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How many women do you know want it all and try their best to have it? Work full-time, be there for the kids, volunteer for Parent Association at the kids’ school, run the household (which is a full-time job in itself) and have somewhat of a life?

There’s a lot, right?

As Romi Neustadt — author, entrepreneur and mom — puts it: You Can Have It All: Just Not At The Same Damn Time (which is also the title of her book).

As a former corporate chick who traded in the billable hour to become an entrepreneur, she’s figured out how to juggle being a wife, a mom, a professional success, and a healthy human without losing her mind. And she’s on a mission to help other women Have It All too. Romi’s first book, Get Over Your Damn Self: The No-BS Blueprint to Building a Life-Changing Business, was selected as a Forbes Best Business Book for Women and sold over 200K copies. Her second book You Can Have It All: Just Not At The Same Damn Time makes a distinction between doing it all (which is where most of us go wrong) and having it all. Romi provides a framework to get your life on track and in line with what really matters to you.

Tune in to the full episode to learn about:

• How to have it all: key insights to leverage in your life
• The difference between doing it all and having it all
• The difference between your priorities and goals
• How to free yourself from doing stuff that doesn’t excite you
• How to get your life on track

Connect with Romi Neustadt:

• Linkedin
• Twitter
• Website

Romi Neustadt’s Story (said in her words):

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Full Transcription:

Romi Neustadt: You write down an H next to the things that you think you have to be doing and an S next to the things you think you should be doing. It’s in the things marked with an H or an S that I help people find more time, and it’s in those two categories often times that, really, you should be delegating or deleting them.

Tanya: That’s Romi Neustadt, former corporate chick who traded in the billable hours to become a successful entrepreneur. She’s figured out how to juggle being a wife, a mom, a professional success, and a healthy human without losing her mind, and she’s on a mission to help other women have it all too. Romi’s first book, Get Over Your Damn Self: The No-BS Blueprint to Building a Life-Changing Business, was selected as a Forbes best business book for women and sold over 200,000 copies. Her second book, You Can Have It All, Just Not at the Same Damn Time, makes a key distinction between doing it all, which is where most of us go wrong, and having it all. Romi provides a framework to get your life on track and in line with what matters most to you.

Romi, your story is super interesting, actually, and Romi, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that name before. I would love to know where you grew up and a little bit about your professional journey as you’ve entered into law, into PR, consulting, author, speaker, you name it.

Romi Neustadt: I grew up in the thriving metropolis of Butte, Montana, which is a small town. It used to be a vibrant mining town. As I was growing up, it had dwindled in size, and it gave me an incredible upbringing full of heart and soul and scrappy resilience. Then I went to USC in Los Angeles for journalism school for undergrad, and I was too afraid to pursue journalism because I didn’t think I had what it took to make it out of the small markets. I did the safe route, and I went to law school. I went to the University of Virginia School of Law, and even in law school, I had a sense that this wasn’t the right career for me. I ended up being a business litigator, and it turns out I’m not meant to fight for a living. I’m meant to bring people together and build people up and promote things.

After less than three years, I escaped the practice of law and talked my way into a PR job in New York. I figured, given my background, I would be able to at least get something in PR and always wanted to live in New York City. I just never wanted to be a New York lawyer. That kicked off a very successful career over the next dozen years where I was in PR in New York and Seattle. Then when my husband John and I had two little kids and I was looking for more flexibility, I really loved the idea of being my own boss. I wanted to escape from the billable hour. I started my own business and became a very successful entrepreneur and then started writing books. My first book was about how I built my business, and I do speaking. I’m raising these two incredible humans, and I have my marriage and a very full, vibrant life that has been and continues to be an evolution.

Tanya: Isn’t it always? The moment it stops, we’ll be dead.

Romi Neustadt: That’s right.

Tanya: You said you were an entrepreneur. What was your business about?

Romi Neustadt: I started a direct sales business in skincare. I never in a million years thought that that would be my passion, my career, but what it has done for me is it’s combined my love for people and promoting things that I love and building people up. It now spans across the US, Canada, and Australia. It allowed me to design the professional life I wanted, increase my earnings dramatically. I busted my ass for years doing it, and I really fall in love with mentoring other people and helping them design businesses that they want to serve their goals.

Tanya: Isn’t that the best teacher, by the way, is when you actually get to mentor, or even guide, or coach? You’re going through the learnings as you’re going through the coaching or the guidance, except it’s landing in a super profound way. At least that’s what I found.

