Work-Life Sanity Blog

If you missed the flurry of public conversation that took place right after Lean In was published, this post gives you a taste of it.  [Background: the book was written by Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Facebook.]  You can get the gist of the book’s overall message in Sandberg’s Ted Talk.

She essentially looks at why there are so few women leaders (CEO’s & heads of state, for example) and what can be done about it. 

She’s largely speaking to young, ambitious professional women about what she’s learned about women’s career advancement and leadership.  Her strongest recommendation to women is to “lean in,” meaning to be fully, 100% committed to working hard and getting ahead, and to assume their “place at the table” whether or not they feel they belong there.  To the women who shy away from the fast track because at some point in the future they want to cut back to raise their children, Sandberg says, “Don’t leave before you leave.” 

Here are some of  the best posts from right after the book came out:

Why Sheryl Sandberg is Beside the Point, by Amy Gutman.
Start here because Gutman lays out beautifully just how and why the book elicits such strong, polarized responses.

The Retro-Lean-Back Snow Day, by KJ Dell”Antonia (in the Motherlode column of the NY Times).
Dell’antonia, from deep inside a snow day at home with her kids, makes the case for a modified career plan that allows for snow days and sick kids.  The strategy is imperfect, it requires flexibility, and it’s the right answer for many professionals with young children.  This piece links to several other juicy posts/columns on the subject. 

Why Lean In Makes Me Depressed, by Morra Arons-Mele.
She writes, “Sandberg asks women to lean in, but social and cultural institutions haven’t caught up with her, so we feel confused and perhaps disappointed.”  Aarons-Mele writes about the challenges that 20- and 30-somethings grapple with.

Why I’d Rather Stand Straight Than Lean In, by Kristin van Ogtrop, editor of Real Simple magazine.
Van Ogtrop makes the case for a more balanced approach: “Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be striving for bigger/better/higher/more every minute of every day. I don’t always want to have a larger goal.”  Sometimes she stops to enjoy a clementine.               

Enough With The ‘Leaning In,‘  by Tiziana Dearing.
This is more of a response to the buzz than to the book. A CEO herself, Dearing writes, “Who died and made the top of the ladder God?” She makes the case for each individual navigating her professional path in her own way.

 I Had to Take a Xanax to Read Time Magazine This Week, by Penelope Trunk.
She writes, “The high performers in corporate life are so much more focused than everyone else in the workforce that it’s time we stopped selling a false bill of goods; almost no one can be so singularly focused to get to the top of anything. Including corporate America. Yet we keep talking to kids and each other like anyone can do it.”  Trunk often says things no one else is saying. I don’t always agree with her, but boy, she is one interesting blogger. And smart. 

He Hasn’t Had it All Either, by Michael Winerip in the Booming section of the NY Times.
Winerip opens with this: “I have had a lot. I feel lucky to have had a successful career as a journalist and author while being the primary caregiver of our four children for a decade.  But I definitely did not have it all.  And unlike most people written about in the media who don’t have it all, I’m a male who didn’t have it all.”  This is a very sane, grounded piece, and an interesting look at an egalitarian marriage.

You Can’t ‘Have It All’ & More of Feminism’s Outdated Phrases, by Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute.
Galinsky “loathe[s] the terms of the debates . . . [because] these seemingly innocuous words invariably hamper, not foster, change.” She takes 5 of these terms and suggests more appropriate ones, such as “fit” instead of “balance,” “thriving through it all” instead of “having it all.”

And now it’s your turn.  Did you read the book, and if so, what did you think?  And, whether or not you read the book, what do you think about its message?  Please leave a comment.

At times, finding your work life balance may seem like an impossible task. Most people live with the belief that there is never enough time to get it all done and stay in balance. This leads to stress and anxiety. And then to more stress.

Creating balance in your life means:

• getting more done with less stress
• feeling energized instead of drained
• letting go of the anxiety that there is something else you should be doing (at any given time!) or that you’ll never be able to get everything done

There are two simple tools that I would like to share with you to help you find the balance that you crave.

The first tool is a mindset tool, and it involves examining your beliefs about time. Do you believe that time is against you and that there’s never enough of it? If so, it is understandable that you are feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. When you view time in this way, finding balance is next to impossible.

