The Juggle: YOUR DREAMS COUNT TOO!
Is it possible to fulfill yourself professionally and personally? Can we really have it all? The answer is yes, just not always at the same time.
Pursuing personal and professional goals doesn’t have to mean trade-offs. They can be mutually beneficial and provide a positive way of living.
However, accepting that, at times, one area of life will have to make way for another is realistic as we search for balance over time.
One of the first steps to creating successful work-life integration is to define what success means to you. This means having a clear vision for your life. Typically, we all have a sense of who we are and what we do, but how does the job of parent fit in? And what can we do when we experience conflicts between our role as parent and our previously existing sense of self.
How can we give adequate time and attention to both our children and our career? It can easily feel like we are being unsuccessful when one area falls behind. Truly examining your life means re-defining success not as something that has to be externally achieved but instead as a sense of well-being that can be internally reached.
Here’s a game-changer: “Success for me means that I strive to be the best version of myself, and to reduce any negative impact my behavior might have on others.” To be the best version of yourself means being honest about all your needs, including accepting that some of these needs may be in conflict in the short term but important in the long term, as they lead to wholeness for you as a person. Achieving your family dreams, as well as a measure of happiness and fulfillment in your career, will require introspection and conscious decisions to support your vision.
A personal Vision Statement Helps Redefine Success
This is a simple but very powerful exercise (you may want to make sure you have some quiet time to yourself to complete this). To help redefine success, it is helpful to start with the end in mind:
What is your vision for your life? Write it down. Write several versions if you need to and then pick the one that feels the most truthful. Try not to let your ego take over; really listen to your deeper, inner voice.
How would you like to be remembered and by whom? After you’ve answered that question, go back to your vision in point 1 and ask yourself if you want to redefine it.
What specific actions, activities, and relationships are helping you achieve this vision? Divide a page in half and write them down on one side of the page.
What specific actions, activities, and relationships are blocking you from achieving this vision? Write them down on the other half of the page.
Pledge right now to take action to increase what you wrote under point 3 and decrease point 4. Write down specific, measureable targets and how you will achieve them.
Pat yourself on the back! You’ve just done a great thing for yourself and your family.
Then, as part of your routine and to check your progress, ask yourself every week:
How well did I take care of myself?
What did I do to connect with my mate?
What did I do to connect with my kids?
How did I do at work?
Let the answers guide you so you don’t lose site if that long-term inner balance.
Making Conscious Parenting and Professional Choices
Achieving successful work-life integration requires understanding what you truly want to achieve professionally. It’s also important to consider whether your work offers you the flexibility to not only spend quality time with your family but also do other things you personally enjoy. Ask yourself: “Is work providing me with what I need, or do I feel stuck in an understimulating position in order to make room for other competing priorities from my partner and/or family?” Since half of your waking life is spent on the job (if you work full-time), it is critical that you find fulfillment in what you do.
If you want to be successful with your family, it will require a firm commitment to protect family time. Without this commitment, the urgent demands from work and the incessant beckoning of household tasks will steal precious relationship-building time. Equally, to be successful and content at work you need to protect that time too and not feel guilty about it. Often all that is required is a shift in mindset and a little bit of planning. Here are a few tips which can help in the “home-work”:
Celebrate mistakes as wonderful opportunities for growth. One of the fundamental cornerstones of Positive Discipline is to value mistakes as opportunities to learn. Pioneering this policy in your everyday life will help you to relax those exacting standards you hold for yourself (as well as your children, partner, and colleagues), and help you become a little more flexible and forgiving at home and at work.
Try not to multitask during family time. Check in with your focus where is your mind? If you’re spending time with your child but your mind is elsewhere, chances are he or she will feel it and could possibly act out. Children want to hear (with your words and your actions) the messages “You are important to me and your needs count.” Make a commitment that during family time you are present with your family and during work time you are present with your work.
Schedule special time. Kids aren’t nearly as materialistic as we tend to think. They’ll take quality time and genuine signs of affection any day over “bad conscious” presents from guilty-feeling parents. Begin to take your children (and your partner) on dates that you plan ahead together. Don’t be afraid to say no when a colleague asks you to work late or do extra work. You can say, “I’m sorry, I already have a very important meeting scheduled.”
Routines. Most everyone responds well to clear expectations and routines, and younger children in particular need them. Creating routine charts is great training for children to learn time and life management skills. Parents may help their children by guiding them in the creation of their routine charts instead of creating charts for them. Why not make daily affirmations a part of your daily morning and bedtime routine.
Shared responsibility through jobs and chores. Harmony and respect are maintained when family responsibilities are discussed and shared together. At a family meeting, make a list of all jobs and chores that need doing. Find a way to creatively rotate who does what. This helps teach valuable life skills around home management and teamwork. Regularly reevaluate progress at family meetings.
Use the digital world to your advantage—Skype or FaceTime when you’re traveling, and send cute texts and emojis to your kids once they’re old enough to have phones. Let them know in advance when you’re out of reach (in a meeting, for example) so they don’t worry if they can’t get hold of you.
It is not just parents who are busy—children are too! Your mind will be more at ease if you have goodcommunication around plans and schedules as a family. The key is to have fun! Create a clearly visible chart for everyone’s schedules, and then sit down as a family to discuss what everyone’s priorities are and figure our together how to make it work in a balanced way.
Making flexibility happen with your work requires discipline and letting go of perfection. It often requires setting boundaries around family time and work time, and finding creative ways of delivering even if you can’t physically be at work all the time. However, when you focus on all the benefits a flexible work situation brings to your family in terms of income, personal fulfillment, and security, it will feel easier to do. You are, after all, the leader in your own life!