Romi Neustadt: I found that to be the case as well. It has helped me evolve not only in a more effective professional and entrepreneur and leader, but it also has infused all parts of my life, including my writing and speaking and, frankly, parenting.

Tanya: Yeah, which is a big job, one that doesn’t necessarily come with a guidebook and is all-consuming.

Romi Neustadt Yeah, it is the hardest job, and I’m constantly grabbing from my professional toolkit for use in parenting and even sometimes vice versa.

Tanya: Yeah, absolutely, and so you just launched a book that I find absolutely brilliant and directly speaks to me, which is a mom, Type A, super ambitious, and fulltime in the workforce. Your book is called You Can Have It All, Just Not at the Same Damn Time. What was the inspiration and motivation behind writing this book?

Romi Neustadt: I have people come to me all the time saying how do you do everything you do? I could never do what you do, and I wanted to dispel that myth, this notion about having it all. It’s such a bad rap, and it’s because we’re having the wrong conversation. We are confusing having it all with doing it all, and we most certainly can’t do it all. I wanted to share very candidly, authentically, about my journey from a working mom who was drowning in her own to-do list and having a breakdown into how I found and developed the tools to figure out what it was that I really wanted my life to look like and how to let go of everything else. I wanted to put it all together in this road map for people. I wrote the book for women, but men are finding it and absolutely loving it as well. I wanted to give everyone permission to learn how to say no, to stop should-ing all over the place. Let go of all the shoulds that we fill our lives with and to figure out what they uniquely want their lives to look like and go back to that.

Tanya: You were mentioning this really came out of a breakdown that you were having in your life. What happened, and what was your journey to pull yourself out of it?

Romi Neustadt: Seven years ago, I had a fast-growing business, these two little fast-growing kids. I had a marriage that needed nurturing. I needed nurturing. I had an aging mom that needed more and more time, and I was involved in a whole host of extracurricular activities. I was drowning. My life was whizzing by. I didn’t feel like I was present in my life. I knew that there simply weren’t enough hours in a day to do what I was doing. I felt stressed. I felt exhausted. I had constant feelings of inadequacy, and I was bitchy as hell.

Tanya: Yeah, I’m right there.

Romi Neustadt: Right? I didn’t like who I was. One day, I went to my husband, John, and I said, “Sweetheart, I need to run away from home for a few days and figure this out.” He said, “Absolutely, go.” He had been watching what had been happening with me, and he had even been trying to help in his own way. I didn’t want to hear any of it. We have to get to that point ourselves where we just have had enough, and off I went. I checked myself into a hotel for a few days and gave myself the greatest gift, which was time and space and quiet to do the introspection to figure out, okay, how am I going to recalibrate this gift of life? This isn’t how I want to live.

I was armed with some books and a journal and my laptop, and I was reading and searching and thinking, things that I never ever gave myself permission to do. It dawned on me that, at 42, not once, not ever my entire life had I stopped to figure out what my priorities were, and in fact, I had always confused priorities and goals. My mom jokes that I came out of the womb setting goals. I would set goals, and I would slay them. I just figured, okay, that’s the important stuff. Those are my priorities. I thought they were synonyms, but it turns out, as I found in my reading, that priorities are the things that are so important to us right now in the present tense that not serving them is nonnegotiable and that our goals are the things that haven’t yet happened. Those are the things in the future that are important enough to us that we want to work toward them.

Here’s the important part. If your goals don’t serve your priorities, if your goals aren’t serving the things you say are the most important in your life right now, that’s when we feel scattered and unfulfilled. That’s when we can’t find the time to do the things that are truly important to us, and that was the life I had been living.

Tanya: As you’re talking through this, I’m trying to pull this into my own life. Goals, I have big goals for myself, for my family, for my community, for my work, and my priorities in the present tense is keep my kids alive and try to raise them half decently. How do you reconcile those two and, obviously, enjoy them? Time is something that you’ll never get back. How do you align – when this train is going so fast and there’s so many things to handle and do and, for the most part, not that it’s like this in every family but women somehow – it was like this in my family, my immediate family, and my mom and my dad. The women, in addition to working fulltime, actually take on the brunt of the work at home, like scheduling everything and the kids and the doctors and the health and the schools and all that stuff. How do you align your priorities and your goals when they seemingly are at odds with each other?

