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Do you fall into the Dominant, Inspiring, Supportive or Cautious category per the DISC personality assessment? Do you know if you’re an ISTJ or an INFJ in the Myers-Briggs assessment? Or are you considered a Blue in the Color Personality Test?

When it comes to personality assessments, a lot of people seem to look for ways to understand themselves and others better, by taking a personality or strengths finder-type test, hoping to understand the motivations, thoughts, feelings and actions that lead us to do what we do. It can be comforting to come across a grid or diagram that promises to explain where you fall in the scheme of things compared to other humans, and how to best utilize your innate gifts and talents.

While tests like DISC and Myers-Briggs are interesting in order to see what you tend to do or what you’re strong in, they’re also just a snapshot in time, not an identity. Unfortunately, while they are intended to give you information, they can also keep you stuck, believing that you are what the test or assessment says you are and there’s not much you can do about it.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I explain how your personality is shaped and how you can choose to be the architect of it.

As we are all living in uncertain times, it can be challenging, especially as a mom, to deal with all the things that are known and unknown right now. When someone asks you, “How are you doing? Is everything okay?”, it can often feel like you’re a dam about to burst with things that are weighing on you and challenges you’re having to deal with.

As a smart, capable woman it can be difficult to deal with the roller coaster of ups and downs that come with being an accountant and a mom. You’re not just responsible for doing your job and servicing your clients or the company you work for, but you’re also in charge of the health and welfare of your children while helping to support your family financially as well.

When you have all that on your shoulders and then add something like a job loss or a loved one’s diagnosis, it can often feel like you’re at your breaking point. It’s as if one more thing will literally break you into a million pieces.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss why it’s okay to not be okay and the steps for handling how you feel when life isn’t going the way you want.

You can check out the CPA MOMS Podcast Roadmap at https://cpa-moms.com/the-cpa-moms-podcast-roadmap/

Every CPA has a story - we all have a journey we’ve taken to get us to where we are. Every entrepreneur also has a story and journey as well. This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Nicole Kehl, CPA. Nicole is a mom of two from Kentucky and became CPA MOMS fourth founding franchisee, having previously struggled with building her own practice and having the support and training she needed.

Listen in as Nicole shares how she started out in the United States Marine Corp, worked in private accounting after college, but after having her second child, she knew she needed to make a change.

Although Nicole had started her own firm with the help of CPA MOMS previous Fast Start Program, she realized that she needed more support in order to create the vision she had for herself and her family.

As we flip our calendars over each month after the start of the new year, a lot of accountant moms might be experiencing a wave of stress and anxiety, especially those in public accounting. Once January is over, we all know that tax season is just waiting to pounce on us like a lion waiting in the brush.

On the one hand, as a modern working woman living in the time of technology, you fortunately have the incredible ability to use that technology to help you in so many ways, especially in the work you do as an accountant. But on the other hand, with all the benefits you have with technology, you are also living in a time of information overload and information disorganization.

Just know that time actually is on your side when you learn how to work better with it. Learning the skill of how to take back control of your time is a gift you give to yourself professionally, but it’s also a gift you give to yourself and your family personally because it allows you to be less stressed and enjoy your time.

From one working mom to another, learning how to take back control of your time is a career and life changer. It allows you to be incredibly efficient and to create the balanced life that you really want and deserve.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss the power of being proactive and how to use that power to get more done in less time.

For information about The Balanced Accountant Program, you can check it out at https://cpamoms-academy.com/p/the-balanced-accountant

While being an accountant comes with its own set of unique challenges, being an accountant AND a mom can be a very difficult balancing act, both physically, mentally and emotionally. There are so many expectations placed on you professionally, often making your energy and patience dwindle considerably when you are home with your family.

When you’ve been spending so much mental energy at work, it can be tough to come home and deal with the demands of raising children while also creating a home environment that offers you a “soft place to fall” at the end of the day. I’ve yet to meet a mother that didn’t yell at her children at various times, for various reasons.

But let me be clear - you are NOT a bad mom if you yell at your children; you just might want to consider the effects it’s having on you and on them. If you are looking to understand why yelling has become a habit for you and how to break that habit, then this episode is going to be helpful

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss the reasons why yelling can become such a powerful habit and how to begin to break the habit of yelling at your children.

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Alexandra Ferman and Allison Adams-Jones. For both of my guests, being a woman of color in accounting has been a challenge, both culturally and professionally.

Alexandra lives in California (born and raised), she is working on passing the CPA exam to obtain her license and is hoping to be licensed by the end of this year. Alexandra worked in public accounting for about 6 years and recently transitioned to private a few months ago. She has three children, two girls and a boy, who are 17, 7 and 5.

