Eve Rodsky Says Solving Burnout Is All About 'The Life-Changing Magic of Mustard'

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3 days ago

Parents Next Gen winner and author of 'Fair Play' author Eve Rodsky has been called the 'Marie Kondo of relationships' because of how she helped families balance domestic labor. She says it started with one question.
Balance isn't a fairytale for Eve Rodsky, it's a way of life. Coming from Harvard with a background in organizational management, Rodsky applies the idea of treating our homes as our most important organizations, and it's made a big difference in the lives of families across the world.
In her New York Times bestselling book, Fair Play, she developed a game plan to help couples restore balance to domestic labor within their homes and their relationships. Followed up by Find Your Unicorn Space, Rodsky dove deeper into the idea that every individual, especially parents, needs time to unlock their creativity without a margin. Rodsky's work to help parents balance that mental and physical load while reclaiming their creativity is what makes Rodsky a Parents Next Gen winner.
Rodsky was born and raised by a single mom in New York City, and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three kids. Called the 'Marie Kondo of relationships,' she shares how organization can be an effective tool for radical change, and gives more insight into what has now become a national conversation.
How does Fair Play approach the imbalance within domestic labor?
Fair Play is a system. It treats the home as an organization, so that was the big 'aha' moment. That's my background; I'm an organizational management specialist. I'm a lawyer, and I have lots of experience working for families that look like the HBO show Succession.I would say that people should feel bad for me, but what I learned in that work was that all successful organizations have two things: they have accountability and they have trust. So what Fair Play does is it uses organizational management techniques to restore accountability and trust to the home. No one had ever done that before.
You surveyed over 500 couples across the US to get a better understanding of the invisible load families carry. Is there something you specifically heard from men that informed your approach to how couples can work together to restore balance?
I call it the life-changing magic of mustard. What I heard from men at first was that they were overreporting what they were doing, so that was the thing that was most alarming to me. Women were coming to me saying they were completely overwhelmed and their partners weren't helping, but men thought that they were doing 50% of the work. What I had to do was change my research approach, so that's why I call it the life-changing magic of mustard, because how you ask questions is how you get good data.
A lot of the questions that I asked before Fair Play were questions that weren't capturing the real problems. The question I started to ask was, 'How does mustard get in your refrigerators?'Once I asked that, I was able to capture data in 18 countries, and now we have a study on women's cognitive labor based on that question. What that allowed me to do was realize that in 18 countries, women were the ones who noticed that their son Johnny liked yellow mustard, not spicy Dijon.That noticing, that conception, is a key part of project management. The 'aha' moment was that the reason men were saying they were involved in groceries was because that's the planning phase, they weren't involved in that. They were involved in the execution phase.I realized that I could change the dynamic of how men felt as well by moving from a 50-50 scorekeeping exercise to one of full ownership, and that's where Fair Play was born.
What is the toll that women often face being the 'she-fault,' as you call it?
If you're always the one in charge of the C [conception] and the P [planning], regardless of whether you have someone helping you execute the E, that C and the P is where the cognitive labor is. We have a new study that shows that the more women hold the cognitive labor (that C and the P), the more they're not allowed to give ownership to others, the more their mental health suffers, the more they're personally burnt out, and the more their relationship satisfaction decreases.It's literally life and death. Women are sick, they're burnt out. We have women in our studies, basically any woman that says that she holds more than 60 of the Fair Play cards—most people play with about 80 cards if you have kids—if you're holding more than 60 cards, almost every single woman in our study was showing some physical ailment and the top ones were insomnia, stress-related disease, autoimmune diseases, we had women reporting a lot of cancer diagnoses.We're not saying that stress causes all these things, but it definitely exacerbates them.
Recent research confirms what we're sure you already know, that 71% of moms still say they feel they're shouldering the majority of the mental load. What message do you have for them and what do you hope the future looks like for them?