Romi Neustadt: The reason why for many people they seem to be at odds is because they truly haven’t spent the time to give themselves the permission to figure out what the priorities are without any external influence, without carrying in any of these notions of what people expect or what they think they should be doing because of what society tells them. I mean, out of the tens of thousands of women I’ve coached, a sliver have ever stopped to figure out what it is that’s really important to them. When you do give yourself the time and space to do that, it tends to become pretty clear what is truly important. First of all, even for those of us who are overachievers, it’s important to understand we can only serve two to three priorities at any one time. More than that is simply not possible for us mere mortal humans. Now, for me, it became really clear that, when I stripped everything away and thought about what is the most important in my life right now, there were three areas, first and foremost, my health. A perennial priority of mine, Tanya, is I make healthy choices every day. I know if I’m not doing that I can’t get to anything else. If my health and body and mind isn’t there, everything else goes to pot.

Then it also became very clear to me and you alluded to this in referencing your kids, another priority of mine had to do with the people I love most, and even though the wording may change a little, every single year one of my priorities centers around being present in the lives of the people I love, which are my husband, my kids, and my close friends and my mother. Then the third priority for me always centers around the professional realm. For example, the priority I have and have had for the last few years is about helping women design the lives they really want, and so when I am setting goals, those goals have to serve one of those priorities, or it’s the wrong goal. Let’s talk about health for a moment. For years and years, I had a goal of fitting into a certain size of clothing. Yet, my true priority revolves around health. A number on a tag in your pants has nothing to do with health. When I instead started focusing on goals that would serve that priority like eating mostly plants, getting eight hours of sleep finally, I was actually serving that priority, and it was a lot easier to attain those goals because there was a direct connection.

Tanya: Okay, I see that. I could see that by switching a pant size, like a Target pant size to a directional goal, which is like being healthy, that allows you to not just look at how to get down to a size whatever. Now you look at sleep. You look at exercise. You look at eating. Eating becomes a component of that. You look at the dynamics of your relationships. It’s really directional, and it’s the heading upon which you begin to operate in or the context upon which you begin to operate in, which is powerful.

Romi Neustadt Exactly,

Tanya: Mm-hmm. Okay, so how do you – let’s say, for people out there – and I just had a friend that came over this weekend, and her job is a means to an end for her. She’s actually brilliant at it turns out, interior designer, and really, really talented, but right now, it’s a means to an end for her. Her real passion is writing, very similar to you, but she’s not sure. Actually, she knows that she wouldn’t be able to support herself. Whether that’s true or not, in her mind, there’s no path to being able to support herself through writing. How do you bridge those two when you have an actual obligation of people that depend on you to live and survive versus what really moves you?

Romi Neustadt: First off, I have a lot of experience with this. Not only myself but tens of thousands of women I work with have created their Plan Bs, their exit strategies from careers that they no longer want or no longer serve them while doing both concurrently, so I know it’s possible. The other thing that I would immediately say to your friend is stop telling yourself BS stories that this can never happen. Instead, let’s figure out how to make it happen, how to create more time in your life for the things that light you up while still supporting your family so that you can figure out if in fact this is something you can incorporate as either an additional career that you pursue, or it could one day become a replacement. Now, a huge part of that is by doing an exercise that I call relentlessly editing your life. When I say that, when I’m giving talks or coaching, I love watching the women. Their eyes light up and their shoulders come down from their ears because this prospect of being able to relentlessly edit their life is so exciting.

How it works and I walk folks through this in the book, you figure out everything you’re doing in the course of a week, and I mean everything. Write it down and how long you’re spending doing it. Then you get to categorize it. You get to mark a P for the things that are serving your priorities, a G for the things that are serving your goals. M for the things you must do like personal hygiene and going to the bathroom. I said you got to write down everything. Then you write down an H next to the things that you think you have to be doing, and an S next to the things you think you should be doing. It’s in the things marked with an H or an S that I help people find more time, and it’s in those two categories often times that, really, you should be delegating or deleting them. For example, especially for working moms, if one thing on your plate is serving as the fundraising chair for the school fundraiser, if that’s not serving one of your priorities or goals, guess what? You shouldn’t be doing it, but often times, we say yes to things because we are afraid to disappoint others or to be judged.

When I was building my business, Tanya, I could not make a home-cooked meal every night. There was no way in hell I could do the PR business and build my other business and be present for my kid and do this, but I had this voice in my head that said, well, my mom always made dinner every night. It’s what a good mother does. Now, that’s a should, and I got really adept at doing meal assembly. This was before we had this fabulous meal in a kit things or these food delivery services.