Allison lives in Cincinnati, OH, is a practicing CPA, works in public accounting and has been with her firm for 12 years, 6 ½ of which she has worked remotely, Allison just got out of the Navy Reserve, which she served in for 11 ½ years. She is a single parent to a 20-month old girl.

During this interview, we not only talk about the normal struggles that accountant moms face, but the particular struggles that women of color in accounting face as well.

Whether you are an accounting employee or an accounting entrepreneur, it’s nice to be considered the person that other people can count on. When others know that you can be relied on to do great work in a timely fashion, that definitely helps you get noticed, whether you are looking to move up in your company or you are looking for client referrals.

Unfortunately, saying yes to every request might make you the “go to” person, but it can also make you incredibly stressed, overwhelmed and burned out. For a hardworking mom like yourself, it can be tricky to push back when requests from bosses, coworkers or clients start messing with your schedule and making you feel like you’re being pulled in too many directions.

Learning how to push back in a way that doesn’t jeopardize your career, your business, or your relationships, offers you the opportunity for a discussion as opposed to a disagreement, and gives you the ability to set boundaries around your time. If you want to have more autonomy over your schedule, and decrease your overwhelm, while still maintaining healthy relationships, you need to learn a better way to push back.

If you’ve ever found yourself in a meeting getting defensive about requests being made of you, hanging up from a client call with a feeling of dread, or battling with your children because of their demands, then this episode is going to be really helpful. There is a better way to be an amazing working mom, but not lose yourself in the process.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss a method for how to push back and give you examples of when and how to put this method to use.

If you'd like to discuss anything you've heard on the podcast, you can book a 20 minute free coaching session at http://go.scheduleyou.in/X7xcdpc

Have you ever set a goal and then gotten a burst of energy or been so excited about taking on some new challenge that you set another goal, and another? Before you know it, you’re feeling overwhelmed, your free time is non-existent and you realize that you haven’t actually gotten much headway on anything; or that you’re still paying for a subscription for that meditation app that you haven’t used in 2 months and that you haven’t actually sat on the stationary bike in weeks.

This is what usually happens to a lot of women after the excitement of New Year’s resolutions where off and you realize your goals like losing weight, learning how to crochet, reading every night to your kids, and joining that virtual book club are nice ideas, but unrealistic. It doesn’t even have to be a New Year’s thing; it can happen at any time during the year where you get the urge to set a bunch of goals.

Loving the sense of accomplishment when you set and achieve a goal is great, but the problem is when just setting one goal at a time isn’t enough; when you feel a sense of urgency and impatience with yourself, your career, or anything else in your life. Not only do you wind up spreading yourself too thin, but you also decrease your ability to succeed at your goals.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss the importance of constraint and how to use it to achieve whatever goals you have both personally and professionally.

You can book a 20 minute free coaching session at http://go.scheduleyou.in/X7xcdpc

You already know that being an accountant is tough, and being an accountant and a mom is tougher, but being an accountant and single mom should seriously come with its own awards ceremony! As a single working mom, you probably feel like you’re running a marathon every single day, while only being trained to walk a 5k at best.

If you’re like most single working moms, you’ve probably experienced loneliness, fear about supporting your family, and not being sure whether you can do all this on your own. With the current pandemic, these issues and more are even more stressful and overwhelming.

With less people you’re able to be around, more restrictions to adhere to, and the added complications of either co-parenting or having no other parent around, more and more single working moms are finding it challenging to balance it all. What was already difficult before the pandemic, has now become even more demanding and exhausting.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss the importance of getting support, being honest about what you need, tweaking your priorities and dropping the guilt.

It doesn’t matter whether you are in public or private accounting, we all have busy seasons throughout the course of the year. In private accounting you probably struggle with quarterly deadlines and in public accounting you’re most likely faced with busy times like tax season; times where there is more work to get done than at other times during the year.

Now obviously stress is not unique to the accounting profession, but when you add the demands of an accounting career to the demands of being a mom, it can pretty much guarantee that you’ll experience stress trying to balance it all. Before you know it, you’re overwhelmed, frustrated and confused about how to handle everything you have to do.

Unfortunately, as a profession, accountants have normalized stress in our lives because everyone around us seems to be stressed as well. We find it hard to believe that things can be different since it seems like it’s just a normal part of the work culture; as if stress is a given, or possibly even a badge of honor.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss where stress comes from and my 3 secrets for having a stress-free busy season.

To find out more about The Balanced Accountant Program HERE

A few months ago in episode #79 of The CPA MOMS Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Heather Satterley, CPA, a second generation CPA mompreneur. In addition to not giving up on her dream to become a CPA, Heather was named one of the Top 50 Women in Accounting 2019 by Practice Ignition.

