Balance & Beyond Podcast

Ever wondered how to juggle a bustling household, demanding career, and personal hobbies without losing your balance?

In today’s episode, Jo answers the top three questions she gets asked: how does she juggle all the parts of her life, what rituals keep her sane and who supports her on this journey of life.

Discover the secrets to achieving harmony as Jo shares her journey of balancing two energetic children, a husband, a household, and her own passions. This episode of Balance and Beyond tackles the myth that managing these components seamlessly is impossible and offers insights into how you, too, can redefine success and balance on your own terms.

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honour the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

In today’s episode, I’m going to be answering three of the biggest questions I get asked regularly. This is going to be a personal share, so if you're not interested in how I fit everything in or what my habits and rituals are, or who supports me, feel free to skip to the next episode. But if you’re curious about how I manage it all, what my habits and rituals look like, and the different forms of support I use, come on in, let’s talk.

Before we dive in, I want to offer a few caveats. What I’m about to share is my definition of balance and how I make it work for me. This is what has worked in my life, and I encourage you to approach it with an open mind. Be mindful of any judgments that might come up for you as you listen—whether it’s a feeling of jealousy or thoughts like, "That's not fair," or "I can’t do that." Remember, I’m just a mirror here. What works for me doesn’t necessarily need to work for you. Think of this as a chance to peek into someone else's life and observe how they do things. And while you're listening, notice what comes up for you—what resonates and what triggers you. Let’s dive in!

My goal in sharing this isn’t to say there’s one right way to do things. It’s about giving you insight into the principles I use to guide how I structure my life and make decisions—whether it’s how I prioritize my time, or who I choose to work with. So please, don’t walk away thinking, “Jo does this, so I have to do it this way too.” That’s not the message. What I’m offering here is a look at what works for me, and who knows? There might be one or two nuggets of wisdom or principles that could resonate with you and be useful in your own life. So, with that said, let’s dive into how I fit it all in.

This is a question I often get asked—whether it’s at conferences or from my clients, especially when they hear about everything I do and how much I seem to pack into my life. There’s a common belief that they can’t do it because their circumstances aren’t the same as mine, or their life doesn’t match mine. But here’s the thing: I’m here to tell you that you can fit in whatever you want if you understand how to do it.

So, let’s start by talking about what exactly I’m fitting into my life. When I say “fit,” I mean, what are the components I’m juggling? Because, at the end of the day, we’re all juggling multiple things in our lives—it’s something that we all have in common.

So I have two kids who are 14 and 11 and incredibly active. They are dancers, and they play sports. And when I say dancers—if anyone here’s got dancing kids—they don’t just dance once a week. They dance five days a week and are on a competition team, which means lots and lots of weekends and lots and lots of extra rehearsals.

So they’re busy kids. Obviously, we’ve got school, drop-offs, and pickups, which all come with the territory of lots and lots of Ubering and everything else that comes with children. I have a husband who's shifting jobs and will be going to work—ideally, or hopefully—full-time out of the office… sorry, out of the house. So that's going to be Monday to Friday.

So, you know, we are juggling. We will be juggling a whole new dynamic because he's been doing other sorts of work—consulting and those types of things—and often working from home. I am juggling, too. We also have a dog who needs to be walked every day, so my husband and I tend to divide that up.

Obviously, I have a business I'm running, and yes, I have more control over my schedule than I used to when I was in corporate. But I used to have this limiting belief that only if I ran my own business could I have as much control. So if you have this—"Well, you know, I couldn't do that because I work for someone else"—there's definitely going to be something here for you.

One thing in my life that I never believed would be possible is that I play sports. I used to love playing sports as a kid, and it wasn't until after COVID that I thought, Hang on a second, I'm running around after everybody else. My husband started playing soccer and going away for boys’ weekends, and they started riffing—why am I missing out? Why am I running around and never actually doing anything for myself?

So, about four years ago, I started playing netball. And this year—sorry, in 2024—I actually played soccer for the first time, which is something that terrified me. So this is a winter sport, so I’m playing on either Friday nights or Saturday afternoons. And once again, my hesitation when I started playing netball was, We can't fit it in. There’s no way, with everything going on. But Mick said to me, We’ll make it work. And we did.

Then last year, when I said I wanted to play soccer, I thought, It’s on Friday nights. The girls have dancing on Friday nights. He wants to be somewhere else on Friday nights. It’s not going to fit in. But again, We’ll make it work and fit it in. So, uh… and on top of that, I play. Uh, I've been playing summer soccer this year, and I will be playing winter soccer and winter netball. I also run two to three times a week.

