Work Life Balance is Built Not Found with Jayne Havens

 

Links: willing to try

If you would like to learn more about becoming a Sleep Consultant, please join our Facebook Group: Becoming A Sleep Consultant

CPSM Website: Center for Pediatric Sleep Management

Book a free discovery call to learn how you can become a Certified Sleep Consultant here.

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Transcript:willing to try

Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.

On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.

Jayne Havens: Today I want to share some thoughts about what I see constantly. I’m in Facebook groups every day. I’m in professional communities. I’m reading posts, comments, questions and messages from women who are just trying to hold it all together. And the question that I see over and over and over again is some version of this: “What can I do professionally that will allow for work-life balance?” Sometimes it’s framed softly. Sometimes it’s desperate. Sometimes it’s almost apologetic, like they’re afraid to even want more than what they have.

What I see underneath that question is not laziness or entitlement; it’s some level of exhaustion. These women are stretched thin. These are women who are giving and giving and giving at work and at home, and they have nothing left for themselves. These are women who feel like every part of their day belongs to someone else.

But I also noticed something else. I see how deeply committed so many people are to what’s familiar, even when it’s no longer serving them. I see women staying in careers—not because they love their work, not because it excites them, but because it’s what they’ve done for a long time: teaching, healthcare, corporate roles—professions they’ve invested decades into.

And again, I want to be clear. I’m not judging this. I actually totally understand it. There’s safety and familiarity. There’s identity wrapped up in long careers. There’s fear in starting over, and there’s this real grief that can come with letting go of something you once really cared about. But I’ll be honest with you. Watching women talk themselves into staying small breaks my heart, because I do not believe most people are actually truly stuck. I believe they have learned to tell themselves that they are.

I know that my brain works differently, and I think that some of this is how I was raised. I grew up knowing that if something in my life was not working, there had to be another way. That doesn’t mean that the way was obvious. It doesn’t mean that the way was easy. It just means I never accepted that nothing could change. I’ve never allowed myself to feel stuck.

Before I had children, I worked in catering sales. It was demanding, fast paced, very intense. I worked nights, weekends, holidays, long hours. There were very high expectations. I worked incredibly hard in that field for about 10 years, and I was very good at it. I built a wildly successful career at a very young age. On paper, it looked like something I should be very, very proud of. But also, that job was not compatible with the life I wanted as a mother.

When my son was born, I made a decision that felt very obvious to me and very confusing to others. I walked away. I said goodbye to a career that I had invested a decade into because I did not want to be the mom who was always working. I didn’t want to miss bedtime. I didn’t want weekends and holidays to belong to my job. I understand that there was a level of privilege baked into that choice. We were able to make it on one income for a period of time. I had support. I know not everyone has that.

But here’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t say, “Well, I guess this is just how it has to be now.” When the financial pressure of one income started to creep in, I didn’t tell myself that the only options were to go back to an office or return to a life that no longer fit. I knew what I did not want. I did not want a nine to five. I did not want to commute. I did not want to build my life around someone else’s expectations. So instead of shrinking my life to fit a job, I decided to build work around my life. That was a choice, and it was not a passive one.

For me, sleep consulting became that vehicle. It gave me flexibility, autonomy and control over my time. It allowed me to work from home. It allowed me to choose when I wanted to work and when I didn’t. It allowed me to be present for my kids in a way that aligned with my values. But I want to be very intentional with how I say this. Sleep consulting is what worked for me. It’s certainly not the only path. There are many ways to build a life with more balance, more flexibility, and more agency. What matters more than the profession itself is the willingness to believe that you have options.

Let me give you a real snapshot of what my day is going to look like today. This morning, I dropped my kids off at school at 8 AM. After that, I stopped at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and ran into Target because my daughter needs more corn starch for slime. Normal, real stuff going on over here. I’m recording this podcast now. Then from 10 to 12:30, I have client calls and meetings.

After my meetings, I’m headed to lunch with a non-profit event committee. I was asked to be on the committee to help organize their 10th anniversary celebration. And I said yes, not because I had to, but because I could, and I wanted to. From 2 to 3 PM, I have a tennis lesson, right smack dab in the middle of the day on a weekday. After that, I’ll pick something up for dinner, and I’ll be in carpool line by 3:45. The afternoon will be filled with making slime, helping with homework, the usual winding down for bedtime routine.

Tonight, I may or may not open my laptop and write a sleep planner too. I guess that depends on how my calls go later this morning. But this is what work-life balance really looks like. It’s not perfection. It’s not endless free time, but it is autonomy. None of this happened by accident. No one handed me this life. No one told me exactly what steps to take, and no one guaranteed that it would work. I built this intentionally over time.

Here’s the part that people don’t always want to hear: you don’t get this without effort. You have to decide that you want it badly enough to try. You have to be willing to be uncomfortable in the beginning. You have to be willing to learn something new and believe in yourself before you have proof that it’s going to work. It takes grit. It takes persistence. It takes patience, and it takes a real commitment to your own well-being.

People often ask me if there was ever a moment I almost quit, and the honest answer is no, quitting does not occur to me. It never has. That does not mean that I never feel overwhelmed—because I do. It doesn’t mean that I never slow down—because I do, and it doesn’t mean that I never take breaks or take a step back when I need to. But quitting is not an option that I entertain. When things feel heavy or hard, I pause. I reassess, I rest, I adjust, but I do not walk away from something I’ve decided matters. People who succeed are not people who never struggle. They are people who do not quit when it gets uncomfortable.

If you’re listening to this and you feel burnt out, you feel stuck or resentful of your work, I want you to hear this clearly. You are not powerless. You are not trapped. You are not out of options. You may be afraid. You may be tired. You may be overwhelmed. But those feelings are not the same as being stuck. If something in your life is not working, you’re allowed to change it. That change may take time. It might require learning new skills. It might mean letting go of an identity that you’ve held on to for a very long time. But it is possible.

For me, sleep consulting was the path that allowed me to build a life with flexibility, presence, and autonomy. For you, it might be something else, or it might be this. What matters is that you stop telling yourself the story that this is just how it has to be, because it does not.

You are in control of your own destiny, and the moment that you truly believe that, everything will start to shift. If any part of this episode resonated with you, if you found yourself nodding along or quietly thinking, “I want something like this,” I want you to know that you’re allowed to explore that feeling. If you’re curious about what it actually looks like to become a certified sleep consultant, I would actually love to speak with you—not to convince you of anything, but to help you understand whether this work and this training could be a good fit for the life you want to build.

You can book a call with me using the link in the show notes. We’ll talk through your background, your goals, what this path could realistically look like for you. You do not need to have it all figured out. You just have to be willing to explore. Sometimes that first conversation is exactly where everything starts.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.

If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.