Experimenting with shifting your beliefs about time can change your experience. What if you viewed time as a gift, and believed that when you are focused, you can get anything done? This is the perspective that is held by many highly effective people. When you truly believe that you are in control of time and how it operates in your life, you are able to make more productive, satisfying choices.

Instead of feeling like your to-do list is pressing down on you, you understand that you are always at choice. As a result, you gain the power to make decisions about time that are most beneficial to you. In those moments when you are stressed about time, take a breath and say to yourself, “I have all the time I need.  Slow down and focus on the task at hand.”  Skeptical?  Try it out!

The second tool that can help you gain better work life balance is to chart your time. Do you ever find yourself wondering where the day has gone? Do weeks or months seem to slip by in the blink of an eye, and all the while tasks and goals go unaccomplished? Charting your time can help you get a grip on all that missing time. Looking at your day, chart how many hours you spend on:

• sleeping
• eating
• physical activity
• commuting
• working
• family/social life
• personal time such as reading, relaxing, or doing something recreational

Do this for 2 weeks and see what you find out. 

Another way to utilize the chart-your-time tool is to use it to chart how you spend your professional working time, whether it’s at your workplace or at home (or Starbucks, the airport, the dentist’s waiting room or wherever else you work).  Categorize your work activities into no more than 8 categories.  Make one of the categories something like “informal chatting with co-workers.”

Whichever tracking strategy you start with, track for 2 weeks and see what is revealed.  After you do this, you can evaluate how well your perception of how you spend your time matches your actual time. And from there you can make adjustments, so that your day includes planned time for each area that is important to you.

If you try one of the strategies suggested here, please leave a comment about how it goes.

If you would like help in creating more balance in your life, you might enjoy my free 5-part e-course, or my book, Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: Restoring Work-Life Balance.

What strategies, tools, etc make a difference for you regarding balance and time? Please share your experience in a comment.  Thank you!

My Tai Chi teacher, Ben Booth, is lean and agile. As he does every class, last week he taught us additional moves in the Tai Chi form we are learning. I kept losing my balance in one part of the new sequence, and eventually I asked for help.  It turned out I was modeling my step after his, that is, stepping the distance he steps in this move.  He is a little over 6′ with unusually long, lean limbs.  I am a little under 5′ with proportionally average-length limbs.  His natural step is WAY too big a step for me – it’s no wonder I was losing my balance.  I was trying to take HIS next step, not mine.

Ben Booth teaches Tai Chi & Yoga, and runs outdoor adventure programs.

I’m sometimes annoyed when I get a life message like that.  It’s so trite, really. If this were a movie, I’d say, oh, please, that’s just too simple and obvious a metaphor. But there it was. I was over-reaching.  I was basing my move forward on what someone else was doing, not taking into account our differences and what was a good next step FOR ME. When I repeatedly lost my balance I had to deal with the fact that something wasn’t working. Once I understood the problem, I easily fixed it. I started taking smaller steps at that point in the sequence, and voila, that was it. Balance restored.

As I left the the class, I wondered where else in my life I was trying to take too big a step.  And then I got at  least one place: of course! In social media.

My intention for my coaching business is to become more active in social media. I’ve taken some appropriate-to-me next steps in that direction, including blogging more regularly, about once a week on average. I’ve done that for the last several months.

Until last week. Last week, in addition to meeting with my ongoing coaching clients, I had an influx of new clients, I hired a new Virtual Assistant and had our first working meeting, placed a real estate referral for my real estate matchmaking business, started a 12-week marketing class (as a student), caught up on the blogs I follow, posted two comments, and closed the office Thursday evening to take a long weekend away visiting my new granddaughter (oh, and her family too). 

I did not also get a blog post out last week.  But at the time of the Tai Chi class I was still pressuring myself to write one.  The epiphany about over-reaching helped me realize that getting a blog post out last week was more than I could pull off without losing my balance: getting crazy and miserable, an utter slave to the task. I’ve learned that when I see crazy and miserable coming at me, it means I’m already out of balance, and I stop moving in that direction. So there was no blog post last week.

It can be hard to distinguish between being out of comfort zone (which often just means you’re trying something new) and being off balance (in some way you’ve gone too far for your own well-being).  For me the difference lies in the inner experience. When I’m out of comfort zone I feel awkward, unschooled, or afraid. When I’m out of balance I predominantly feel miserable, resentful, and kind of manic.

