I ask almost every woman I coach some version of the same question in our first session: walk me through your week. The answer is always full. Work deadlines, a kid's schedule, a partner's plans, a parent who needs a call back, a friend going through something hard. It's detailed and generous and it takes a while to get through.
Then I ask where she is in that list. Most of the time, there's a pause. Sometimes a laugh that isn't really a laugh. Sometimes she just says, "I'm not," like it hadn't occurred to her that she was supposed to be.
I see this constantly, and it isn't really about time management. These are women who are excellent at their jobs, who show up fully for their kids, who are attentive partners and reliable friends. The problem isn't that they're bad at handling everything. It's that they're good enough at it that nobody, including them, notices what it's costing. Giving to work, to children, to a partner, doesn't look like a problem from the outside. It looks like devotion. It only becomes visible later, as exhaustion that a weekend off doesn't fix, or a kind of flatness that shows up even when nothing is technically wrong.
What I've noticed is that it rarely comes from one overwhelming demand. It comes from a hundred small ones, each reasonable on its own. Your child needs help with something at 9pm. Your partner had a hard day and needs to talk it through. A client needs an answer tonight, not tomorrow. Any one of those, you'd say yes to without thinking twice, and you should. The problem is that "yourself" never makes it onto that list of asks at all, because you're not asking, you're just the one who's always available. There's no moment where you have to say no to you, because you were never in the running.
Mine used to look like helping people when I was the one who needed help, or a hard time sitting still long enough to actually hear my own thoughts instead of everyone else's. What helped me was time outside, and a partner who notices before I do when I've disappeared into everyone else's needs and says something about it. I don't think there's a clean fix for this. I think there's just getting better, slowly, at noticing sooner. You can't change what you don't know, or in this case, what you don't notice.
The thing I try to get across to the women I work with is that putting yourself on the list isn't the same as putting yourself first. Almost nobody I coach wants to flip the order and make everyone else wait. What they're missing is being on the list at all, somewhere, with a real claim on their time instead of whatever's left over after everyone else's needs are met. I've written before about choosing yourself, and that's exactly what this is. Not a dramatic exit from your responsibilities. A small, repeatable decision to count as one of the people you're responsible to.
There's also a quieter cost to never being on your own list, which is that you stop knowing what you'd actually choose if you were. Ask a woman who's spent ten years running on other people's schedules what she wants for herself and you'll often get silence first, not because the answer isn't in there, but because nobody's asked in a long time, including her. I think that's the real work behind confidence: not becoming louder, but staying familiar enough to yourself that you'd recognize your own answer if someone finally asked.
If this sounds like your week, you're not doing anything wrong. You're doing what you were taught was generous. The only thing worth questioning is whether generosity that never includes you is actually sustainable, or just invisible for a while.
This is what we're sitting with at Kafe con Propósito on October 8, in a session called Confidence & Boundaries. My guest that evening is Veronika Kořínková, a lawyer who spends her working life where boundaries get tested formally, in contracts and employment disputes. But most of the boundaries we lose aren't the ones anyone writes down. They're the ones we quietly stop holding with our own kids, our own partners, ourselves. Come with your coffee, no pitches, no pressure, just a room full of women figuring out how to get back on their own list.
Tamara Medina