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.
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There are few books I’ve read that have made me feel like my experience as a working woman and a mother in general, and a Black professional woman and mom in particular, is universal. Seldom have I felt more at home than in the pages of Michelle Obama’s latest book “The Light We Carry”. Rarely have I felt more seen, more touched, less invisible than inside her no-nonsense words, her lived experience, the shelter of her unique yet so universal testimony…
Yet, this is no common woman whose life I was reading the bold and brilliant strokes of. This woman, this role model to the whole world, also happens to be the first Black woman first Lady of the United States of America, an educated, profoundly and powerfully human woman. A woman who’s been praised, but also critiqued, denigrated and misunderstood…Yet a woman whose light she so graciously allows to shine on the rest of us, even as she gently summons us to let our own shine…
As a Black woman born and raised in Senegal, West Africa, an immigrant on US soil, someone at the margins of different worlds, cultures, even languages, I could so relate to her voice also suspended between worlds. Worlds transcending generations of past slaves, into a middle-class home on Euclid Avenue in Chicago, to the heights of Ivy league schools and prestigious law firms, into the noble service of the highest office of the land at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Worlds that may seem foreign to a little African girl like myself, an immigrant, yet that rang a familiar bell through every single word, every heavy phrase of a loaded yet interestingly familiar read. The reason this book felt so familiar to me, is because it speaks of the universal familiar experience of being a human being, a woman, a mother at the fringes of worlds colliding and coming together in an unending dance of life and experience…
How I could relate to the strong sense of achievement brewing inside the young woman on Euclid Avenue, as she felt in her a call for the things, places and universes many did not think she belonged in. How I could understand the determination to transcend barriers in her way, coupled with the desire to do it in an authentic, real manner that also made room for the things that truly matter, like family, love, health. And how I could sense the deep longing for normalcy in the midst of the uncommon, the cultivation of the ordinary in the middle of the extraordinary, the duality between the highs and lows of those of us who dare to do the work of our lives…
More than anything, what I could relate to was the feeling of constantly navigating different worlds as a Black woman at work and in life. This constant need to adjust, recalibrate, prepare and do the work. It’s a feeling so many Black women experience in the corporate and professional world day in and day out, one they learn to carry with them as fuel rather than deterrent to their own lights. One they fight to not let steal their authenticity, their heart, hope and soul, as they stand on the shoulders of the women and men who came before. Those same shoulders that made it possible for us to wear our natural hair at work, to create our own businesses, to be more vulnerable, more raw, more human…I could hear and feel through her words the ache of others’ perceptions when someone who wasn’t supposed to make it does in fact break through the doors of success, when the cost of destiny is leaving your home and family to pursue new dreams, when all you have is your faith, hope and fight to turn the rejection, frustration and anger into the healing power to keep moving forward.
As a mother reading her, I could so relate to the urge to protect our children, counterbalanced by the need to allow them to fly on their own. One of the parts that most edified me in the book, is the part when she was describing her mother. Learning about her own mother teaching both she and her brother to be more independent, taught me about the more challenging yet more impactful side of mothering. The side that requires us to prepare rather than hinder our children from the world. The part that describes our job not just as a rosy cloud of love and kisses, but as a tough armoring of the souls entrusted to us. The side that requires us to buy our kids an alarm clock rather than having them depend on us to get out of bed in the morning. By the way, I did buy my son an alarm clock, finally…
As a wife and partner reading her, I could so relate to her account of the reality of marriage. Not a reality mired in roses and visions of eternal romance, but one of practical love, love that stands the test of time, love that takes into account the differences in people, backgrounds and destinies. The no-nonsense love of our forefathers and mothers, who shared a common purpose, a common goal, those who weathered storms and somehow came out on the other side…What it also made me realize is the imbalance of marriage, the uneven nature of partnership at its core, and how to navigate the reality of it with a long-term view in mind while still keeping our end of the bargain somewhat intact.
