In this episode, I chat about planning for work-life integration instead of work-life balance. How about planning to integrate all the areas and aspects of our lives and careers, instead of compartmentalizing and attempting to balance it all! Listen in on this episode!
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Self-care? What self-care? That’s the question many working women and moms ask themselves (and others) when constantly pummeled with the urgency of self-care. When everything else is urgent, from the kids’ school activities to professional responsibilities and household duties, how do we make time for self-care? How do we even begin to care for ourselves when there is so much to do to care for others? And most importantly, how do we maintain a consistent habit of self-care when our schedules are prone to so much change and upheaval, from kids’ sick days to hybrid work?
If you’re reading this and nodding, then you know how setting and keeping self-care habits as a working woman and mom is daunting. It’s all fun and games to read the plethora of self-care advice out there, especially coming from women who are able to hire personal chefs, trainers and assistants? Yet, when you’re busy saving for the kids’ college and catching up on your own retirement, all the while trying to get your sleep on and snatching some childcare on the fly, where do you fit self-care?
Like so many other working women and moms, I have, and still am, grappling with all these questions, plus the undercover guilt of not properly taking care of myself at times. Finding the time, money and resources to practice and maintain proper self-care is no easy feat. So what are some simpler ways, accessible and available to most of us, to do this without breaking the bank, the schedule or losing our minds? Here are three simple ways to get started:
Build small self-care habits into your daily routine
Planning for the monthly spa date with the girls or a solo trip is certainly great for most of us. However, for many among us, it’s not always feasible. Even when it is, it may not be sustainable in the long run, what with the little one catching a cold, an unexpected bill popping up, or a marriage crisis brewing in the background. Besides, what are we to do in between the monthly spa dates and solo trips? This is where building self-care into your daily routine can make a difference. It starts by seeing self-care differently, as just the simple act of caring for oneself, and not necessarily champagne-infused indulgences at the local spa. This can be done by building small self-care habits in the margins of life and work, such as waking up a few minutes earlier to enjoy a cup of coffee alone, or going to bed earlier to read a few pages of your favorite novel before catching some zzz’s. Long commute? How about finding some self-care podcasts to listen to, such as one of my favorites, “The Science of Happiness”.
Set an easy budget
Google the word “self-care”, and you may easily be overwhelmed with glamorous pictures of girls’ trips in Napa valley sipping on some fancy wine, or overpriced spas offering the latest fad in Swedish massages…Even self-care apparently requires money these days. Don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy a fancy spa and gourmet wine too, just not one that adds more financial stress…
If you’re like me, setting an easy “self-care” budget can help. This can be as easy as setting up an automatic $20 deduction a week from your paycheck into an account appropriately called “Self-Care” or “Self Love” (or whichever name will bring a smile of relief on your face). That’s $80 a month, $240 a year, and can take care of some the indulgences you would list under self-care.
Make it a family habit
For the working mamas reading this, we all know how self-care can be daunting. Just getting time on the toilet to gather your thoughts together or scroll through Instagram can be a challenge, never mind a stroll at the local mall or 15 minutes to get your eyebrows waxed without the little one requesting your undivided attention. So how about making self-care a family habit? I get it, the point is to get away from the family, however building family habits around self-care can help everyone understand and respect the need for it. This can take the form of implementing some “quiet time” at home, or teaching kids about the importance of self-care by helping them develop their own self-care habits.
Get a self-care accountability partner
One of the biggest obstacles to taking care of ourselves, is actually maintaining good self-care habits. Often, especially at the beginning of a year or season, we start on a good footing, only to fall back a few weeks or months later, overtaken by other “urgent” tasks and too tired to re-commit. This is where a self-care accountability partner can help. Sharing your self-care goals and being accountable to someone else can go a long way toward ensuring you don’t fall off the bandwagon. And if you do, someone will be there to catch you.