How do you distinguish between the two in your life?  Please share your wisdom in a comment.

I don’t know how it is for you.  I’m able to stay on track for a while, then things happen, I lose focus, and suddenly I’m off course.  I used to think that the trick was to just never get off track.  But I think never getting off track is really not an option in real life.

So the real challenge is to identify as quickly as possible that I’m off course, and then as quickly as possible to get back on.  THIS is the behavior that needs to be sustained over the long haul: getting back on. 

It doesn’t really matter what the track is — your work habits, fitness regime, feeding your fish on time, turning off the tv, visiting Aunt Ellen over at Senior Living, staying on top of your bills — it’s the same dynamic.  It’s all about getting back on track when you find yourself off.

(This idea of off reminds me of the film Being John Malkovich, where the characters find a mechanism that lets them experience being the actor John Malkovich for a few minutes. When the experience is over, they are dumped out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.  I think being dumped out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike is a perfect metaphor for being off-course.  (And no offense to the NJ Turnpike, which I gratefully travel regularly to go visit my daughter and her family in Philly.))

I recently got off course with my gym and healthy eating routines.  I could tell you all the reasons why and how I got off course but really they are completely irrelevant.

For me, the most precarious moment in the whole process is when I’ve been off-track for longer than usual — in this case a week or two.  At that point, there’s a little voice inside me that says, “Hey, you’ve been blowing it for so long at this point, why bother?”  I hadn’t been to this risky point for a while and I was shocked to see how close to the surface it was.  And how tempting.

But I got to the gym that first day, and I saw how I could actually get there for the next 10 days straight and got it into my calendar for each of those days.  THAT would be really good.  I also knew I had to pair that with eating right.  The second day I got the right foods into my kitchen and was eating right again.  And I got to the gym again.  And right then I was back on track.  Yeah, I still had to follow through for a bunch more days to re-establish my credibility with myself, but I really was back on track.  I would have to HOLD the line.  But I was back ON the line.  It actually didn’t take all that much once I got past the temptation to just keep blowing it.  But wow — what a huge difference.

I’m learning to have less drama around getting off and getting back on.  I’m less distracted by the story, and more focused on what works.  I know what worked for me on the food-exercise front this time: 2 days in a row of gym, one good food-shopping trip, one large pot of home-made vegetable soup in the frig, ingredients for quickly assembled great salads.  That’s it.  Oh yeah, and my home-made salad dressing which makes any salad a great salad.

What do you get off course?  And what gets you back on track?   That’s really what matters.   Please leave a comment so others can learn from you.

I recently emailed a client to ask how she was doing with her upcoming deadline.  She replied by sending the following image:

The source for this image and many other original graphics that reflect a similar sensibility and dark humor is http://www.ToothpasteForDinner.com.  This image is used with their permission.  I think the image brilliantly captures a very real experience.    

The creative process — whether invoked to write a grant, solve an engineering problem, or deal with a difficult person –  is an excitable beast.  It uses different parts of our brain than the usual task-list, taking-care-of-business mode does, and requires a different kind of care.  If you treat your orchid plant the same way you treat your schefflera, at least one of them will not flourish.  Same with the creative process — it needs to be handled in a way that’s specific to IT.  It’s much more of a diva than our workhorse routines are.  It’s  temperamental, easily dissed, and will shut itself down in a heartbeat if it’s mistreated.  But with proper care, it can flourish.  

ONE element of care that can enhance your creative process is to free up some bandwidth: make some space for it.  That means getting some things off your plate.  Here are some classic ways to get items off your to-do list:

• DO.  Find the short and simple items and just get them done.  Get your car inspected, tell Ed you won’t be at his meeting, do your backup.
• DELEGATE.  Outsource some of the tasks: find someone else to do them.  Cajole, beg, barter, influence, hire, call in favors, leverage your authority, whatever it takes.
• DELAY.  Schedule the item into your calendar for a month from now, at which time you will consider doing it.  Note: this is not the same as procrastinating.
• DITCH.  Admit that it’s not happening, get over it, and cross it off the list.  For example: re-organizing your PowerPoint slides.

