Balance Is a Point in Time
By Debra J. Gawrych
"Mom, I don't feel very good and I think I need to go home from school. The nurse took my temperature and I have a fever."
Those words strike panic in the hearts of women who travel. Women, who work diligently before they leave, and plan for every contingency at home, in addition to dealing with logistics at work. Women who are maxed out with schedules, demands and priorities are forced into a crisis mode when the unexpected occurs, such as a sick child, or a car breaks down. The stress causes anxiety and can result in headache, guilt and worry. Family life demands attention to detail, planning, and time to spend with each other. Work demands attention to detail, planning and time spent doing what needs to be done. It can become overwhelming unless we find a way to balance it all.
A few months ago, I received a call minutes before I was to start the second day of a leadership seminar and was told that my child was sick and needed to go home from school. I was also concerned for his health and that he would have to stay at school until someone could pick him up.Even though my son was 13, I felt guilty. My husband eventually picked him up, but I had a difficult time returning my focus to the seminar and away from what was going on back home.
As a professional I had to pull myself together, but also knew that I would be no good at teaching effective leadership skills if I failed to let them know about my concern. Sharing my story, deepened our level of communication, and the participants felt freer to share their own experiences around family and the difficulties of balancing family with work.
The recent events of September 11, helped put many things in perspective. On that day, most people were focused on making sure their loved ones were safe, rather than getting a job done. Time stood still. We gave ourselves margin, room to breath. We were in shock and in that moment, were able to take stock of what we valued, what was really important in our lives. Most of us have chosen to remember what we realized that day. We remember to pray. The pledge of allegiance has been brought back into some schools. We check in with our neighbors and friends. We have family meals and although work has resumed, most of us have slowed down.
In my book, The Seven Aspects of Sisterhood: Empowering Women Through Self-Discovery, I explain life as a series of balancing acts, teetering on a point in time. It is only a moment and the stressors of life often push us off that point. The key is to find our way back to the balance point, to recalibrate. The point can be one minute, one hour, one day, or even one week. If we know how to stay centered, we can find our way back to the balance point.
In the business world, men and women naturally vary in their ability to find the point of balance. Sally Helgesen, nationally acclaimed author of The Web of Inclusion and The Female Advantage: Women's Way of Leadership, profiles successful businessmen and women. She states that most successful women executives are able to handle constant interruptions and recognize them as part of the process. These women also allow space in their lives or margin in order to be able to handle the unexpected. They maintain a complex network of relationships with people outside their organizations and tend to see their identities as multi-faceted and complex.
Instead of separating their business lives from personal, they view their jobs as one element of who they are, bringing strengths from all parts of their life to perform effectively. In other words, the aspects of their lives outside of work filled them up too much for them to overly identify with their jobs. "Raising two kids alone, how could I forget that I'm a mom and a manager?" cited Barbara Grogan, president of an industrial contracting company in Denver. It is also evident in the changing leadership styles of successful male business executives, balance is not a separation of work from other parts of your life, but a blending. It is a leveraging of the strengths and the realization that we cannot do it alone, that relationships matter.
The world is a crazy chaotic place. How do we stay sane and productive when we are thrown off balance? How do we not only communicate to future generations that it is possible to steer a course of sanity amidst the tension and stress around us? The answers to those questions lie in self-exploration, a pragmatic sense of humor, and the awareness that we are not alone. Together as a community; business leaders, employees, family members we can remind ourselves that balance is a point in time. The point is how do we get there?
