All throughout adulthood, I have struggled with finding the right balance between work & life. As my career took off & our family expanded, maintaining balance proved to be extremely difficult! Over the last decade, the scale has almost always been heavier on one side more then the other.
With our first child, both my husband & I held full time jobs. Financially, it wasn’t feasible for me to stay home. I was fortunate that we were stationed at home in Hawaii & I had my grandmother to help babysit but sadly I missed out on a lot of my oldest son’s milestones. Work took up a lot of my time in my twenties.
When we had my two younger children, we were stationed in an area where we knew no one & family baby sitting wasn’t an option. If I continued to work, my entire paycheck would have gone to a babysitter & so we decided to make some sacrifices so I could stay home with the kids. Once my younger two were in elementary, I started to get back into the work force, the scales weighed heavily toward family life. I made sure to plan my therapy practice around their school & extra curricular activities. As they got bigger and didn’t need me as much, I was able to take on more hours & my business started to boom. Such a double edge sword. I loved my practice, wanted to excel & to grow but all the work it took to continue forward momentum meant cutting into family time. Again the scales were off balance. In 2015 I have hustled to get my life more in sync with giving almost equal time to both work & family.
Daily I speak to women about this exact same struggle. This problem plagues not only working moms but also SAHM’s as well. This constant battle can be so exhausting & while I hear what’s broken, I also hear the underlying theme of being overwhelmed & at a loss for how to remedy. I firmly believe in order to fix something, you have to know what’s broken, why it’s broken & what’s holding you back. In order to do so, I’ve come up with a worksheet to map out your own work/life balance! I’d love to share it with you. Just click the box below!
-Nadine