She has a 100% virtual consulting company as well as a YouTube channel called the “Appy Hour”. She and her co-host have free webinars, discussing various technology apps and programs available for accountants, helping them to feel competent and confident with the ever-growing technologies available.

After asking our CPA MOMS Facebook Community what they’d like to learn more about in regards to technologies for accountants, I interviewed Heather about best practices for document storage, filing structure and retention as well as the best cloud based accounting programs and more.

Heather is a wealth of information that you won't want to miss!

This fun episode of The CPA MOMS Podcast shares the highlights from the most popular and thought provoking episodes over the past two plus years.

The whole premise for this podcast is to show you that you can have the thriving accounting career as well as the happy family you desire, by learning some of the tools that I, the podcast host, Dawn Goldberg, CPA, have learned along the way in my 30+ year career in public accounting. I just knew that what I was learning in my own personal studies wasn’t taught in any accounting classroom or any continuing education seminar.

I wanted to make everything that made my life so balanced and manageable, available to you so it can help you as much as it’s helped me. To be able to have a career in public accounting, as well as be there for my children, without the stress and overwhelm that most accountants experience, was something that I knew other accountant moms would want to know and should be able to know how to do.

This episode discusses some of the highlights from the past two plus years, and how this podcast can help you be the balanced accountant and mom that you deserve to be.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I break down the most popular podcasts into three categories - how to manage stress like a pro, how to confidently own your worth, and how to boost your time management and productivity.

For The CPA MOMS Podcast Roadmap you can get a copy HERE

At some point in everyone’s life and career, you’re going to make a mistake. Whether it’s choosing the wrong size when buying pants for your son, entering the wrong date on a check in Quickbooks which completely throws off the opening Trial Balance, or putting cinnamon instead of cumin into that taco dish (been there, done that), as accountants and moms we are no stranger to making mistakes.

It happens to everyone, even the most conscientious and organized working moms. Just by virtue of the fact that you have a very busy life, balancing an accounting career with a family, all while trying to do your best in all areas of your life, can often lead to mistakes as you try to keep all the balls you’re juggling up in the air.

In order to be both the accountant and mother you want to be, you need to get out from under the weight of a mistake so you can bounce back and keep doing what you are here to do. The world doesn’t need you to be perfect, it needs you to know how to handle mistakes when they happen and not let them derail your progress forward.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss why we make mistakes and how to bounce back after making one.

Whether you are an accounting employee or entrepreneur, there’s no avoiding the fact that interviews are a necessary part of the hiring, advancement, and growth of your career and business. While most accountants would rather discuss numbers than themselves, when it comes to interviews, it can be challenging to know what to say, what to do, and how to maneuver during these often awkward social interactions.

Whether you are the interviewer or interviewee, you are still being sized up by someone else and deciding whether there’s a good fit. As the interviewee, you should be as concerned about whether you want to work for a potential employer, as they are concerned about whether they want you to work for them.

But one of the most important things that I think is missing from you nailing that job interview is less about the resume and more about you, your self-confidence and your self-awareness. Without a better understanding of how you think and feel, and how to manage your mind as well as the mind of the interviewer, you’re probably not as prepared as you can be.

In order to nail that job interview, you need to spend as much time understanding yourself as you do trying to figure out which font looks more professional for your resume. While there are definitely things you can do to get your resume to the top of the pile, the interview is where you are no longer your credentials on a piece of paper, but instead a working mom with hopes, dreams, fears and hangups.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I explain what you need to do in preparation for a job interview and then how to nail it when the time comes.

From the tragedy of losing both of her parents in a car crash a few years ago, Sallome Hralima she has devoted her time to give back to society some of the very valuable life lessons she learned in order to prevent unnecessary hardship for families who don't have their estate plans complete.

She isn’t an accountant or an attorney, but has taken her experience and used it to help others.

Sallome facilitates and encourages dialogue among family members about the subject of estate and end of life planning. She is an advisor at After, the organization she helped create in order to turn her personal tragedy into a gift for others.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast we discuss the importance of end of life planning and how to have those difficult conversations as well as how to design your life and your legacy.

You can find out more about After at https://www.after.community/

As the year comes to a close and year end planning is on the minds of all accountants, it’s more important than ever to get a handle on procrastination so that deadlines aren’t missed, and so that you’ll also be able to enjoy the holiday season with your family. There’s nothing worse than having to work frantically the last few weeks in December because you’ve procrastinated for so long that everything has piled up into an insurmountable mountain of overwhelm.

