• Home
  • About Sherry
  • Work with Sherry
    • Career Power Hour
    • Job Interview Power Hour
    • Job Search Confidence – land your dream job
    • VIP 1:1 Coaching
    • Women in Cyber Leadership programme
    • BOOK A CONVERSATION
  • Success stories
  • Resources
    • PODCAST
    • ONLINE COURSES
    • DOWNLOADS
    • • FREE Manage Your Career with Confidence and Purpose
    • • FREE 99 Action Verbs To Make Your CV Stand Out
    • • FREE The Ultimate Job Interview Checklist
    • • FREE 15 Tough Job Interview Questions & How To Answer Them
    • • FREE Women’s networking directory
  • The Book
    • About the book
    • Sample chapter and reading
    • About the author
    • Media
    • Interview with the author
  • Blog
  • Speaking
  • Contact Sherry

The Confident Mother

Helping ambitious women in technology fully unlock their leadership potential

3rd January 2017

What you need to balance work and life with confidence

What comes first, work-life balance or confidence? When you ask a working mum that question, it’s no easier than the chicken or egg debate.

For many ambitious women, getting that balance right between work and life is much easier said than done.

The separation-integration continuum

According to Anna Meller, one of the UK’s leading experts on work-life balance (and a speaker at The Confident Mother online conference later this month), how you tackle your work-life balance comes down to individual preference and where you sit on the separation-integration continuum.

When I interviewed Anna just after Christmas, it was a fascinating opportunity to explore together how working practices and expectations have changed over the past 30 years.

How can you balance career and motherhood?

Often the women that I work with love their careers AND they love their family. They come to me because they are feeling off-kilter. They’re wondering how to balance career with motherhood.

Nobody wants to burn out trying to do everything but equally, you don’t to be overlooked or pushed to one side ‘just because’ you no longer want to work 70+ hour weeks. They might be forcing themselves to be an integrator when their true preference is separation. (More on this in the interview with Anna).

Work-life balance is the no 1 challenge

In my workplace challenge survey at the end of 2016, 75% of women said that work-life balance is their No 1 workplace challenge. The results themselves didn’t surprise me, but the strength of feeling did.

I help women approach this challenge by looking at it from a different perspective. The way I see it, there are five elements to take into account.

How you balance those elements is unique to each woman and will change at different stages in your life. It might even change on different days in the week! That’s the thing with work-life balance confidence – there is no ‘one size fits all’.

5 elements for work-life balance confidence

The 5 elements I’m talking about are:

  • Contribution – the contribution that you make to the world. Some call this your purpose or calling. It’s about valuing and being valued for what’s unique and special about you.
  • Wellness – it’s about taking care of your mental, physical and emotional wellness. Very often women take care of everybody else and don’t take care of themselves. However that elusive balance is impossible if you don’t take care of you too.
  • Work – it’s about valuing and being valued for the work that you do. Whether that’s in your career, your business or indeed the work you do in the home.
  • Family – obviously one is about family, your relationship with your children and with your partner, if you have one, or maybe the relationship with your parents.
  • The Feminine – it’s about being a woman, and not just a mother. It’s about accepting, embracing and actually enjoying being a woman, and the challenges and opportunities that brings.

Get the foundations right first

Most women approach me because they want to focus on Work (whether that’s career or their own business). However you have to get the foundations right first. In other words, valuing yourself (Contribution) and taking care of yourself (Wellness).

When you have those solid foundations in place, you are ready to explore further (for example, how much energy you give to your career and your other roles such as mother, partner or daughter).

When you have the foundations in place, this gives you the confidence to create the work-life balance that works best for you.

Leave a comment below

I’d love your thoughts – which of these 5 elements (contribution, wellness, work, family and the feminine) is the one you need to focus on first to balance your work and life with confidence?

p.s. if you’re liking the sound of the interview with Anna Meller, it will be broadcast on Thursday 26 January. Register here to get access to this interview as well as another 25+ amazing speakers. 

Article by Sherry Bevan / The Confident Mother, work-life balance, Working mums Leave a Comment

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Subscribe to Blog

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email.

Looking for something?

Categories

Archives

Recent posts

  • What I’ve learned about how to be successful
  • How to job search successfully on LinkedIn
  • How to be sure that your employer values you
  • How to articulate your ambitions to protect your gender pay gap
  • How to protect your career falling foul of the gender pay gap

Copyright © 2022 · The Confident Mother · Website design by Helen Taranowski Design