All in all, as attractive as the prospect of self-care can be, the reality is, it can also be daunting for many working women and moms already stretched too thin. However, by building self-care into our daily routine, setting an easy budget, making it a family habit, and getting a self-care accountability partner, it is possible to include more self-care into our daily lives.
When we think of working women and moms, we often think of work-life balance, this elusive Eldorado of perfect (or semi-perfect) equilibrium between motherhood, work, and life in general. An elusive Eldorado that has yet to be proven true, and whose impracticality and subjective nature keep pushing working women and moms everywhere over the edge… Countless articles and arguments have been written and built around this concept, only to slowly end in the sober realization that
work-life balance for working women and moms simply does not exist…Instead, shouldn’t we focus more on work-life integration?
How can one balance the deeply personal, unpredictable and subjective journey of motherhood with the creation and nurturing of a partnership or marriage, and the demands of a purposeful career interspersed with the many obstacles all too common to working women and mothers? How can one talk about balance when your average working mom performs at least five jobs before even leaving the house in the morning? And how can there ever be a sense of balance after the way women bore the brunt of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, from the home to the business and work front?
The simple answer, after all these years of building theories and concepts around work-life balance, is that there is none after all, at least not for working women and moms. The good news? There is a link between work and life, one that can finally be beneficial for working women and moms. It is not balance, but rather an integration of the various aspects and areas of our lives as working women and mothers.
While I, as a working woman and mom, do not pretend to or even desire to balance work and life, as it would suggest an equality of weights that does not even begin to exist; I can integrate them into the ever-evolving puzzle of my life. Here are a few steps to get started:
See your life as a whole
The first step is to stop giving in to the temptation of compartmentalizing the various areas of our lives. As effective as it may sound, I have found in my own experience as a working woman and mom it doesn’t exactly work. Planning for my work schedule without taking into account the kids’ school and activity schedule is a recipe for disaster. So is considering what my priorities at home are, without taking into account my professional life. Hence why it’s so important to see our lives as a whole, with inter-dependent and integrated areas as opposed to separate and independent aspects…
Consolidate what you can
When I started really understanding how connected the various areas of my life are, I began using the power of consolidation to bring them together. I have to say, my first motive was to make my life easier. The more I was able to consolidate tasks together, the better I was able to build and maintain habits that would otherwise be unsustainable for me. For instance, when I started building my schedule to allow me to go to the gym right after dropping off the kids, building a consistent exercising habit became easier. Since I already had to be out dropping off the kids, why not wrap my exercise into this continuum of activity? The more you can consolidate your habits, tasks and ultimately your day-to-day schedule, the more you can achieve a more integrated work and life. This way, switching from one activity to another goes from being this impossible task, to just being part of a flowing schedule.
Create and maintain margins
One of the biggest problems I face as a working woman and mom is having enough margin in my schedule. Instead, I often face, as many working women and moms, a packed-tight schedule with very little breathing room. The result? Feeling a sense of always running from one thing to the other, without enough breaks in between. Ultimately, this results in a sense of going from crisis to crisis and never catching a break.
This is when intentionally creating margins and breaks in your schedule can help. When we see and approach work, life, parenting, relationships, etc, as separate blocks to attend to, we tend to want to allow as much time as possible to each, thus foregoing the necessary spaces between them we need to breathe and recover. However, when integrating work and life, we’re able to allow the various areas of our lives to flow into each other, creating the much-needed margins we crave. For me, it means limiting multi-tasking, scheduling breaks, and allowing for at least an extra ten minutes for each task.
Overall, planning for more work-life integration as a working woman and mom requires the willingness to see our lives as a whole, instead of buckets to fill up and boxes to check at the end of the day. It also demands intention and some level of planning to consolidate what we can, and create the margins we need to breathe, recover and refuel. This year and beyond, I hope we can commit to more work-life integration and allow ourselves to live fully, rather in a compartmentalized way.
How will you integrate your work and life this year?