Reading Michelle Obama’s words, I could feel a growing sense of hope that the work is not, after all in vain. The work of motherhood, the work of marriage, the work of Purpose, and ultimately, the work of being human. While I could identify more closely to her experience as a Black woman, wife, mother, sister, friend, it was really the universality of her story that she refers to, that is left in me. A universality that says, as she herself explains it so well, that at the end of the day, we have more in common than we have differences. That as women and mothers, the threads of our existences and experiences are so intertwined, so similar despite all the apparent complexities of our individual stories, that we can’t help but hear each other even in the midst of the noise of our current times. Most importantly, we can’t help but see each other, see the light we carry, the light we give, the light we receive…
Let me ask you: When was the last time you decided to tidy up the kitchen yourself because no one else at home would do it, or do it right for that matter? How about taking over the task of organizing lunches and get-togethers in your department at work? Or even taking over the planning of events in your friend group? If you’re reading this and nodding, you probably have been the victim of weaponized incompetence, and a willing victim at that…
Weaponized incompetence was coined on TikTok and is routinely defined as the act of pretending to be incompetent at a task in order to get out of it. Usually, this is done so as to get someone else (aka the weaponized incompetence victim) to do it. It can play out in any context, from household chores to friendship-related tasks, to family dynamics and definitely work environments.
For working women and moms, this is a phenomenon that definitely plays out in the home, where mothers tend to take on the majority of the parenting and household labor three times as much as their partners, according to a McKinsey poll. This became even more apparent, and traumatic for working women and mothers, during the COVID pandemic. The pandemic also brought to light the heavy invisible labor of women leaders, from supporting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts to providing employees with emotional backing or taking on unofficial mentoring and administrative projects.
The reality about weaponized incompetence, as much as too many of us unfortunately would prefer to justify and excuse it, is that it’s nothing but an attempt to manipulate others, namely women, into doing more work than their fair share. The real danger about it as related to gender, is that it has the unfortunate tendency to victimize women and girls, seeping into their education and socialization from an early age Although it’s embedded in the artificial, man-made fabric of gender stereotypes and societal expectations, it can be addressed and fought against. Here are a few ways to do so:
Call it out!
One of the first weapons against weaponized competence is the courage to call it out, just as it is, and for what it is. Often, the perpetrators are weaponized, or strategic incompetence, do not fully realize its negative impact on its victims.
The woman leader at work who takes on unwanted DEI or administrative tasks is piling on additional labor, hours and stress that are taking a toll on her well-being and even the quality of her work. The wife who has to shoulder the majority of household tasks is crumbling under the pressure, not able to be present with her family, attend to her work and take care of herself. The friend who is constantly expected to plan all outings is prevented from enjoying the latter because of all the work she has to put in. Calling it out is the key to starting the process of fighting it!
Have an honest conversation
The first time I mentioned the concept of weaponized incompetence to my husband, he was quite taken aback. As a matter of fact, when I mention it to my male friends and family members, they’re often surprised and even tickled a bit. Yet, the more we talk about it, the more we can come to a mutual understanding.
Having an honest conversation about the load taken on by victims of weaponized incompetence, mostly working women and moms, is vital. Whether it’s discussing the mental load of planning and scheduling everything on the home front, to the time and physical load of handling household-related tasks, to the pressure of doing too much at work, being honest about the consequences and impact of weaponized incompetence is crucial. The more we pretend we’re ok taking on more responsibilities, more work with less time and resources, the less others realize what is really happening. Hence the need to have frank conversations about what this means, and how to more equitably share the load…
Now release control!
Yet, it’s not enough to just call it out and have an honest talk. Last but not least, implementing solutions discussed and releasing control are key. As working women and moms especially, we are so accustomed to doing it all that releasing control and allowing others to step in can be particularly hard. As a recovering perfectionist, letting go of the need to have things done my way was one of the biggest challenges in this process, yet one of the most freeing parts of it. It also happened to benefit my entire family, as it became an opportunity for my partner and children to learn and even start enjoying some of the tasks they had been running away from previously.
Surrendering and releasing control, even if the initial outcome if not exactly to our taste, may take some substantial trial and error. However, it is what ultimately can, and will free us, from having to suffer from weaponized incompetence.
All in all, weaponized incompetence is a phenomenon which has always existed, although it was only recently coined on social media. More than just an unfair allocation of labor, be it personal, relational or professional, it is really rooted in the patriarchal, power-based construct of our societies. The good thing is, as we’re gaining more awareness of it and its negative impact, we’re also able to counteract it in constructive and beneficial ways, not just for its victims, but for the education and bettering of all.