The problem though when it comes to procrastination, is that you fool yourself into believing that that’s just what you do; that you are the type of person who needs to wait until the pressure is high or the deadline is looming. You may have even labeled yourself as a procrastinator, believing that that’s just part of your identity and there’s nothing you can really do about it.

You may even think that it’s how accountants get things done, letting looming deadlines hang over your head like a guillotine, excited by narrowly escaping beheading each time and priding yourself on finally getting it all done in the nick of time. But have you ever asked yourself, what are the costs of procrastination to you, your family, your health, or your productivity and efficiency?

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss 5 causes of procrastination and the best way I have found to overcome procrastination.

It doesn’t matter whether you are in public or private accounting, or how long you’ve been an accountant, having a professional development plan is key if you want to have a successful accounting career with a deeper level of satisfaction.  Let’s face it, even though being an accounting professional has taken a lot of hard work on your part up until this point, now is not the time to drop the ball.

While it may be cliche, it’s also very true - your future is really what you make of it.  Taking charge of and developing a professional development plan enables you to start, or continue, on a chosen path, set reasonable goals, and take the steps necessary to achieve those goals.

Honestly, no one will ever be as invested in your career as you are, which is why it’s so important to understand what might be getting in the way of taking charge of your professional development and what you can do about it.  In this episode I want to help you overcome the typical hurdles that a lot of accountant moms face so that you can have the accounting career that you really want.  

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I explain the reasons why it can be challenging for accountant moms to take charge of their professional development and an exercise you can do to help you take charge.

You can schedule a free 20 minute coaching discovery call HERE

The holidays are quickly approaching, and although 2020 may not be quite as “normal” as it’s been in the past, there are always going to be family gatherings, company or client parties, or other holiday and social events to varying degrees. Unfortunately, whether it’s getting together in person or virtually, so many women experience social anxiety no matter what time of year, or how many people are in attendance.

Unfortunately, so many of us will spend time in social settings, both personally and professionally in our accounting careers, painfully aware of ourselves and worried about how we’re being perceived by others. As women we are even more susceptible to social anxiety because of the undue pressure put on us to look a certain way and act a certain way, in order to be approved of, accepted, and appreciated.

If this resonates with you, it’s important to understand what actually causes social anxiety so you can lessen its effects on you. You don’t have to plan on living alone in a cabin in the woods or saying no to every social request, when you learn how to deal with social anxiety in a way that empowers you, rather than robs you of your ability to handle any social situation.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss the cause of social anxiety and a better way of dealing with it.

Connie Benjamin is the #1 International Best Selling Author of the book “Women With Fire”, international speaker, and podcast host of My Fire Within Radio. After nearly losing her marriage and almost giving up the entrepreneurial journey, she and her husband Andy began a quest to live their mission without losing their family. They developed the My Fire Within System that helped them to fall in love again, replace their day job income, and love being stay at home parents with their three daughters.

Using their proprietary My Fire Within System, they are now on a mission to empower other entrepreneurs who have lost passion for their purpose within their relationships and business to re-light their fire within themselves, their marriage, and their business connections.

Their mission is to empower entrepreneurs to fulfill their Divine purpose so they can uplift their family and humanity through socially responsible business.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I had the pleasure of interviewing Connie and learning more about what led her to write her book and her mission to help more women follow their calling without losing what they love in the process.

All working moms have experienced the “Sunday blues” to varying degrees, where you dread having to go to work on Monday and wish you had more vacation time. Or maybe it’s Wednesdays that are challenging for you because they promise the weekend, and it never seems to come soon enough.

While we’ve all had times where we have a love/hate relationship with our job, unfortunately it's becoming more mainstream for people to be complaining about working in toxic work environments. 50 years ago a toxic work environment meant working in a space where there were literally toxic chemicals or harmful substances, however today, a toxic work environment could mean an unlimited number of issues.

Unfortunately, the issue with working in a toxic work environment is that it breeds unrest, constant stressors, and often low morale. It’s as if a dense fog creeps in and covers everyone affected, with a dark cloud of overwhelm, frustration, and distraction.

Before you know it, you’re bringing your toxic work environment issues home with you. When this happens, it begins to take over your conversations with loved ones, robs you of much needed rest, and causes more burnout, stress and overwhelm.

Fortunately, for those non-extreme situations, where you don’t have an HR department to handle your issues, or maybe you do and they’re ineffective, or where you aren’t quitting anytime soon, there is a way to handle working in a toxic work environment. You don’t need to feel hopeless and suffer with the daily blues any longer.

This week on The CPA MOMS Podcast I discuss why you might be dreading your job and what to do when you work in a toxic work environment.