Ellen's blog

Like most working mothers, I spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy worrying. The origins of the anxiety are most commonly: being late to pick up the children, mentally-scarring the children by my absence during working hours, being perceived as a part-timer, being perceived as un-committed; missing out on a promotion; being over-taken by some young childless whipper-snappers (who remind me of my younger self)!; getting (more) grey hairs. I could go on…..

Like most people in financial services, I like a nice bit of data analysis and lean process management, and applying these principles to my personal life yields interesting results….on analysing the relationship between the length of time spent worrying about a particular outcome and the number of times that outcome actually arises, I have to accept that I’m wasting too much of my precious energy worrying about things which either don’t happen, or if they do, are actually much less stressful than expected. The result of tying up a large proportion of my limited energy on worrying about the future, is that I cannot actually enjoy the present, because I spend it in a state of anxiety, worried that the future will not be as good as the present, which is actually not terribly good, because of all the worrying. You see the paradox? vicious circle? I used to be of the opinion that if someone told me not to worry about something because it’s beyond my control, I would simply dismiss their advice because I felt that not worrying meant not caring, but this is absolutely not the case.  

Women also have a tendency to extrapolate problems; for example “I’ve got a headache, so I’ll have a paracetamol” can easily become: “I’ve got a headache, it’s probably a brain tumour, I might die, who will look after my kids when I’m gone? Will my husband re-marry (I bet he would – must bring this up with him, although obviously that will cause an argument).” So the trick to managing this energy-sapping behaviour would appear to lie in your ability to identify it, and then stop it in its tracks. Let's not try to tackle the whole of the future today; easier said than done, but something to aim for nonetheless. Think of all the other things you could be using that energy on…..

Ellen works for a well-known investment bank in the City. She began her career at KPMG, before moving on to Barclays, HSBC and Aviva before joining her current employer almost three years ago.  She has two children aged three and one, who divide their working week between nursery and grandma's house.