Tanya: Plated, yes, or like that.

Romi Neustadt: Right, or the great deli sections at grocery stores, right? We have no excuse now. What I’m on a mission to help especially women do because we’re so good at this is to stop should-ing all over the place.

Tanya: Yes, you know what’s so powerful about what you just said is we have these unexamined, unconscious outlooks on life, our world views that guide us to do things that just don’t work for us. For example, cook a home-cooked meal every night because that’s what a good mother should do. It’s like inherited patterns that we get from one generation to the next. Until you actually stop to disrupt that cycle or that pattern, it just runs your life, and it’s at odds with perhaps your goals and what your priorities are so really brilliant. Why do you think this is mostly a woman problem?

Romi Neustadt: Now, please understand that men are not figuring out their priorities. They’re not figuring out their goals that serve them. I have many men finding this book and loving it, even though I wrote it for women, but we women more than men have a very hard time saying no. We are, I believe, genetically predisposed to want to be people pleasers. We want everyone to like us, and in general, men don’t fall prey to that same predicament. We put unrealistic expectations on ourselves, and yes, it is in part, as you previously mentioned, societal pressures. Women are supposed to go to work, and then they’re supposed to be superhuman supermoms. I think this is exacerbated by this carefully curated, instant perfection world that we live in of who we’re supposed to be, how much we’re supposed to do, what we’re supposed to look like while we’re doing it. I think all of that leads us to think we have to do it all, and we absolutely can’t.

What I’m so passionate about and what I’ve seen recently in traveling around the country on my book tour is that, when we women give ourselves the time and the space and permission to figure out what we really want to do in life, what our all looks like and when we let go of all the other stuff and live our truth, what happens is we’re secure in our choices. We’re living lives that light us up and use our talents and our time, and we’re more likely to do the things we were meant to do, what we were put here to do. Then the woman next to us, she’s no longer competition. She’s inspiration, and we champion one another. If all of us women were living this way with this kind of intention and authentic purpose, we would be lifting each other up, and imagine the kids we could raise.

Tanya: Yes, and I think that the best way to teach your kid to really live their best life is to do that with yours. Lead by example. This is really amazing. Just to close off here, what is the best piece of advice you ever got and from whom?

Romi Neustadt: I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of mentors and wise people. One piece of advice just resonates with me and always will and has dictated a lot of the choices and, ultimately, I think led me to these epiphanies and relentlessly added in my life. When I was a PR consultant, I had a client, Nell Merlino. Nell was the mastermind behind Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which became Take Our Children to Work Day. I was working with her on her later project, which was Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence. We were driving to – I believe it was a press conference.

Nell said to me, “Romi, do you know why there aren’t more women millionaires?” I said, “Why, Nell?” She said, “Women refuse to delegate. If every woman stopped doing the things that she could hire or give to somebody else and only focus on those things that she should uniquely be doing, it would make a world of difference.” I took that with me through my entrepreneurial ascension, and that ultimately led to me coming up with the calculation that I have in the book about figuring out what our time is worth per hour so that we would have an unemotional, mathematical proof of the things we should be delegating. Nell changed my life with that.

Tanya: That’s a very sound piece of advice, I have to say. I can think of a handful of women off the top of my head that actually suffer from this exact problem, so I totally get it. Listen, thank you so much for being on the Unmessable podcast. I think that what the message that you’re ultimately broadcasting, which is you can have it all, just not at the same damn time, also all in your book, is brilliant. I encourage everybody to go and get your book. Where can they get a copy of it?

Romi Neustadt: At all retailers, Amazon. Independent bookstores, let’s hear it for those babies, as well as visiting my website, romineustadt.com.

Tanya: Okay, awesome. Thank you so much. How do people get in touch with you? Do you have a Twitter, or a LinkedIn, or Instagram that you want to share?

Romi Neustadt: I’m on all of the above. Romi Neustadt is a pretty unique name, so it’s R-O-M-I-N-E-U-S-T-A-D-T. Find me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever your social channel of choice is.

Tanya: Awesome. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today, and keep spreading that message. It’s a powerful one.

Romi Neustadt: Thank you so much, and keep doing what you’re doing. It’s great stuff.

Tanya: Unmessable is recorded in the heart of New York City, and a special thanks to all the team involved in producing the show. Visit tanyaprive.com/unmessable to find a transcript of this episode, and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.