The key thing in freeing up bandwidth is to not get so caught up in it that you never get around to addressing the original creative challenge!  I have learned this about myself: I’m much more in my comfort zone when I’m in work-horse mode: do do do do do.  I am easily hijacked by my all-important to-do list and my big bold brassy bossy executive function.  I have to remind myself that my working-dog mentality reports to me, not vice-versa — I am its boss!  Once I get some tasks off my list and some bandwidth freed up, it’s time to return to the creative process.

There are many other things you can do to support your creative process, but this is a crucial one.

Do you think Einstein did his own taxes?

As  life coach, I help professionals and entrepreneurs tap into their creativity and brilliance.  Curious?  Contact me and get your questions answered.

Thanks to technology, every dedicated and successful professional can now be on call 24/7. You can respond to emails from the pediatrician’s waiting room. You can participate in an overseas business meeting in the middle of the night from your home. Advanced degrees can be attained at night and on the weekends during “off” hours.

This level of ultra-accessibility reflects amazing technological progress. But if you aren’t actively setting boundaries between your work life and your personal life, this progress may be causing you to suffer.   If your relationships with the people you live with are suffering or if you are feeling the beginnings of job burn-out, it may be time to strengthen your boundaries, which can lead to a powerful course correction in your work-life balance.

Think about when, where, and why you are willing to be interrupted in your personal life for a work-related issue. Make a list of the kinds of urgent work issues that may need your immediate attention. Decide if you can limit your off-hours interaction with your job to those specific situations.  Decide on the hours you will be accessible.  Could 7 am to 9 pm be enough?  If so, then make those your time boundaries and only respond between those times.  If you are unwilling to take business calls after 9 pm, shut your cell phone off.  If you won’t answer emails after hours, don’t read emails after hours, either.

You’ll need to make a few more rules for yourself that help you respect your own boundaries.  When you are on the job, really work the whole time you’re there, or the whole time you’re “on.”  When it’s time to be with your family — be there.  When you’re taking time for yourself, take it with as little guilt as you can manage.  Being fully present (or as fully as you can manage) wherever and whenever you can not only makes your time spent in that arena more effective and satisfying, it can also free you from the personal cost of that nagging voice telling you you really should be somewhere else.

Once you have drawn some clear boundaries between the various domains of your life, consider how best to communicate them to your coworkers and possibly the people in your personal life as well.  They may push back a bit, but part of creating and maintaining good boundaries is standing your ground.

If you want to move forward along these lines and know you could use some individual assistance, please contact me for an initial coaching consultation at no charge.  You  will get a sense of whether you want to work with me, and you can ask whatever questions you have. The skills involved in creating , maintaining, and nurturing healthy boundaries are all very learnable.  Most of us just don’t learn them in school or from our original families!

I recently read a compelling article about password hacking:”Hacked!” by James Fallows in The Atlantic.

The link to this article was sent by a friend whose address book had been hacked.  All his contacts received an email that basically said, “I was robbed in London — please send money.”  You’ve probably received one of these yourself.

The article is sobering and instructive.  Take a look.  It recommends using long strings of characters as passwords, strings you can remember because they mean something to you, but not easily hackable strings like your address.  It also recommends using unique passwords for each of your essential accounts, to limit your exposure in case one of your passwords gets compromised.  See quoted section at the end of this post.

I started playing with what I might use as long strings of letters that mean something to me.  And I came up with an idea I’d like to share.

Why not use affirmations, mantras, and other personally-useful phrases as passwords?

Why not pepper yourself, throughout your day, with messages that are positive, validating, grounding, and/or amusing?

Here are some examples, just to get your imagination rolling:

• Remember to breathe (remember2breathe!)
• Take it a step at a time
• Perfection is not an option
• LightenUpSweetie
• ILoveMyChowHound
• iknowhowtodothis

It’s oddly integrating to get a personal message (from yourself) in the midst of doing something else. It can actually bring some balance into your day and reduce stress.  It does this by reminding you that you are more than your work and bringing your awareness to your body for a moment, or in some other way interrupting your habitual stress-enhancing thought patterns.  By “habitual stress-enhancing thought patterns,” I mean the ones that sounds something like this: “I’ll never get this done in time!  I should be doing this faster!  I should be doing this better!” For some people it also sounds like this: “I’m a fraud.  It’s only a matter of time til everyone figures it out.” You probably know what yours sound like.

