five or under, over half said it is a lot or somewhat harder to advance at work. Okay? So if you have young kids, is it harder to advance at work?
[00:22:39] Tiffany Sauder: Like, heck yes it is. Okay? That was essentially the answer. Among parents whose youngest is 13 to 17, so your kids are teenagers, 13 to 17, they can drive, that number drops to around 30%. Okay? Over half of you are saying if your kids are young, this is insane. There's no way I can... my job could get harder. And as your kids get older, it starts to get easier.
[00:23:02] Tiffany Sauder: Same parents, different seasons. So my point is the fear is loudest when you're standing in the decision. Biologically, we need to have kids within some kind of a range, otherwise our bodies can't do it. But also, as you're thinking about the ages of your f- kids and having, I didn't have kids close together, but if you want to, Pew is saying, yes, fear is gonna be the most prominent in expanding your family when your kids are young because everything feels so hard.
[00:23:30] Tiffany Sauder: And I just feel like this data is supporting what it is that we see play out socially. Do I have another kid? Do I take the promotion? Do I try to do both? When opportunity and growth, I feel like I always say this, change takes capacity. And so when you've got change at home and kids growing and having new kids and expanding your family, and change growing and expanding your career, all that's happening on the exact same timeline, it's really difficult.
[00:23:53] Tiffany Sauder: And our fear can get us to say, "I'm gonna just keep this simple. Let me just keep it small, and everything's gonna be fine." and I think the toolbox that we're teaching at Life uh, it can help you do both of those things at the same time. So I guess I just wanna close with saying, if you're standing at your own version of that lunch table right now, kinda cagey and vague about like, "I don't know what to do," and, um- I, I don't know what to-- I, you know, I don't know where to go.
[00:24:18] Tiffany Sauder: I don't know if I have the capacity. I, I guess I wanna, I wanna reiterate to you the same thing that that woman said to me, and that is to say, "Don't let your career decide." Like, you decide. You lay in bed, and you close your eyes, and you engage those slow twitch muscles, and you say, "I'm gonna roll f-forward 20 years and figure out what life do I wanna be living in."
[00:24:38] Tiffany Sauder: 'Cause your today choices are gonna be the ones that are deciding what life looks like 20 years from now. When you close your eyes and you think about Christmas as a grandparent, what do you want it to feel like? This isn't advocating for big families. This is just saying, let your future self, let your brain go to your future self to figure out what life she wants to live in, and track those decisions back to who you are today so that those fast twitch decisions can start informing that slow twitch future.
[00:25:10] Tiffany Sauder: So, I don't know. Thanks for listening. I, I guess this is your weekly reminder to slow down. This is my weekly reminder to slow down. I am, I am desperately trying to build this muscle, and it is really uncomfortable because I like to move fast. I just thank you for going on this journey with me.
[00:25:25] Tiffany Sauder: If you wanna take a look at this report, we've, um, linked it for you, and, um, I hope you'll continue to join us as we're all building into this incredible life of And. What a gift life is, and, uh, I hope that you've learned something today to help you as you build your life intentionally. Thanks for joining me, and I'll see you here next week.