It’s one thing to set career goals at the beginning of the year. It’s another to actually devise a plan to reach those goals, especially as busy working women and moms. Many of us set ambitious goals as a new year, or even a new season begins, only to get stuck because we don’t have the blueprint to actually achieve them and we’re way too busy and spread thin anyways. I know I’ve certainly been there…
So how do we actually put together a plan that works for each and every one of us, in terms of achieving our career goals, whatever these goals may be? How do we get that raise this year? How do we manage to snatch that promotion? And most importantly, how do we set an approach that fits into our particular set of circumstances, lifestyle, environments, relationships, etc? I remember reading about all these highly successful individuals in the corporate and entrepreneurial world with incredible goals and habits, and not having a frame of reference to apply what I was learning. How was I to wake up at 4am when I had been nursing my newborn two hours prior? How was I to attend networking events when I was barely making it to pick up my kids? You may have probably felt the same, in addition to being intimated by the sheer monumental appearance of the tasks at hand…
What I didn’t realize back then, is that many of the successful women and men we look up to, have systems in place, people to help them, and entire infrastructures supporting them in accomplishing their objectives. That working mom killing it on social media also has a full-time nanny and a personal assistant. That newly minted managing director’s husband is a stay-at-home parent supporting her on the home front. For many, if not most of us, especially as working women and moms, these systems are non-existent, the support is quite scarce, from childcare support to financial support, and the resources are tight to begin with…
This is where a sense of purpose has to take over to build a plan that actually works for us as working women and moms. As many of us have already noted, what works for our male counterparts does not exactly work for us. What society, and many of the mainstream self-help and strategy books tell us, may also not apply to our lives as women and mothers. What works, what really works for women, is an approach that integrates the various aspects of our lives, regardless of our personal and professional circumstances.
As I worked to devise steps towards planning my own career amidst the changing winds of my own life, I kept focusing on what would bring me more of a sense of purpose. The word Purpose itself started speaking to me, so much so that I drafted seven (7) steps for career planning following the PURPOSE mnemonic, that I’m happy to share in this post. Here is the PURPOSE approach to planning your career:
Picture WHO you desire to be (not what you have to do): There is power in creating and honoring a mental image of the woman you know you can and are meant to be. This is not just in terms of career title, position, or possessions. This is in terms of the essence of WHO you are. Do you see yourself as fulfilled, powerful, creative, satisfied, rested in your career?
Use what you have. Next, consider what you do have in terms of qualities, strengths, attributes, as well as your current lifestyle, family, relationships. Make a list of these and reflect on how you can use them in your career this year.
Readjust your goals as necessary and often as needed. I remember hearing Christian author Joyce Meyer say in one of her podcast episodes when asked how she keeps her priorities straight, that she basically keeps straightening them out. Goals are not static monuments to worship at the feet of. Instead, they can be adjusted and readjusted as needed.
Make a realistic Plan. When I say realistic, I mean by this a plan that fits into your current reality. If you cannot realistically attend every after-work happy hour or networking event, do not include it in your plans.
Get Outside of your comfort zone. Commit to getting outside of your comfort zone as often as you can. This may mean asking someone to mentor you, starting a new side hustle, or volunteering for a project at work…
Take the next Smallest step. Goals are not accomplished through big, inconsistent steps, but rather through small, consistent efforts. What is the next smallest step you can take? It may be to write a sentence to begin that report, research paper or book, or to make that phone call, or hit “send” on that email you dread sending…
Execute! Commit to executing on your goals, even if imperfectly. Remember, done is better than perfect!
Planning your career at the beginning of the year goes beyond just setting goals. It’s also and most importantly about having a solid approach to becoming the person who actually achieves the best goals for themselves and their communities at large.
Thanks so much for tuning in and listening to this week’s episode! If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please share it by using the social media at the bottom of this post!
Also, leave me a review for the TCS podcast on Apple Podcasts !