Stress is bad because it feels terrible and it’s not good for our bodies.  It’s also bad because when we’re stressed we can’t do our best work.  Under stress, we are just not as effective as when we’re not stressed.

As a life coach, when I work with a client who needs to reduce the stress in her life, we work on several big-picture fronts, making structural and other big changes that make a difference.  We also work on building some moments of balance and sanity into every day.  I think using passwords to give yourself  messages you need to hear throughout the day can be a useful practice for doing just that.

Stress reduces effectiveness.  It’s just that simple.  If you could use some help in addressing the stress in your life, consider a short burst of effectiveness coaching.  Contact me to schedule an initial no-fee consultation.

Here are Fallows’ recommendations for passwords that are less likely to be hacked:

• “Choose a long, familiar-to-you sequence of ordinary words, with spaces between them as in an ordinary sentence, which more and more sites now allow. “Lake Winnebago is deep and chilly,” for instance. Or “my favorite packer is not brett favre.” You could remember a phrase like that, but a hacker’s computer, which couldn’t tell spaces from characters, would see only one forbiddingly long password sequence.

• “Choose a shorter sequence of words that are not “real” English words. I once lived in a Ghanaian village called Assin Fosu. I can remember its name easily, but it would be hard to guess. Even harder if I added numbers or characters.

• “Choose a truly obscure, gibberish password—“V*!amYEg5M5!3R” is one I generated just now with the LastPass system, and you’re welcome to it—and then find a way to store it. Having it written down in your wallet is one, though the paper it’s on shouldn’t say “Passwords” at the top. The approach I prefer, and use for some passwords, is to entrust them to online managers like LastPass or RoboForm. Even if their corporate sites were hacked, that wouldn’t reveal all your passwords, since the programs work by storing part of the encoding information in the cloud and part on your own machine.

• “At a minimum, any step up from “password,” “123456,” or your own birthday is worthwhile.

• “Finally, use different passwords. Not hundreds of different ones, for the hundreds of different places that require logins of some kind. The guide should be: any site that matters needs its own password—one you don’t currently use for any other site, and that you have never used anywhere else.”

(Thank you, James Fallows!)

I’ve begun to use affirmative passwords and I like it.  It still surprises me when I type in a message to myself in the middle of doing something that’s not at all about me.  See how it works for you and let me know what you think.  Leave a comment or email me.

What it boils down to is learning to to recognize when we are running on empy, to NOTICE IT, to identify it as a valid cue, and then to do something about it.  This requires remembering that being completely fried is not a healthy state of being on any level, and it’s our responsibility to ourselves (and to all the people and projects that depend on us) to get UN-fried.  To replenish, restore, recharge, renew . . . so that we can once again live our best life, which includes doing good work, having good relationships, and experiencing some level of happiness and well-being.

“Time off” doesn’t have to be a luxurious 8 days completely out of the office with no checking email, like I took the last week of June.  Time off can be dinner with a friend, reading a novel over the course of a month, or stepping away from your work for a moment to feel the ground under your feet and take a couple of deep breaths. 

I’m currently in the midst of a growth-and-learning episode with this dynamic, learning it at the next level.  I passed Time Off the Treadmill 303 some time ago, but this is Time off the Treadmill 400, and it’s challenging.  I’ve apparently been running on empty.  I only know this because I am CRAVING more time off, even after taking some very high quality time off last month. 

This is unusual for me.  I’m usually a cheap date when it comes to taking time off.  I can’t remember ever wanting as much time off as I have this summer.  I am choosing to trust that this is a real and valid need, and I am allowing myself much more time off than usual.

My oldest behavior, from years ago, was to respond to wanting time off by berating myself for being so unmotivated, grabbing myself by the collar, and saying to myself with authority, “Get back to work.”  And I did.  (Though I came to see, ultimately, that in that state, my work was inefficient and uninspired.)