My message is that there is a way out. There is a secret formula for the home, assuming that you have a willing partner. My number one thing is if you have an unwilling partner, a partner not willing to engage in fair play, or any of these conversations, then you should leave the marriage. That's what I've learned over 10 years: get out if you can. But in most marriages, most of the couples—and we have thousands of couples that are in the Fair Play system—the partner is willing. They just didn't know how to help.I like people to do an audit where they ask themselves, 'In the past month, have I ever said to myself, 'I'm a better multitasker—I'm wired differently to do this?' Have I said to myself, 'we're both rectal surgeons, but my partner is better at focusing on one task at a time, and I can find the time? Have I ever said, 'My partner makes more money than me or my job is more flexible?''If you've ever said any one of those messages to yourself, they're all toxic.
The system is Fair Play, it's ever-standing, and you can do an audit of the system. How well is your system working? How functional do you feel like your home is, or are you a home where you're waiting to decide who takes the dog out every night before it takes a pee on the rug? If you're feeling completely chaotic, start with the system. If you feel like you've said one of those toxic messages to yourself, start with your boundaries. If you feel like you can't even bring things up, start with communication.
Do you and your husband follow the rules of Fair Play, and if so, how does it help you divide the labor of raising your kids?
Everyone should watch our documentary on Hulu. It's called Fair Play, and it shows how we practice fair play. I think it's affected our kids the most because they have ownership of their tasks in the home.They understand that laundry is not just putting the clothes in the washer. It's understanding to separate darks from lights. It's understanding that certain clothes don't go in the washer, that certain clothes have to be hand-washed or dry cleaned. It's understanding that you want to plan for when you do the laundry so that you have clean clothes for when you need them. It's understanding that once those clothes go in, you also have to set a timer to know when they go in the dryer, and then set another timer for when they have to come out of the dryer. And then you have to set another time to fold them, and then you also have to know where those clothes go.So, that's the ownership of laundry. Understanding that CPE [conception, planning, executing] is the core tenet of our household has been really helpful for our children's executive function.
You shared that your mother was a single mom. What was it like growing up with her and how did she influence your perspective on unpaid domestic labor?
My mother is a professor in macro-social work, so she does a lot of social change work. What she always taught me was that everything's a both-and. It's not either-or.What I've learned is that we have to fight for better systems for parents within this country, whether it's subsidizing childcare, paid leave, allowing men more flexibility to be caregivers—but also, with the both-and, we can take the opportunity to change our lives today.We can start practicing Fair Play. We can start demanding a better world for our time. We can reclaim our time. We can spend less time doing cognitive labor. We can insist that our partners share the load.
You talk about people having a unicorn space. Can you explain what that is and tell us about what your unicorn space is?
Unicorn space means creativity is not optional. As parents, we are parents, partners, and professionals on repeat. We have zero opportunity to explore creativity, and so what this concept really gets at is that identity loss in parents is real. To reclaim the things that we love, values-based curiosity, sharing ourselves with the world, and completing something different outside of our roles is really the antidote to burnout.The antidote to burnout is being consistently interested in your own life. You're not going to get there by just having a once-a-year girls trip or men's trip or even going to the gym every day. We have to have this third thing, this idea of unicorn space. Something in our life to say, 'I'm working towards a goal where I can't believe I just did that.' The consistency of learning and excitement, and the fear, all those elements are really what make a meaningful life.
I signed up for something called 29029. It's a hike up Whistler Mountain where you go up eight times to replicate what it would feel like to do the elevation of Everest. I've been training. It's helped me process my father's death in October. And it's the craziest endurance challenge I've ever done, so that's my unicorn space right now.I will say that I think it's very important to understand, my husband and my kids are not like, 'Wow mom you're amazing.' They're like, 'Ugh, mom's going on another hike again.' 'When you hold a boundary, people are not cheering for you. It doesn't work like that. Expect other people's discomfort when you hold your boundaries.
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