More than half of Americans have an unhealthy work life balance. Left unchecked, careers can really take over, especially if you have the ambition and drive to be pursuing those top roles, and the high-end salaries. Before you know it, while you’ve been chasing – and achieving – promotions and negotiating pay rises, a decade or more has flown by. You haven’t even stepped off the treadmill for a moment.
A recent study showed that 77% of all American employees will experience burnout at some point, and that on average only 74% of work is done in the workplace – the rest is taken home and done out of hours. Work is invading our lives. It is stressing us out, making us miserable and unhealthy. We just can’t seem to get that work life balance right.
The Work Life Balance Problem: Why Is It Harder for Women?
First, let me just say, I’m not going to patronize you and dwell too much on the obvious stuff. I’m not going to stereotype all modern men and husbands either. We all know that it takes two to run a household, but that the majority of housework and family-related chores still fall to women. So the demands on female executives who are also family women are astronomical, but we know this bit.
Women executives are seriously inspirational people. They are bold and driven, courageous and fiercely intelligent.
They are often at the helm of a successful business at the same time as steering the ship of their homelife as well. They are often commanding a serious salary, and living an expensive lifestyle. But it’s certainly not all luxury travel and cocktail parties.
The women I know really put in the hours to get where they are and where they want to be, and it often comes at the expense of another element of their lives. It might be their health; they may be struggling with stress which can lead to serious health consequences. Additionally, unfortunately, with increased work hours comes increased dependency on alcohol or substance abuse.
But it might be their personal life that suffers. While women executives may well be meeting and sometimes wildly exceeding their career goals, their personal ones aren’t even on the radar. For nearly all the professional women I meet, a good work life balance is elusive. But it really doesn’t have to be that way. There are just three things that any professional woman must do to achieve that seemingly impossible work life balance.
#1. Identify Your Passions and Pursuits
When I first meet a client, one of the tasks I set them is to identify their passions and their pursuits. Passions are the things that really make them tick, the things that they care deeply about, the things that can bring them joy. Pursuits are the achievable, more practical milestones that they want to tick off, such as paying down a debt, hitting a certain retirement savings goal, buying a vacation home.
I have a worksheet for this that I hand to clients, and it’s also included with my book; it’s that important. It helps my clients to picture their ideal life, a life that they are entitled to and that they are able to achieve. When a client of mine can outline exactly what she wants to achieve in both these areas, she can strip out the unnecessary stressors and drill down into the detail of their true picture of perfection. It is the first step towards a healthy, positive work life balance.
All that’s important is that the client really scrutinizes themselves and their ideals to be totally authentic to themselves. It doesn’t matter if the important aspects of life that they identify are simple – for example, being able to come home to cook a nutritious dinner for themselves and/or their family, instead of grabbing something quick between meetings. Or maybe it’s freeing up time every year for a family vacation or a trip, or devoting some time to a hobby, sport, or the local community.
#2. Set Yourself Goals
Once you’ve identified your passions and pursuits, you need to set yourself some goals. And write them down – you’re significantly more likely to achieve goals when you’ve written them down. Set yourself an ideal timeline, with incremental steps to make sure you’re on course to have everything as you want it. This will help you to identify realistic goals over fanciful ones, as well as separating short term goals from long term goals, more urgent milestones and ones that you can take some time over.
Although it might not seem immediately related, goal-setting really is a fundamental step of achieving the right work life balance. It keeps you on track. It keeps you in the mindset of monitoring how you are spending your time and how you are spending your hard-earned money.
But remember: these are not immovable goals. These goals need to be flexible, because people’s priorities often change. You need to periodically review both your ideas about your passions and pursuits as well as your goals to reach them. It’s okay to change course from time to time, as long as you do it with intent.
#3. Create a Robust but Flexible Financial Plan
The career of a female executive is riddled with challenges and it’s a lifestyle that demands you make sacrifices and compromises all the time. And once you have identified your passions and pursuits, and set your goals, how do you get there? You need the solid foundation of a financial plan.
So how does a good financial plan help to address the work life balance problem? The first thing to be aware of is that not all of them do. I don’t believe that conventional financial advice works for most women. Executive women face different challenges, and their financial plan needs to recognize that. Their financial plan needs to accommodate for all the stress points in their life, and provide solutions.
If their passions involve travel, they must make sure their financial plan accommodates it. If my client’s idea of a great work life balance involves working for themselves, their financial plan must facilitate them being able to set up on their own. This might involve some additional expenses in training, extra qualifications and upskilling, or investing in a retail space to pursue a commercial venture.
If a client feels overworked and on the brink of burnout, their financial plan may well need to accommodate a reduction in income – my client might do much better if they work just four days a week, and have an extra day of leisure time. Sometimes that helps them to strike an ideal balance for themselves. It really is about identifying where things are going wrong, and how to put them right.
Use Your Finances to Get Your Perfect Balance
My clients use their passions and pursuits to build their ideal life for themselves. It empowers them to say yes where they want to, and they can learn to say no when they need to. My clients can set boundaries as to their work hours and their work expenses, to make sure that they are devoting enough time to other aspects of their life that can imbue it with meaning and purpose.
Striking the right work life balance for you means looking at and listening to exactly what is important for you, and looking at your entire financial landscape. It means taking control and making adjustments where necessary. Sometimes it means putting your health or your happiness first.
I love seeing the transition in my clients. I meet them as busy, frenetic women executives with too much on their plates. They come back to me, a short while after our first meetings, having made some tiny adjustments, and they are living truly transformed lives. They are still ambitious and driven, still achieving their professional goals. But they are living fulfilled, well-rounded, happy lives.
If you need to address your work life balance, don’t wait to get in touch. I’ll be delighted to help you.