Right now, I’m training for a 10K, so that's a lot of exercise. My husband and I also tend to do a sauna once a week—that's our date thing, something we do to make sure we keep that connection going. And I have two aging parents. My dad has actually just been diagnosed with cancer, so I’m going to a lot of doctor’s appointments.

So from this, you can see I’ve got a lot going on, right? I’m not sitting here pretending that I have a housemaid. I’m still dropping kids off at dancing, I’m still changing sheets, I’m still doing washing. I have just as many responsibilities as probably 90% of the women listening. And yet, I have so much more in my life for me than I ever used to. What I have now—I got there gradually.

So I don’t want you to think that if you’ve got nothing in here for you, and you’re running around on fumes after everybody else, there’s no possible way you could do as much for yourself as I’m doing. The principle I’ve used to make all of this fit is magic—and it’s called Parkinson’s Law. What this means is that an activity will always expand to the amount of time or space that you give it.

For example, if you give yourself 10 minutes to put the washing away, it’ll take 10 minutes. If you give yourself 30 minutes, it’ll take 30 minutes. By leveraging this principle—and the key thing here is, I’m not saying you should rush, stress, or work at top speed all the time—you can actually shrink a huge number of tasks that are expanding without you even realizing it.

This is how we fit my netball in on Saturdays. It’s like, Okay, well, we’re going to squish the other things—the errands or whatever. It’s just, No, just squish it, and it will fit in. And it does. Once it’s in, you can add more, as long as you use the concept of habit stacking. If you do it gradually, it will fit in. You don’t tend to go from nothing to all of this overnight.

When you really leverage Parkinson’s Law and reduce the amount of time you spend tidying the house—well, I used to spend hours. I remember when I did my first “time audit”. I was spending between 25 and 30 hours a week in the home category, shuffling baskets from room to room. And if you had asked me then whether I could shave any time off that, I would have categorically said, Absolutely not. There is no way. I'll bet you a million dollars I cannot get any more time. There’s no way that’s going to fit. My life is too busy.

And yet—here I am. It fits. The washing still gets done. The cooking still gets done. The house still gets tidied. So, more can fit into your life than you realize. Let me share what I’ve let go of—all the muscles I’ve built—to get to this place where I can fit it all in. Because to me, the lessons haven’t been in fitting it in—they’ve been in what I’ve let go of. I have minimized and worked really hard on my procrastination muscle. So now, it’s pretty rare.

When I sit down to focus, I focus. At work, I get it done. I don’t faff around. When I’m doing something, I’m present. I’m fully doing that thing, and I do it. I never realized how exhausted I was from trying to do 50 million things at once. Because of that, I was never actually effective. I never felt like I was getting anything done—and I wasn’t getting anything done. Everything was half-finished.

I still remember one day very vividly when I decided to clean out the linen cupboard or something like that. I was at it for hours. Mick walked up to me and said, You know, the house is messier than when you started. I burst into tears because I’d spent hours cleaning, trying to tidy up the house and clear all the stuff out. Yet, I ended up making more mess and then spent another hour trying to clean up everything I’d done.

So, the time—my activity—completely expanded because there was nothing else on that afternoon. In reality, about six months later, I had the same experience. I needed to clean out the linen cupboard again. We were putting our house on the market, so you know, people open the cupboard, and you don’t want stuff to fall on their heads.

I set a timer and told myself, I’m not leaving this spot. I cleaned out the linen cupboard in 12 minutes. Six months earlier, it had taken me hours and hours.

So, this is where really learning to focus, truly being present, minimizing procrastination, and cutting out distractions can have a huge impact on how much you can get done. Then, you free up space for more of what you want. I also have very little screen time. I set 30-minute timers or app limits on my phone, and the only time I ever break those is if I’m running a Facebook challenge or something like that for my business. In those cases, I’m obviously in there a lot more, responding to things.

But I don’t tend to scroll very much. I don’t read the news, so I don’t lose time in that way. When I started making some of these changes, I realized I was spending two to three hours a day on my phone, just... I don’t know, doom scrolling or watching stuff. I didn’t even know where the time went. By getting rid of that, I freed up more space for what I really want.

I’m not a robot; I’m a human. But by leveraging these principles, really stopping all my self-sabotage programs, and being really focused where I am, I can sit down and—while I might be working 40 to 45 hours a week—I’m probably getting 60 to 70 hours of work done. Because I sit down, smash it out, and then I go do something else. So, being really present has been a game-changer for me.

How I keep myself fueled up and able to cope in this busy life is through my rituals. People always ask me, Jo, what are your rituals? And those of you who have come through my programs know I share a lot about what they look like. Now, my rituals have changed and morphed over time—particularly when I had younger kids who used to wake me up every morning, either with crying or a poke in the head. My rituals looked very different then compared to what they do now, with kids who I can’t even wake up in the morning.

So, my rituals used to all be nighttime-based. But now, if I get up before 8 AM, I’m typically the only one awake. My life is different now, so I’m able to structure things based on what works for our family and the stage of life we’re at. I am not someone who typically has a super fixed routine anymore. I have lots of friends, and even clients, who have a morning routine. They wake up, meditate, journal, and do that every single morning—and that’s awesome. It works for them.

I’ve found that, because my life can be in a state of flux and I’m running first thing in the morning (I might be out the door at quarter past six), I’ve created more space for snack-sized rituals. These tend to fit around other things I’m doing. But because they’ve become so ingrained in who I am, they don’t get forgotten.

Some things that really work for me are: if I’m not running in the morning or don’t have to drive the kids around, I often start with some journaling. I’ll also often do some meditation before I wake up or before I go to sleep, depending on timing. For this year, one of my focuses in 2025 is really stepping more into my power and revealing that to myself. So, I often do a power hour first thing in the morning. Whether that’s, you know, doing some more intuitive work—that’s something I’ve been really cultivating.

What I have also found is that routines and rituals are much easier when kids are back to school. When you have a routine and more certainty, it’s much easier to find that rhythm you need. Most of us, when your kids are back in school and you have that structure, I find that it makes it so much easier to be more consistent with what you do.

But one of the biggest things that I would probably call a ritual now, even though it may look a little ad hoc, is I make space every day for connection to myself. That’s a check-in on what I need. It drives my family nuts, but every time I get in the car—probably 90% of the time—I take a moment to pause and check in.

I used to always put on music or a podcast. I was terrified of silence. Now, most times, if I’m ever in the car alone—whether I’m dropping off a child, picking one up, or whatever I’m doing—I’m in silence. Every time the family jumps in the car after I’ve been in it, they’re like, Why isn’t the music playing? Mom’s been in the car, and the volume’s turned down to zero because I don’t want any noise. I use those little moments to connect. 

You know, I often walk the dog in silence. I don’t listen to anything. I’m listening to my body. I’m allowing space for downloads—my intuition to tell me what I want to do. That’s something that really refuels me: finding space in something else that I’m already doing.

I’m a person who values efficiency, so if I can make that 15-minute drive to dancing something I enjoy—rather than making it something that I have to do, that I don’t want to do, and where I’m feeling obligated or resentful—it becomes a much more positive experience. I’ll think, Okay, I’m driving to dance. I’ll have some silence, do some deep breathing, feel my hands on the steering wheel, or look at the flowers as I drive past.

By the time I turn up to wherever I’m going, I actually feel quite recharged because I’ve had this check-in time with myself. We do a lot of back and forth to dancing. Usually, it’s about 12 to 15 times a week, and we tend to split that up. So, I’m in the car a lot for these short 10- to 15-minute trips: go here, go there, go to the shops, go back.

Rather than just letting that be dead time or time when I’m trying to pull more and more information into my head, I actually use that time to build my intuition muscle and connect with myself. That’s how, again, my rituals have morphed. The only last thing that I tend to do consistently is almost every night I shower by candlelight, and that has been a game changer. I turn all the lights off, and I have a little candle set right by my shower, on my vanity.

It makes something—again, efficiency, the use of time—that we typically do every single day into something special. When I do that at night before bed, it’s a beautiful way for me to wash off the day. I wash off anything that’s still attached to me. I do a lot of intentional work there, like asking myself, Okay, what’s my intention for tomorrow? or What’s here right now, and what do I need to let go of? It’s just a beautiful environment.

So, I’m all for making the most of what you’re already doing. I’m already driving to dance, I’m already having a shower. Is there a way for me to make that time mean something to me? Can I make that time refueling, rather than needing 15 hours to sit somewhere? Again, you can see how these rituals are morphing, and I really encourage you to work out what works for you when it comes to your rituals and what you need to really top yourself up.

Lastly, I guess this sort of feeds into what I fit in and my rituals… I often get asked, What support do I have? Given that I’m a coach and support so many others, people wonder if I have coaches of my own and whether I continue to do my own work. The answer is absolutely. I don’t believe you should ever hire a coach who is not doing work on themselves. I have to continue to grow. I have to continue to evolve.

My business will only ever grow to the size of the problems that I can solve. So, if I want my business to plateau, the best way to do that—or probably shrink—is to stop working on myself. Over the last five or six years, I’ve had a whole range of people supporting me in different modalities and in various ways.

For example, I was in a very expensive coaching program for a couple of years. That was great at the time. I made lifelong friends, and it really catapulted my business to the next level. But I’m not there anymore because it just doesn’t feel like the place I need to be. We have invested significant amounts of time, money, and energy in our health. This wasn’t necessarily by choice; it was by necessity when faced with a myriad of health problems.

We’ve invested in naturopaths and nutritionists, and we have a lot of technology around health. For example, I wear an Oura ring, which gives me a lot of stats on how my body is doing. We also have a biomat that repairs us at a cellular level, and everybody in our family lies on it every day. We have a body coach from the UK, whom I call my magician. He’s really helped our entire family rebuild ourselves from the ground up, focusing on our muscular health and how we function.

He’s also been a big catalyst in us visiting cutting-edge health clinics and seeking out alternative treatments to modern medicine. For instance, my husband and our daughter Stella have been to a clinic in Norway twice, and the rest of us have gone as well. We’ve really focused on not settling for anything less than optimal health. This isn’t just about how we look; it’s about how our bodies function.

This has been a really, really big area of focus for us. Thankfully, everybody is stabilizing now, and all the work we’ve done has fundamentally changed our lives. I was told that Mick was very, very unlikely to make it to 50 if we didn’t make some changes. So, I know that the trip to Norway—taken on a whim and very much an intuitive hit—has saved his life. You could never put a price on your health. That’s where a lot of our money and support has gone. I also tend to really wait to see which coaches or guides find me.

I’ve really enjoyed kinesiology. It’s something I’ve now trained in, and I’ve worked with the same person fortnightly, or every two weeks, for the past two years. So every two weeks, I continue to dive into what’s holding me back, what’s in my way, and how to move it. Over time, I’ve explored a variety of other modalities, whether it’s Reiki, various readings, or fun "woo" things. I’ve even gone down rabbit holes like past life hypnotherapy.

But I’ve also had business coaches and strategic coaches. I’m really open to asking, What guide do I need right now for this phase? And they’ve always found me. I always know when it’s the right fit for me, and so I follow those nudges. I sign up for lots of masterclasses and participate in various learning opportunities. But, overall, it’s just been a really fun journey.

Part of my journey is saying, Okay, what do I need? Now, let's see who’s going to appear. So, really not holding on very tightly to the support I have or the support I need has been a game changer. Trusting my intuition, and the idea that when the student is ready, the teacher appears, has been key for me. Depending on what I’m focused on, that determines what support I need.

So that is, I guess, a summary of Jo’s world and how I operate. I hope from this, you’ve really pulled out some core principles, whether that’s leveraging Parkinson’s law to fit in more time for yourself. And, it's not just me – this works for anyone.

I’ve got hundreds of clients who never thought they could run, never thought they could find time for a hobby, or never thought they could go back to tap dancing lessons, which is something they’ve wanted to do since they were kids. You can find time. It’s actually there. The challenge is that, right now, until you do the work on yourself, you can’t see it.

There’s no possible way. You will swear blue murder that there’s no way that time will ever appear. And yet, we have evidence from hundreds of women that when you do the work and have the right tools, you can bring those things back into your life. I hope you’ve learned that you can hold on loosely to your rituals and still do what works for you. You can fit it in in various ways. You can have consistency if that’s what works for you, or you can find something that fits within your life, depending on how busy it is. And remember: the right guides will always find you.

I’ve found that many of my guides knocked for quite a while, and often, I would ignore them. I’d say, “Nope, not going there,” and then they’d just keep bumping, and they kept bumping. I know this is how it works for many people who find me. They say, “I listened to every podcast episode, and you kept coming back. You kept getting in my head.”

Well, usually, if I keep getting in your head, that might be a sign. Depending on who else you’re working with, maybe it’s time for you to come and see what we’re about. But I’ll leave that up to you because, once again, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. It’s up to you to decide what that means. So, have a wonderful rest of your day.

I hope this has been an insightful and inspiring episode. If any judgment or other emotions have come up, just think of this as a mirror. What is this trying to tell you? Do you think this is completely farcical and I should be giving you a rainbow and a unicorn with this? Or are you thinking, “You know what? If she can do it, I can too”? No matter where you are, there’s a very strong chance I have been there. So here’s to more time for ourselves, more rituals, and more support. I’ll see you next time.

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us today on the Balance and Beyond Podcast. We're so glad you carved out this time for yourself. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who might need to hear this today. And if you're feeling extra generous, leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice would mean the world. If you’re keen to dive deeper into our world, visit us at www.balanceinstitute.com to discover more about the toolkit that has helped thousands of women avoid burnout and create a life of balance, and beyond. Thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the Balance & Beyond Podcast.