My newer behavior illustrates some of what I’ve learned (over oh-so-many iterations):
    a. to notice without judgement my experience of desiring time off
    b. to consider it valid
    c. to investigate how soon I can responsibly take some time off,  and do it 

So I’m taking another week off in August. My business is generally quieter in the summer months than during the year because there’s less training and keynoting.  In past summers I’ve used this “quiet time” to do more writing, catch up on back office work, and develop marketing plans for the coming year.  I’m not going there now.  I’m just allowing myself the time off the track. 

While taking this much time off is out of my comfort zone, it has felt so compellingly right that I am choosing to have no doubts about it.  I have questions, such as when will I catch up on all this back office work?  I allow myself to tolerate having no answer for that.  My inner “Driven Woman” is hungrily, greedily, hopefully wondering if this “fallow” period will give rise to a new book.  I’ve learned to just let her do her thing but not let her dominate the conversation. 

I recognize that as a self-employed person I can take time off more easily than an employed person, but then again there are costs to it, such as not getting paid for vacation days.  So please don’t use my self-employed status as a way to disregard what I’m saying here: “Well sure, SHE can take time off because she works for herself, but I can’t just do that, so I’m blowing off everything she says because her situation is just so totally different from mine.”

There is always a way to take some time off, whether it’s a day or an hour or a minute.  So if you too are craving some time off, find a way to take some!

Lower a standard, re-negotiate an agreement, take a vacation day or a vacation, get some help with a project so you can create more open space for yourself, eliminate some non-priority items from your master list — whatever it take, get what you need. 

If you don’t need time out right now, remember this for when you do.  And enjoy your current state of not having this need!

Here is a simple summary of what I’ve been saying.  I’m calling it The Fallow Law:

The Fallow Law:

• Being completely fried is not a healthy state.

• Like letting a field go fallow regularly to keep it fertile and healthy, you have to give yourself time off in order to stay creatively fertile and emotionally healthy, both of which are precursors to living your best life.

I hope you will use it to support yourself in getting un-fried when you need to. 

If you find that you consistently do not replenish, restore, recharge, or renew . . . perhaps a short round of coaching is in order.  It’s possible that what’s called for are bigger structural changes than you have been willing to look at until now.  It’s also possible that more regular time off the track is all that you need.  Whatever it is that keeps you from getting what you need, I encourage you to take a stand for yourself and get some help.

I had a very rich experience recently.  I was visiting my then-8-week-old grandson at his home in Philadelphia.  I had almost two whole weekdays (just the days, not the evenings) as his sole caretaker.   It was a gift to have this much time with him. 

For me, much about this experience was remarkable.  First, I had cleared my plate completely and was able to be undivided in my attention to him.  My clients knew I was checking email and phone only in the evening, and I was otherwise on vacation from my professional life.  I had no meals to prepare, no errands to run, no one really expecting anything from me.  Life was very simple: it was just about the baby.  And there was no rush.

When my own children were little, even when I was working part-time, even when I knew enough with my second baby to take some maternity leave, there were always competing demands for my attention: my work, the house, meals, my husband, the other child, etc.  

Spending this time with my grandbaby, I had no competing demands, and there was no need to be in a hurry.

What a joyful experience — to be fully present, in the present, with this new little guy.   Granted, being with one’s own first grandchild is a very special, off-the-charts experience.

But so was being undivided and in the present.

It reminded me how much there is to be gained by being fully present to whatever I’m doing, whenever possible.  It reminded me how stressful it is to multi-task– even to just mentally multi-task.  And how in contrast, just being here now, wherever and whatever “here” is, is actually a qualitatively different experience.  And a better one. 

Since returning from Philly I’ve been able to bring some of this consciousness with me.  It’s helped me be in less of a hurry all the time.  It’s also helped me be more singleminded about what I’m doing.  When writing this post, for example, I’ve been able to just work on the post, rather than also feeling pulled in other directions.  

Sometime today or this week or this month, I encourage you to give yourself the gift of just doing one thing at a time.  Have a taste of being here now.  Even if you’re just clearing your desk or composing a simple email, I suspect it will feel better than it usually does.  If you try this while being in conversation with someone, I suspect the shift will be even more palpable.   

Moments of being here now and not rushing can serve as little oases where you can refresh.

Just posted at this link: An interview with me about work-life balance, on Suzanne Blake’s Energy Talk Radio show, Manifesting Money and Career.  Suzanne is a gracious and intuitive host.   Listen in to her interviews with other experts as well.