Balancing Your Career And Parenthood
One of the greatest challenges that modern women face is balancing parenthood and growing their careers. While it can be a challenge for men too, it's much less common for becoming a father to impact their careers in such a significant way. Things are becoming more equal, but trying to get the balance right between being a parent and focusing on your career is still difficult. You can feel guilty about pursuing a career that takes you away from your children sometimes or even about the fact that purely being a mother isn't enough to fulfill you. If you want to keep your life balanced, here are some tips that might help you.
Be Present at Work and at Home
For a good balance between your career and your family, you should try to present with each one. When you're at work, concentrate on your work and your career. When the workday is over, switch off and focus on being with your family. Of course, there are times when you might need to let one bleed into the other. Maybe your child is ill and needs to be collected from school or a coworker needs to ask you a question while you're at home. But you can try to keep these aspects of your life separate as much as possible.
Take a look at the infograhic below and see which issues and dilemmas resonate with you the most
This infographic was created by Michael Page, a recruitment agency for project manager jobs
Make Big Decisions Carefully
You might face some big decisions in one area of your life that can affect you in another. A significant step in your career could lead you to consider interstate moving options, which would obviously affect your family too. Equally, deciding to have another child could have a big impact on your career, especially if you take a significant amount of time away from work. When these big decisions arrive, you need to carefully weigh the pros and cons and how they will have an impact on different parts of your life.
Prioritize Effectively
Juggling your different responsibilities can be very tough, especially when trying to balance work and family. You might feel like you always have to prioritize your family over everything. But the truth is that both work and your home life have things that are more important or less important. It can be acceptable to drop a less important task at home so that you can get a more important task done for work. And sometimes you might delay a less important task at work because something more important at home needs to take priority.
Set Realistic Expectations
If there's one thing that can quickly make you stressed and unhappy, it's expecting perfection from yourself. No one can do everything perfectly, so you have to be willing to make mistakes. There are some things you might put a lot of effort into to get the best results and other things that you might just do an ok job for. You don't always need to hold yourself to the very highest standards, especially if it will ultimately be to your detriment.
Balancing your career and parenthood isn't easy, but it's possible to have both. Of course, if you have a partner, spouse, or co-parent, they should be doing their part too.