Hi, I’m Allison Venditti and this is the Moms at Work podcast. I’ve been an HR professional and a career coach for over a decade and our team has helped thousands of women grow their career. So whether you’re burnt out, underpaid, or just plain fed up, this podcast is here to fuel your fire, connect you to our movement, and help you take your career to the next level.

On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the cult of doing it all. After way too many conversations with people who feel like they are failing at everything, I thought it was really important for us to address what the cult of doing it all is, how it’s working against us, and how we can work on ignoring it.

So let’s start with the basics. What is the cult of doing it all? This is a weird unspoken expectation that working moms should be able to do it all. And they wrap it in a little bow called work-life balance. Somehow we’re supposed to work a full-time job, handle all the school forms, sign up for extracurriculars, cook meals, be emotionally available for everyone, stay in shape, have a social life, and, yeah, somewhere in there you’re also supposed to sleep.

That weird pressure of having it all without admitting how much help you actually need to keep it all going is causing us to fall apart. It’s the message that if you’re not thriving in all these areas, somehow you’re failing. A lot of this comes down to one thing: social media.

This expectation is complete garbage, and it’s something that I struggled with really hard for the first 10 years of my career. When I run Moms at Work on Instagram, I’m really careful about what I post because we live in a world where it shows clean homes and bento box lunches. People who wake up at 5 a.m. to journal, do yoga, run a business, and look good doing it. My first post on Instagram was of my bathroom when I walked in: a towel ripped in half, a broken hanger, and the window screen popped out. That was 8 a.m. at my house. I have three boys, and somehow that made me feel like a failure.

Instagram shows us what we should be doing in life, and LinkedIn shows us what we should be doing professionally. Blurring the lines between these two makes us feel like complete failures. Most of this is performative. If it is real, they probably have a lot of help. No one ever puts the fact that they have a housekeeper, an assistant, flexible spouses, or generational wealth.

What I really want people to take away is that a lot of what you’re comparing yourself to isn’t reality. If you feel like you’re drowning, it’s not because you’re disorganized or lazy. It’s because you’re trying to live a full life in a system that really wasn’t built for you. Workplaces weren’t built with mothers in mind, and parenting wasn’t supposed to be done in isolation without community or support. Success was defined by a model that assumed someone else, usually a woman, was at home taking care of everything.

When I researched for this episode, I found that most CEOs had one thing in common: a stay-at-home spouse. Imagine all the things that would be made so much easier if you had a stay-at-home spouse—which most of us don’t. That’s why it can look like they “have it all.”

So now you’re at work and still doing everything else, and you’re tired. You don’t need to hustle harder—you’re already working hard enough. What you need is a new system. That’s what we’re building at Moms at Work.

Let’s talk about the actual cost of trying to do it all. I’m not just talking about stress—I’m talking about full-blown burnout. I spent years working in disability management and managing leaves of absence. Since the pandemic, the rate of burnout for employees has exploded. The number of short-term and long-term disability claims has skyrocketed. This is mostly affecting women.

Once people hit burnout, it is really hard to reverse, to change course, or to make changes. We have to start looking at things that aren’t “acceptable” on LinkedIn: putting your career on pause, not applying for a promotion because you’re already burnt out, or walking away from jobs you love because the system doesn’t allow flexibility. All of these things are okay.

Even when we manage to do it all, nothing seems to matter. Work doesn’t work like school used to, where you had clear markers for success. We spend our life working toward goals, but as we enter our careers, consistent feedback disappears. As we get more senior, we’re not only responsible for our work but also for giving feedback to others, without ever being trained. This makes people feel adrift.

A big part of this is invisible labor, or unpaid labor. Invisible labor is time spent doing things like cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, caregiving, and running the emotional back end of our household. It remains largely invisible to economists because it’s expected to be done for free. Women’s unpaid labor literally keeps the world moving.

My favorite example is Iceland, when women went on strike to stop doing all work, including unpaid domestic labor. The country shut down. Women’s unpaid labor keeps economies running. If women were paid even minimum wage for this work, the number would be $10.9 trillion, more than the revenue of the top 50 companies on the Fortune 500 list. Women and girls perform over 75% of the world’s unpaid care work—12.5 billion hours a day. In Canada, women perform an average of four hours of unpaid labor daily, while men perform 2.5 hours. This hidden tax affects women’s time, health, and economic opportunity.

After listening to this episode, I want you to understand that there is a cost to pretending to do it all. Sharing your struggles with even one other person is an act of advocacy itself. Return-to-office mandates push back against flexibility, and my response is simple: leadership that demands you sacrifice your life isn’t leadership worth following. It is not your job to fit into a rigid 1950s work model.

Women are starting their own businesses. I was forced to work for myself because I couldn’t make it work with sick kids’ appointments. I now run a business called Moms at Work that employs five women who all work part-time, remotely, and flexibly—and we get more done than 20 people in a 40-hour week. I lead my team with trust and kindness. Imagine if companies focused less on shareholder value and more on employees.

My ask is simple: reflect on what this means for your life and be okay with the fact that maybe you aren’t okay. If you’re in a position of authority, push back on rollbacks of flexibility. Advocate alongside other women and men.

What happens when we say no to the cult of doing it all? When we stop buying into it, we start setting boundaries, letting some balls drop, and prioritizing rest. This year, I didn’t sign my kids up for certain things because I couldn’t do it all anymore. Asking for flexible work and choosing rest over productivity are critical. Rest is a necessity, not a reward. Rest is resistance.

When I made Moms at Work, my goal was to be part of this anti-cult movement. We’re here to help you stop juggling things that don’t matter. We do career coaching and workshops, but the most powerful thing is the network we’ve built where we can talk openly without shame. Sharing your experiences is the first step toward change.

You’re not alone, and you were never supposed to be alone. Doing it all is a myth. Even if you could do it all, why should you? You deserve rest. You deserve support. And you deserve a career that works for you, not the other way around. I hope that Moms at Work can help teach you these things and that if you’re feeling strong feelings about this episode, you can take that as an invitation to start making changes today.

I’m Allison Venditti, reminding you that you’re doing a good job.