How to Balance Work and Family: Can Family & Career Co-exist?
Questions at the intersection of life, work, and family that entrepreneurs and career-minded people face.
“I didn’t know how I was going to feel like a completely different person a couple of months after I had a baby.”
“Can I effectively do both of these things, very important things, running a company as well as raising a family?”
Should you start a business or a family? Do you have to choose? Can one human really do both? What if you want to postpone one for the other — what are the risks and tradeoffs? How do you balance work and family once the kids come? Are you just coming back from Maternity or Paternity leave and wondering how you can show up for your work in a sleep-deprived state?
If you are sitting with any of these questions or living these questions, this series and set of resources is for you.
For those who have put their startup and career dreams ahead of their family, a lot can happen while business building puts a family on hold. Maybe you’ve pushed off being a parent for a few more years, so you’re not so absorbed with the company, but what if…?
Fertility issues happen when your business timeline for making and having kids has opened up. For men, impotence post the startup slog can lead to grief and regrets. Some women freeze their eggs in advance of starting up their companies, just to be safe. Other folks struggle with the thought of putting their whole life on hold while navigating the roller coaster of a career in startups and scaleups.
While there are challenges on both sides of the ‘when to have a family?’ debate, it can help to reflect and consider what you want your life to be (according to your needs and desires).
For those who are new parents, such reflection is also handy. Life changes in big and meaningful ways when children enter your life. Not only are you making room for new humans in your life, but your life will orient to them in wholly new ways. Which brings up the question: How do you want to orient yourself to your work?
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
- What kind of parent do you want to be?
- What do you want your kids to say about you and their childhood when they are grown?
- What kind of relationship do you want with your children?
- What did you learn about work and parenting from your childhood?
- Where do you feel split, or misaligned between home life and work life?
- What feelings (guilt, shame, exhaustion, inadequacy, weakness, strength, etc.) float around your thoughts of your working self and your parent self?
- When you think about your “career” what comes to mind? When you broaden “career” into the concept of “Your Life’s Work” — what comes to mind?
- What does your life’s work feel like to you?
- What is the most beautiful and true life you can imagine?
- If you were to imagine an older, wiser you in the future, what would that version of you say to you now?
- Who are the people in your life who have made family and work work? What have they modeled well?
- What support might you want to ask for? What would you dare to ask for?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES TO READ & LISTEN TO:
A lot of women are afraid to talk about wanting to have kids and hesitant to tell anyone they are pregnant. “Will I be seen as less credible if I reveal to investors that I’m planning on having kids?” she wonders. Then, there’s the fear of taking maternity leave. How much time will feel right? Does that match company policy?
Then, there’s an identity shift that happens when you become a mother. Your heart gets broken wide open. The going back to work after having a baby has its own diaper bag of issues. Aside from deciding when and how to pump at work, working moms deal with mom guilt, wondering constantly if they are present enough in the lives of their growing children.
In this podcast, Reboot co-founder Ali Schultz is joined by fellow executive coaches Heather Jassy and Ann Mehl for a dialogue centered around motherhood and fertility, and working through it all. Together, Ali, Heather, and Ann (both mothers of two) address some of the singular challenges women face when it comes to family planning and share their own unique experiences as mothers in the workplace.
We hope you’ll enjoy this conversation which serves to tackle some of the questions our clients work through such as, “Is motherhood right for me? When is the right time to start a family? How do I manage maternity leave and navigate the return to work?” and much more.
“To feel seen by other people who can say, “I know how hard this is every day.” How wonderful it is and, also how hard it is. And to have a safe place, to be able to say that, it’s so validating.” — Ann Mehl
Parenting is not as “instinctual” as previously believed. While decades of research have focused on the maternal brain, revealing fascinating changes that train the brain for the demands of keeping a small human alive, new research on the paternal brain shows similar changes. And these changes happen even though fathers do not have the physical experiences of pregnancy, birth, and the related hormone shifts. In other words, paternity leave = a free brain-training program for dads.
According to the authors, a short-term time investment in spending engaged time with their new baby has the potential to pay a lifelong dividend in dad instincts. If we want to see greater gender equality, we need to not just focus on women’s participation in the professional world — we need to encourage more men to participate in the caregiving world.
In a modern working world that often venerates the ‘grind,’ — long hours and dogged work ethic — as the dominating model for focused career development, where does that leave room for building families and raising children? In today’s episode, Jerry is joined by Melissa Pasquale, mother of three and Chief Operating Officer at Engrain. Together, Melissa and Jerry consider the navigational challenges of being a parent while maintaining a career.
Throughout their conversation, Jerry calls on Melissa to consider the fallacy in yearning for the perfect work-life balance; asking us all to consider that our longing to achieve harmony between work and life inevitably imparts feelings of guilt at our inability to do it all (the notion of, “I’m not really working unless I’m panting.”). When we recognize that we can’t absolve the guilt we feel in that nebulous place of balance between work and life, we can pause to consider the deeper question of, “How we are complicit in the need to be ‘good’ enough — at work, as parents, and in life?”
“This phenomena, you can’t be a mother and have a career, can feel as if it’s only a present day phenomena. But it’s in fact in something that has been troubling our culture for decades.” — Jerry Colonna
In Part 2 of this series, Reboot Coach Chris VandenBrink shares Reflections of a New Parent:
