Are you ready to make your life simple? As a working mom, you can have a simpler life without all of the fluff that keeps you busy and exhausted. Sounds too good to be true?
Trust me. It can be done. And my guest, Rosanna, is going to show you how you can simplify your life just like she did.
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About Rosanna
Rosanna Berardi is a lawyer, mother, and entrepreneur. She built her immigration law firm, Berardi Immigration Law, from her home apartment to a multi-million-dollar company in 15 short years. She is a sought-after speaker and has been featured in Forbes, The Los Angeles Times, Politico and The National Post. She is an Adjunct Professor at SUNY Buffalo School of Law. Rosanna is also the CEO of High Wire Woman, a consulting firm that provides systems and solutions to working women.
Connect with Rosanna
Website: www.highwirewoman.com
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/highwirewoman
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/highwirewoman
Links Mentioned in this Episode
- Website: www.highwirewoman.com
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Transcript of this episode
Real Happy Mom 0:09
To get inspiration and practical tips and listening to Episode 171 Well, Hey there and welcome back to another episode of The Real happy mom Podcast. I’m super excited to be back again here with you to share another great conversation with another great guest. Today I have Rosanna variety, who is going to be sharing with us some tips on how to make our lives simpler, is working moms. Now, this is something that I know that I am constantly trying to do, trying to find ways to simplify my life so that I don’t have to deal with all the fluff and the things that don’t really matter. But before we jump into this week’s episode, I wanted to make sure that you knew about the time transformational toolkit. Now if you are stressed, because you are not spending enough time with your kids, or you have enough, never enough time to do the things you enjoy a really just want to stop feeling overwhelmed with your to do list, I have something that is going to help you with all of that and more. And that is the tone transformational toolkit. This is my self paced course that is going to help you with time management habits, routines and mindset strategies for you as a busy working mom. Now I get it going through having a son and trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with him and then also trying to show up at work. It was really difficult trying to juggle all the things but over time, I’ve learned how to simplify things, and to actually have time to do things I enjoy. And I want to share this with you. So head on over to Robbie mom comm slash time to get your hands on the time transformational toolkit, if you’re ready to stop wishing and dreaming. Start living out the life that you really want, so that you can start to do the things you enjoy and start beating yourself up about things that aren’t really important. Alright, that is real happy mom.com/time To get your hands on the time transformational toolkit. All right now, let’s go ahead and jump on in to this week’s episode. All right, awesome. Welcome to the podcast. I’m excited to have you on this afternoon.
Rosanna 2:24
Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to chat. Yes, yes.
Real Happy Mom 2:28
I definitely want it to have a conversation with you just because I feel like we have so many similarities, but there’s still a lot of things I can learn from you. So before we jump into our conversation that I wanted to have today, I would like for you to share a little bit about you and what you do.
Rosanna 2:45
Sure. So I’m Rosanna Berardi, my day job is I’m an immigration lawyer. I’ve been helping people achieve their American dreams for almost 25 years. Absolutely love that. I’m also the creator of high wire woman, which is consulting business for busy working women. And we’re all trying to stand that high wire of life and not fall to our death. Because we have so many things we have to balance. I’m also a mom of a 15 year old sophomore in high school, a Disney fanatic. And I love cake.
Real Happy Mom 3:24
Nice. I love cake too. Now you, you definitely have a lot of things going on. And as far as like juggling all of the plates, especially with the the metaphor with the high wire too. I know it’s easy for things to kind of get dropped, or things get missed in life. So I was just wondering, what are some of the things that you have done to kind of simplify things or to make it so that you can juggle things a lot easier.
Rosanna 3:52
So one of my favorite tips to share is to automate your life automate as many things as you can. We are lucky enough to live in a country at a time in which many, many things can be automated for other people to handle for us, for example, this morning, I put my dry cleaning out on my porch and the dry cleaning company comes to get it it might cost a few dollars more, but I don’t have to go somewhere twice, you know, wants to drop it off wants to pick it up. And what I like to do is an inventory of my day or a week and say God what, you know, where did I spend time where I didn’t necessarily have to and I’ve become really good at that because I don’t think I’ve stepped inside of a grocery store and well over a year I automate my grocery delivery. And you know, with with services like Instacart it’s not just groceries, you can get your vitamins you can get, you know, Costco delivered BJs. Last year a friend of mine use Instacart to get her kids Halloween costumes. You know, automate paying your bills automate any type of delivery service. And you know, a lot of women, including me have a hard time I’m a first generation, Italian American, and I came from a family that didn’t have much. So it seems frivolous, right? It’s like, why should I spend extra money for someone to pick out my tomatoes at a grocery store? I could do that myself. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. And our most precious commodity is our time. And we have to really be diligent about time saving activities.
Real Happy Mom 5:41
Yes, and amen to all of that. And I was gonna ask you about that, because I know that, at least for me, I’ll be honest, I’ve already kind of inventoried my day. And the thing that I spend the most time on is cleaning my house. And I know, I know, I know, I know, I need to get someone in here and do it. But it’s just this girl I know. But it’s just something inside of me just cannot let it go. And my husband’s already given me the okay. And I’m like, I just need to do it and just let it go. But again, that that mentality that like, oh, like I can do it, but just like you said, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be doing it.
Rosanna 6:15
Right? And think about what you could be doing, instead of doing that, you know, you could maybe take a walk or relax or work on your business or, you know, it’s really looking at what that automation, what opportunity that automation provides, right? Because when you’re, when you’re saying like no to this, you could say yes to that. And that’s, you know, I think as busy working women, we have to really get into that mindset of we live in a world of modern conveniences. I mean, you can get anything delivered anywhere. And yeah, it can get pricey. So you have to kind of weigh your options of, you know, how much am I willing to pay? And what is my time worth?
Real Happy Mom 6:55
Absolutely. And I know my time is very valuable. So yes, I am going to stop and start automating that one, because that is a big one. But I liked how you brought up the dry cleaning and the groceries because those are two big ones, at least for me that I’m like, I’m not gonna lie. I’m now I’m gonna let that go. I’m gonna go. It’s just the cleaning. Yeah, like doper, is there anything else off the top of your head that you’re thinking that yeah, like that’s on automated, like, I’m not thinking about that.
Rosanna 7:24
You know, a lot of during the pandemic, a lot of retail stores closed, and it’s hard to find building men. I’m a big fan of subscription boxes, I do Stitch Fix, Stitch Fix, send you a box once a month, or every two weeks have closed it and I love that because I’m updating my wardrobe, I don’t keep everything they send me, you know, they might send you five items. And I might just keep one, but I’m getting a new shirt, you know, once a month or a pair of pants. And I don’t have to go anywhere. You know, I don’t have to go out to the mall. The mall doesn’t even have anything anymore. Amazon’s great but hard to buy clothes from Stitch Fix uses, you know, an algorithm. And there’s other subscription boxes that do the same thing where they track, like what you don’t like, and it’s just a way of automating shopping. And same with prescriptions, right? Like, you know, Amazon has, well, it’s called pillpack. But there’s lots of pharmacies that will automatically automatically just send you your prescriptions once a month. Again, there’s two trips that you’re saving, right, you don’t have to go, you don’t have to call you don’t have to pick it up. No one’s texting you. It just comes in your mailbox. And I love I love those two things. Because, you know, none of these things take a terribly long amount of time, but cumulatively it adds up, right? It adds up to lots of hours in your life.
Real Happy Mom 8:50
Yes, absolutely. And I just got on the stitch bandwagon too. So so I can totally vouch for that. And I absolutely love it. Now, I just wanted to switch it up a little bit, because I know I talked a little bit about feeling a little guilty about the whole cleaning thing. But I’m wondering about the moms that are listening who want to, you know, do all the things like have the career and be an awesome mom and do whatever it else they have, you know, inside of their hearts that they have the passion to do. I’m just wondering, how can women truly be good at doing everything and really get rid of that guilt?
Rosanna 9:30
So here’s the secret. You can have it all, but you can’t have it all at the same time. The expectations on the modern American women are absolutely absurd. I mean, how many things can one girl do? Right? I mean, it and we’re bombarded by these messages of oh, you know plant based meals. 10,000 steps, drink your water. You know your child’s first day of school pictures have to be perfect. Like with a little sign that you bought off of Etsy and, and you have to go on date night and climb that corporate ladder. It’s like, Are you kidding me? Who the heck could do all of this? It’s insane. And I think we get so buried by the expectation of everything has to be perfect. And I like to just compartmentalize my life like, Okay, here’s the deal. I got two lunches for my head. First, I’m not going to give him 10 bucks to buy his lunch for the week at school. I’m not going to worry about getting you know, all my steps in every single day, maybe I’ll focus on that twice a week. And really by compartmentalizing, least take all of the things you should be doing. In bites, it’s pieces, but I’m also a big proponent of don’t do all these things you don’t want to do like, I don’t like to bake. And for years, I made myself bake Christmas cookies with my son because, you know, I should do it. And it would be a good memory for him. I was the only thing that he was gonna remember was me swearing, about the frosting and the sprinkles all over the place. So I stopped doing it. And that’s okay, we can’t do it all and we don’t have to. This isn’t the recipe that you wrote for yourself. This is someone else’s recipe, and you could tweak it. And you could take it byte by byte you do not have to do everything that the world is telling you you should do.
Real Happy Mom 11:41
Now I know you’re like me and only have 1,000,001 things to do in a day. And feeling like you need an extra pick me up in the morning to get you going. In. Typically I grab for a cup of coffee. But lately I have been reaching for magic mine. Magic mine is not an energy drink or a coffee based drink. It is actually the world’s first productivity drink. And it helps me to feel more focus, and helps me to beat that procrastination that tends to creep up throughout the game. In the end, I ended up feeling way more productive. And I get into that work in flow state so much easier. Now magic mine has been my go to morning routine drink. And I promise you it has helped me so much. And I definitely want you to get the benefits of it. So go on over to magic mind.co/mom and use the promo code mom 20 to get 20% off, I promise you want to start taking this you will not feel the same way about coffee in the mornings. I know my coffee intake has gone down significantly. And I know that you will be way more productive to in the end. So like I said, Go on over to magic mind.co/mom and use the promo code mama 20 for 20% off. All right. Go ahead and get it now. I promise you, you’ll thank me later. Yes, yes, I totally agree. And really quick, I just turned my video off because everyone in this house is streaming right now. So that we don’t use up too much bandwidth. If you turn off yours, I won’t be mad too. But I just want to get good audio. So just wanted to tell you about that. Sorry. And I’m in it. But yes, I really love everything that you just said. And I think I heard Oprah saying that quote too about you can have it all, just not all at the same time. And it was hard for me to kind of wrap my head around that because like you said, it’s kind of this expectation that we’re supposed to do all the things and be all things to everyone. So I love the way that you say it’s a cart, compartmentalize things because that makes it so much easier. And I can definitely see like, okay, how can I do better in this area, and start eliminating some of the things that really don’t matter? Because you are right, there’s a lot of things that we do that we could easily get rid of that don’t really make a difference and don’t really light us up. So I love that you brought that one up.
Rosanna 14:08
Yeah, and we’re, you know, we’re all individuals, but yet, we all think we should be doing the same exact thing, right? Because we’ve been told this story of, you know, a good mom or a good wife does this, this and this. But who is that? Where did that recipe come from? Right? Like, what if I don’t like those ingredients in the recipe? I’m not doing that. Right? Like, you know if I want to go on a date night, once a month or not at all. That’s That’s my choice doesn’t mean that I don’t love my spouse doesn’t mean that go out. But we get caught up in when other people are telling us what to do and and then we just feel like oh, we can’t do anything and then we just check out and we do dumb things like scroll on our phone for 11 hours a day. Or watch bad TV.
Real Happy Mom 14:57
Definitely watching bad TV and scrolling. Yeah. I’ve definitely seen that now. I’m thinking about the moms too, who are looking at you, especially as the as the working mom. And they’re like, Okay, all right, I see how how you’re able to do this now. But how have you like, changed things over the years? Or is there anything particular that you’ve really had to shift? Or things that you’ve had to let go in order to get to this place where you’re at now?
Rosanna 15:25
Definitely. So particularly when my son was younger, you know, he’s an only child that I felt like I had to be at every and have to be at his school in every capacity. Whenever they asked for a volunteer, or room mom, or, you know, someone to bring in cookies, like I always said, Yes. And overtime, I realized, I didn’t love all of those things. Actually, some of them I really didn’t like at all. And it took me a good, maybe eight years to recognize, you know, what been involved and be miserable. Doesn’t make sense. So now he’s in high school. And when they ask for volunteers, I only do things that I think I’ll enjoy, you know, not that I feel like I should do. Because, you know, when you think about it, when you’re, when you’re older, and you’re gone, your kids aren’t going to remember, you know, the cupcakes that you brought into their classroom, but they are going to remember, God, my mom was always a raving lunatic and was in a bad mood and yelling at me, you know, every time we had to go to school, that’s what they’re going to remember. So take me a long time to realize that I don’t have to do absolutely everything that’s out there with respect to my kid doesn’t make me a bad mom. And when I do want to plug in and do the things, I like that I actually enjoy that time. And we’re both happy.
Real Happy Mom 16:53
Yes, yes. Yes. I’m totally with you on that one. And that was one thing for me too, because I thought I had to be you know, that amazing Pinterest mom making all the fun little projects and things like that. And I really was awful at it. And so yes, I can definitely agree about letting that go. And just trying to create those memories. Because I’ll be honest with you, I had a conversation with my mom, similar to this, like, you know, kind of venting to her about how I’m like doing all these things, and I don’t really enjoy. And she’s like, Well, why are you like, why do you feel like you have to do all these things? And I’m like, because that’s what I’m supposed to do. And she was like, No, she’s like, You don’t have to be there. And she was like, remember your dad, he was in there for all of your your dance competitions and in shows and things like that, because I used to dance competitively back in high school and in college. And I used to be like, we used to have performances all the time. But my mom, I remember her there for like a huge majority. But when she said that it like literally like, I’m grown and have kids. And it just occurred to me that my dad wasn’t always there. And I just realized it, but it isn’t that I missed him or, you know, I was mad like he was there for the things that actually matter. So that’s when I gave myself the permission slip, like it’s okay, if you’re not there for everything, or you don’t do all the things. So I love that you brought that up.
Rosanna 18:19
For sure we tell ourselves these false stories. And kudos to your mom for saying, Well then, why do you do with this? Right? Like, it’s like, if we watched our kids trying to do stuff, we’d say, Are you crazy? You can’t do all this, but we expect ourselves to do it. And we wonder why we’re depressed or we feel terrible, or you know, all these things. We just, we make it we make it so much harder than it needs to be.
Real Happy Mom 18:45
Yes, definitely. Now, I always like to think about this. But I wanted to xe this particular question in that if you had any advice and could go back and talk to the the mom who just brought home that baby that’s now 15 What would you tell her? As far as what you know, now that you could have done things a little differently?
Rosanna 19:10
To things chill out. It’s not as hard as it seems. It’s sometimes it’s hard because we make it that hard. And I always share this with young moms, I know, kids until they’re about like eight or nine. They don’t really have a concept of time. You know, like we know as adults what six hours feels like or what an hour feels like, but little kids don’t. And I remember used to drive myself crazy when my son was like a year old. Like ah, I’ve been working for seven hours and they haven’t been with him for seven hours. And he didn’t know what seven hours meant. They don’t have any concept of time. All they know is how you feel and how you make them feel. And I used to put so much pressure on myself. So now at my law firm I have a lot of young moms and they stress about having to go, you know, to an overnight business trip or something. I’m like, your baby won’t know that you’re gone for that long. Like, yeah, they’ll miss you will be happy when you’re back. But they’re not looking at their clock. They don’t have one. Thank God.
Real Happy Mom 20:18
Definitely, it i, I can think of many times where I realized like, My son doesn’t even realize like I was gone for that long. Yes, I have little ones. They’re eight and five right now. So I know, as they get older, you know, that will change of course, because I remember my mom told me she was like, now’s the time that you want to like work and put the hours in, because when they become teenagers, you need to be in their face, because the hormones and all that. Oh, yeah, definitely want to make sure that, yes, I’m a little bit more present when they get a little bit older. But I definitely agree with the ad. They don’t really observe the clock like we do.
Rosanna 20:58
Now they don’t they don’t have any context or what it means. And so we have to remember that as adults, like they’re, they’re not looking at their Apple watch every five seconds. They’re just
Real Happy Mom 21:07
known. Yeah, for sure. Now, I was just wondering, I know, you’ve given us a lot of really great advice. But if you had any other motivational, quote, words of encouragement for us real happy mom was before we signed off.
Rosanna 21:24
You know, I really think you’ve got to monitor that voice in your head, because so many of us walk around saying terrible things to ourselves, like, oh, you know, I’m talking right now. And I’m looking at the camera thinking, Oh, God, my hair looks kind of frizzy. Or, you know, I look fat, or Oh, my son’s lunch today is the Lunchable. And we have this really negative voice. And I’ve just stopped myself numerous times a day and try to shift that. Because we wouldn’t like get if anyone talked to us like that. If our kids walked around saying stuff like that, we’d be devastated. But for some reason, we feel like it’s okay, you know, to beat ourselves up. And I’m sure you’ve experienced this, when you’re in a group of women within 10 or 15 minutes, the first thing that someone says is, oh, I need to lose weight, Oh, I’m so fat. You know, you just start complaining about how you look and your clothes are tight, and the COVID 15 pounds and all that jazz, but let’s just be kinder to ourselves, let’s pivot and look at what all the cool things are that we’ve done, and accomplished. I mean, man working women during COVID been a nightmare. Remote school remote work being with your family 24/7 cooking. I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t one of those moms that have the luxury of repainting bedrooms during COVID. I was in survival mode, keeping my business, you know, going and my kid, you know, remote school and, and all that. So just be kind, look back at what you’ve done. Even if you have to write down one thing a day that you’d like about yourself, or that you’ve actually accomplished those things the way that you talk to yourself and, and just taking inventory of the.
Rosanna 23:17
Four, you’re like, Yeah, I did this, you know, I could do this again. This morning. I was all stressed out about, you know, something, my son just playing football. And I was worried. And I had to say to myself, you’ve been worried before about him. And it’s worked out fine. You know, and it was just that shift that was like, Okay, take a deep breath. It’s going to be fine. And I think as women we’re on this hamster wheel of Go, go go go go go go all the time. But let’s stop, say nice things. put things in perspective. And the world is a much better place.
Real Happy Mom 23:51
Yes, definitely. I love that. Now, if we want to connect with you learn more about you and about high wire woman where can we find you online.
Rosanna 24:02
So high wire woman.com is the best place to find me. I do a podcast as well that that that drops every Tuesday, high wire woman and I entered a interview interesting women like yourself, who are always trying to solve the problems of the highway or woman. So I talk to people from all different industries. And we always have a lot of fun tips and tricks on how to stay on that highway. And I love working with other women who are just trying to be better versions of themselves. So can definitely reach out to me on highway women.com.
Real Happy Mom 24:32
Awesome, awesome, and I’ll be sure to include all of the links to get in contact with you in the show notes. So again, thank you, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Rosanna 24:44
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Real Happy Mom 24:48
Button. There it is. Now that does it for this week’s episode of the happy mom podcast head on over to happy mom.com/ 171 To get your hands on this Show Notes for this episode. If you found this helpful, please make sure that you share this episode with a friend because sharing is caring, you know definitely helped me out by getting the word out to other moms that this is a great podcast. We’ll be back next week for another episode. Take care and with lots of love
