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Hello Reader,

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As we continue to celebrate Women's History month, we are focusing on work life balance in this edition. In particular, I wish to share with you the way the last two years have impacted my work life balance. This is a story of partnership, and the importance of the language we use.

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When the pandemic hit, my husband was furloughed. We navigated an unprecedented time in our relationship. I had been unemployed at various times in our relationship - caring for our small children. As he climbed the corporate ladder, I followed him around the world. Reorienting my own career, readjusting and reinventing through breaks and back-to-the-start moments.

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This time though, the disruption was in his world. And at the time my business was seeing a significant pick up. I was busy realizing my dream. He was feeling disoriented.

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We learned so much about each other’s worlds then. I understood what it meant for him to listen to my concerns as well as resentment. He learned how many things happen in the background of our family life.
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We paid attention to the language we used. It is not about him helping me, or the kids helping us. We established that there is a lot to do in this family and everyone needs to contribute. No one is the sole provider of everything, and no one helps anyone. We ALL contribute and do a part of the job.

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This changed many things that are still there today, even as he has returned to a full time job and I continue with my business. This change in perspective and upgrade of language was fundamental in making life/work balance a more sustainable thing for us. There are still days when I feel pulled in a thousand different directions. But then I have those unexpected moments when everything is perfectly aligned and I know that I'm right where I want to be. Perhaps that's the best we can hope for. What do you think? How did the pandemic affect your work life balance?

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Thank you for your continued support. You can follow us on social media by clicking on the links below:

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Here's our bi-weekly reading list on WORK LIFE BALANCE:

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​Are Career and Family Incompatible? - Source: Bloomberg

Quick Take: A Q&A with economic historian Claudia Goldin on women’s long struggle to balance the demands of work and children — and why government policies aren’t the answer. "The economic system can work. But for women, I think the answer is find a mate — I don’t care what sex it is — who wants what you want. And that’s the way to do it. If my book does anything, it’s a statement of caution: that there aren’t quick fixes, just as there aren’t quick fixes for Covid, there aren’t quick fixes for cancer, there aren’t quick fixes for the environment. These wouldn’t be problems of importance and difficulty if there were quick fixes. And there’s enormous hubris on the part of individuals who somehow believe that there’s a policy for everything, and everything can be fixed, and they can be fixed overnight, and we can wave magic wands over individuals to fix it. It's just too difficult."

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​Work-Life Balance Is a Myth. Do This Instead - Source: Time

Quick Take: "Yet work is not the opposite of life. It is instead a part of life — just as family is, as are friends and community and hobbies. All of these aspects of living have their share of wonderful, uplifting moments and their share of moments that drag us down. The same is true of work, yet when we think of it as an inherent bad in need of a counterweight, we lose sight of the possibility for better. It seems more useful, then, to not try to balance the unbalanceable, but to treat work the same way you do life: By maximizing what you love."

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​The uneasy intimacy of work in a pandemic year - Source: Vox

Quick Take: "America has treated work as a sacred object throughout this past year, as something that is valuable for its own sake: more valuable than the money with which it is meant to provide us, more valuable than contact with our loved ones, than our mental health, than our lives, than the lives of our neighbors. We have treated work as something to be taken home and cherished. Work is our lover. And this year, we took it to bed....We obsess over our jobs because we know we can’t count on them. So we keep thinking about them after we leave the office, and in the end we find ourselves unable to get them out of our minds, like a bad boyfriend."

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​Work-Life Balance Finally Happened. Then They Were Called Back to the Office. - Source: The Wall Street Journal

Quick Take: "Present your manager with time-limited experiments: You’ll log off at 3 p.m. for the next four Tuesdays, for example, to volunteer at your child’s school or fit in a workout. Stress that you think it will improve your job performance since you won’t feel distracted or pulled in two different directions. And present a way to measure outcomes. Are you still hitting your project deadlines or sales quotas, or even exceeding them? “The benefit of small wins is that you gain confidence in your ability to control your own world,” Dr. Friedman says."

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What do you think of the new look of The EQrated? Please let me know at stef@yourturnsolutions.com. Please feel free to share this newsletter with people you know who might find value in it. They can also subscribe to the EQrated by clicking the button below.

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Ciao,

Stef