Creating a Work-Life Balance

FountainBlue's December 8, 2006 event was on the topic of Creating a Work-Life Balance

Silicon Valley women leaders are challenged by the corporate and business pressures of high-stress, high-impact positions, while still juggling the personal demands of life and family. This month's When She Speaks event focuses on how successful women are juggling these often-competing goals and what we can do to adjust our own and others' expectations on us, in order to ease the load. Our speakers will share their stories, commiserate with us, and challenge us to re-evaluate how roles, our priorities, and our own expectations for ourselves.

• Facilitator Michele Bolton, a founding partner of ExecutivEdge of Silicon Valley, LLC, http://www.executivedge.com, an executive development and management consulting firm. Michele is a former professor of management, having recently retired from nearly twenty years on the faculty of the College of Business at San Jose State University, having taught MBA courses in visionary leadership, strategic management, entrepreneurship, and team building. She is the author of The Third Shift: Managing Hard Choices in our Careers, Homes and Lives as Women.
• Panelist Jan Schlossberg manages the Hardware Product Standards team at Cisco System, the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Cisco employs more than 47,000 employees worldwide, 24% of whom are women, and frequently appears on Working Mother magazine's "100 Best Companies" list. Jan will share the joys and challenges of standardizing hardware innovations across 80 product families while raising young children in a dual-income family
• Panelist Jennifer Gill Roberts is currently a partner at Maven Ventures. Having served as a serial VC for high technology companies across the valley and beyond, Jennifer has helped a wide range of early- and later- stage start-ups with access to funding and consultation on their business strategies. Jennifer will share how she juggles the intense business demands while raising three children alongside her husband.
• Panelist Nivisha Mehta is currently the development director for South Asian Heart Center at El Camino Hospital http://www.southasianheartcenter.org/. Nivisha will share how she has successfully juggled her work interests in support of nonprofits across the region and her growing young family.
• Panelist Kristi Royse is currently President of KLR Consulting, http://www.klrconsulting.com a successful consulting practice focusing on team and organizational challenges for executives in the valley. Kristi will share how she successfully balances her business interests with that of her family.

Below is a Summary of Notes and Advice for your Creating a Work-Life Balance, drawn on the wisdom of our facilitators and participants. We also invite your comments on these notes.

Set realistic goals about what you can accomplish, based on your resources and strengths and support networks and manage your activities based on those goals.

• Visualize success. Look forward, not backwards.
• Embrace the positives about yourself, don't focus on the negatives.
• If it's a goal worth achieving, focus on achieving that goal, even is it's harder than you thought it would be, and if it takes longer than you thought it would take.
• Be realistic and strategic about your standard for balance

Define what you mean for balance in which areas (work, life, family, friends, etc.,) over what period of time (day, week, month)

• Define success for you
• Manage your activities and self-talk based on your defined standards
• Accept that you can't always keep all the balls in the air. One of them is going to drop. That's OK. Just pick it up once in a while and keep juggling.
• Being balanced is about being happy.

Advice for professional women who chose to have a family

• If you have made a career choice, don't second-guess yourself if/when your children, for example, ask for more time from you.
• If you have young children and need to spend more time with them, considering finding a situation a work with the flexibility to do it.
• If you have chosen a high-pressure career which doesn't support raising a family, and you decide to do it, don't think too much about when a good time will be. Just do it and find a way to make it work afterwards.
• As business professionals, consider your opporutnities to volunteer and make sure that you can make a good impact which best utilizes your skills, acknowledges the needs of your children, and supports the organization.
• Tell your children why you are doing what they are doing. Share your work with them.
• Get your children invested in the success of your chosen career.
  

Create an inspirational vision for your life and work, and strive toward achieving that

• Know yourself - your strengths, your passions. Focus on your strengths and build on them.
• Follow your passion. Enjoy what you do.
• Model your values in your work, in your life
• Live autentically, with curiousity, with passsion and with fun.
• Manage your energy so that you're happy, living the life you want.

Delegate tasks, leverage resources for tasks that do not provide core value for people closest to you

• Leverage resources around you - family, hired help from gardener to babysitter to cook to handyman
• Build a support network to support yourself personally
• Continue the conversations with others
• Make time for your family and friends
• Work with your support network so that you can get personal time
• Enjoy each other. Take the time to communicate.
• Seek mentors. Learn from others.
• Dedicate time for your personal and physical health. Exercise can be a great stress-reducer for example.

Do what you have to do to be successful at your chosen task. Enjoy doing it. It doesn't get any better than that!

For more information:

• Michele's book is available at The Third Shift: Managing Hard Choices in Our Careers, Homes, and Lives as Women is available on Amazon.com
• For more information about Nivisha's organization, visit the South Asian Heart Center at El Camino Hospital http://www.southasianheartcenter.org/. The mission of center is to dramatically reduce the high incidence of coronary artery disease among South Asians, and save lives, through a comprehensive, culturally-appropriate program incorporating education, advanced screening, lifestyle changes, and case management. Join us in supporting this great cause by visiting http://www.southasianheartcenter.org/support/donatenow.html.