Children to school; puppy to day care; cat's prescription picked up; quick tidy round the house; one load of laundry; yoga (yes!); supermarket dash; quick texts to a couple of friends all before 11am - and finally off to the office to do my 'proper' job...where I will do a 7 hour day in 4 hours because I have to leave at 3.30 to take my daughter riding (where I will still be writing emails and making calls while I wait).
I'm sure this sounds very familiar to many working women, especially those running their own businesses. As a coach I think I'm fairly ok at prioritising and focussing (well, most of the time - bad Twitter!) but, as Cornwall Business Fair gets under way tomorrow and I'm thinking about all the women I'll be bumping in to who are juggling lives very similar to mine, it's made me stop and think....
How did women get to this point, where if we want to have it all, we have to do it all? I'm not suggesting for a moment that my husband does less than me, far from it, it's just that I believe - and please feel free to disagree - that if women want a demanding career or to run their own business we still have to fit in all the other stuff around the edges, too. My view is that there still is nowhere near enough genuine support for all the roles women have in their lives for us to be able to juggle everything without turning into a jibbering wreck every so often.
If you have extended family nearby who are prepared to help you with your home and the kids, perhaps that helps, but if not, and you're on your own, you really do need to be mega efficient and be able to wear your pants over your tights pretty much all the time. And who's benefitting? Are we feeling fulfilled enough by what we do to justify these tornado lives? And what messages are we giving our daughters about the sacrifices they have to make in order to fulfil their potential? Germaine Greer has suggested that we haven't got anywhere near to equality yet, and I'm with her on that one.
There was a feature on the news this morning about the importance of enough sleep. How many of us prioritise good quality sleep, diet and exercise to look after our physical and mental health and offer a good role model to our children as opposed to prioritising tasks, completing 'to do' lists and giving them a sense that life has to be hurried through?
No answers here, just questions, but questions that, for the sake of our daughters at least, we should start facing up to if we really want women to have equal chances in the business world and if we want them to be able to make genuine choices about what they want to spend their time doing.
I'm sure this sounds very familiar to many working women, especially those running their own businesses. As a coach I think I'm fairly ok at prioritising and focussing (well, most of the time - bad Twitter!) but, as Cornwall Business Fair gets under way tomorrow and I'm thinking about all the women I'll be bumping in to who are juggling lives very similar to mine, it's made me stop and think....
How did women get to this point, where if we want to have it all, we have to do it all? I'm not suggesting for a moment that my husband does less than me, far from it, it's just that I believe - and please feel free to disagree - that if women want a demanding career or to run their own business we still have to fit in all the other stuff around the edges, too. My view is that there still is nowhere near enough genuine support for all the roles women have in their lives for us to be able to juggle everything without turning into a jibbering wreck every so often.
If you have extended family nearby who are prepared to help you with your home and the kids, perhaps that helps, but if not, and you're on your own, you really do need to be mega efficient and be able to wear your pants over your tights pretty much all the time. And who's benefitting? Are we feeling fulfilled enough by what we do to justify these tornado lives? And what messages are we giving our daughters about the sacrifices they have to make in order to fulfil their potential? Germaine Greer has suggested that we haven't got anywhere near to equality yet, and I'm with her on that one.
There was a feature on the news this morning about the importance of enough sleep. How many of us prioritise good quality sleep, diet and exercise to look after our physical and mental health and offer a good role model to our children as opposed to prioritising tasks, completing 'to do' lists and giving them a sense that life has to be hurried through?
No answers here, just questions, but questions that, for the sake of our daughters at least, we should start facing up to if we really want women to have equal chances in the business world and if we want them to be able to make genuine choices about what they want to spend their time doing.
Being a fella and having two sons I have a similar issue in a way. Men feel immense pressure to go and be 'successful'. Having stepped off that bandwagon to a certain extent, I now subscribe to the axiom that if you find a job you enjoy, you'll never work another day in your life. That's what I tell my boys.
ReplyDeleteObviously, there becomes another issue, that you are obviously finding - if you enjoy your job, you are likely to be good at it , so you become sucessful...and you get immensely busy.
In my previous world, I had a theory that 20% of my customers took up 80% of my time. I identified the 20%, usually up front, and didn't take them up as customers, thus freeing 80% of my time. I was less stressed and better at my job as a consequence and room for a few more 'nice' customers.
How to advise your daughter? She does not have to feel like she has to be able to do everything. She can decide which things she will not do. And free up that time for her whole life. My wife says she doesn't know how to iron...consequently she never does it. I know she knows...and she knows I know she knows. We just have clothes that mostly don't need ironing, I iron all my shirts myself and we have friends who don't judge us by the lines in our sleeves.
EDIT - grrr, can't figure out the signing process. Could ask my wife, she's a teck geek, but she doesn't do that anymore!!