About a year and a half ago, I began a committed yoga practice that pretty quickly became an obsession. As in every yoga cliché you’ve ever heard, it truly was, and continues to be, a journey into self-awareness, self-discovery and self-esteem. Also? A helluva good workout. Yoga is both addictive and empowering in a way I think about constantly, and (warning!) probably a subject I’ll weave into many a future blog post.
Though I had done some of it on and off throughout my adult life, this super-consistent approach was new for me, and it paid off. I built strength quickly, surprising myself with how good that felt. And I became more flexible with each return to the mat, reaching depths unimaginable to me the week prior.
But then there was balance. Balance was a struggle from the start, especially any poses that involved leveling on one leg. While increasingly capable, even as I continuously discovered muscle groups I hadn’t known to exist, I also seemed to be eternally wobbly. The same postures that seemed so simple and centering with my eyes opened were a rollercoaster with them closed.
Seems I like both feet on the ground and to be able to see what lies ahead. Big epiphany.
As with most things, it got better with practice. But unlike the strength I’ve come to rely on, and the flexibility I can order up with a good stretch, balance continues to be a day-by-day, practice-by-practice calibration. Some days, I’m steady. Some, I’m not. It’s as simple as that and I’ve learned to accept it. I set a drishti (yogaspeak for a visual focal point) and do my best with what I have each time.
And let’s be real: it’s not only in yoga. I struggle with balancing opposing variables all the time, inputs and outputs, as a person and as a mother. The right mix of discipline and spontaneity. Leadership and friendship. Spirit and science. Emotion and logic. Listening and communicating. The list goes on; humans are a study in contradictions.
Where I don’t struggle is in the area most oft-associated with women like myself, the one I’m asked about and am encouraged to read about time and again—the dreaded work-life balance conundrum.
It’s the subject every working parent loves to hate, the Big Life Complication non-working parents like to imagine they’re successfully avoiding, the one HR directors all over the world are attempting to solve for.
I work—a lot. And I mother—a lot. It’s not like I don’t juggle my time. But I don’t struggle, per se, at least not internally, because I don’t even try. At least not in the classical sense.
As a society, we’ve swung wildly in how we feel about women and careers. We’ve gone from “You can have it all!” to “You’ve been duped! Pick one or the other!” And from women juggling leading positions in the workforce with raising a family, the opinion du jour is something along the lines of “There is no balance — sometimes it leans more one way, other times the other.” Meaning, there are days when you invest more in your career than in your family, and certainly those in reverse, and the balance is in accepting that, doing your best at both, and not beating yourself up too much over your imagined failures in either arena.
There’s both wisdom and truth there, certainly, but it’s such a depressing outlook. Reality is real enough; can’t life-views be a little more optimistic? Mine is a lot less complicated, and sunnier by far.
Here’s my truth, as much as it may sound like spin: Balance lives in the void of imbalance.
We perceive imbalance when we’re not into what we’re doing and would rather be somewhere else.
Which means the trick is to love what you do, both at work and at home, and play to your strengths in each.
If you can manage this, regardless of how your time is divided, there will be no perceived imbalance.
And better just to avoid the perception of imbalance, really—all those crummy, resent-y, toll-taking feelings that stem from it—than to try and balance things out on a more substantative level. Because yeah, the timeshare is a day-to-day calibration, and evenly shared custody between career and family is, for many, impossible. Play your cards right and it can even be completely irrelevant. So why should it even be the goal?
How to get there, then? How to feel balanced in the wake of imbalance?
Seek to find a balance of emotional investment.
Never mind logistics, the hours clocked. Go after a balance of passions. Nothing else.
Why? Because if you love both forces tugging at your opposite, metaphorical sleeves, time spent on one over the other won’t feel like a choice, it’ll feel like you are self-actualizing.
It’s so easy to be passionate about parenting. The love is so natural, it feels supernatural. It’s not easy work, but it rarely feels like time poorly spent. For so many of us, it feels like fulfilling a part of our destiny. For some, it’s the entire package.
But a girl’s gotta eat. Or maybe a girl just wants more. There are lots of good reasons to invest in a career. And when that investment comes, as it often does, with the price of time away from said beloved children, to feel ok with it all you’ve gotta expand the definition of personal destiny.
I’ve gotten good at this, to the point where I wholeheartedly believe my own stories.
Me at work is just me exhibiting a core function of who I am and what I was put on this planet to do. There’s no point in questioning it, let alone feeling guilty about the time investment it requires. Exercising my brain and furthering my scope is a must-do, just as nurturing and guiding my children is a primal, factual requirement of my existence.
Granted, it’s not an easy thing to do, and the whole concept, loving work, loving parenting, making neither a second-shift task, is only an ideal—a goal—until you make it a reality. But finding a source of self-sufficiency (read: paid income) that feels like an extension of who you are should be something every young person—women especially—doesn’t just consider, but strives for. And it might take time, effort, and energy, typically a good dose of trial and error.
I’m continuously shocked at how little emphasis emotional investment receives in career and vocational coaching. College students receive little to no guidance in the how-tos of seeking out the “right” career path. They aren’t told it might take years to find, or mentored about going after it all the while, despite setbacks. They’re still choosing majors in the dark, without really knowing what they’re good at—or what else they might be good at—or what gets their blood palpably circulating. And then feel like failures when they realize they took leaps of faith and made uneducated guesses.
It’s easy to give up on an unfulfilling career if you think that’s all it’ll ever be. As soon as you get the excuse.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as there’s nothing wrong with it! As long as you’re at peace with your decision, or in a position to reverse it one day.
But say you have a job, and you want children and the time is right. Or you have children, are working, and feeling unglued. Say you’ve found the balance of loves, but are stuck on the time-management piece. There are practical matters undermining that proverbial balance. You can’t be in two places at once. Even if you manage to identify a career path that you love, how can you balance it with that other fulltime path you want to take— raising a family?
It comes down to execution on action item #2:
Play to your strengths, both as a professional and as a parent.
Nobody tells moms that they don’t have to do it all themselves to be an effective parent [Sidebar: 2015 or not, this still seems to go without saying for fathers]. But just as focusing on what you do well increases your performance—and ultimately your value—at work, so can opting to own fewer but more resonating tasks in mothering: bedtime stories over laundry, homework help over bathing, providing emotional support for an older child over cutting the crusts off a PB&J for a younger one. Or maybe for you it’s the opposite—you’re good at the bathing, the lathering, the chatter and towel-drying, the hair combing and snuggly bedtime prep? Maybe homework-helper isn’t your bag. We’re all different.
It all still needs to get done, of course, which is why where we started is a prereq: when you’re making enough money, or investing in the potential to make more money—or just following your heart as a human—you can justifiably delegate and outsource. To hired help, to your spouse or partner,to an older sibling capable of pitching in, to a friend or extended family.
Kids are pretty sharp—they can sense when we’re into what we’re doing. And they get the most out of our efforts and interactions with them when they intuit that we’re really there. By focusing on the parts of parenting that children actually feel and appreciate vs. the ones they take for granted (and then call out in a Hallmark e-card sometime in their early twenties after watching a particularly moving Tide-sponsored ad on Facebook), it’s easier to feel present and appreciative in return.
And feel balanced.
Ultimately, it’s a pretty straightforward equation: Feel-good work + feel-good parenting = balance. To manage both inputs, you’ve gotta play to your strengths and seek out your passions and never stop believing in the potential for emotional equilibrium. Set your drishti and go.
Idealistic? Yep. But doable. And who doesn’t deserve the ideal?