Why “Work-Life Balance” Is The Wrong Goal

Today’s guest expert blogger is Michelle Nichols 

Michelle will be my guest expert on the August 21st on The Women Working Smarter Teleconference.   

If it feels like you’re in a struggle to juggle being successful in both selling and motherhood, welcome to the club. When you try to make enough sales calls, keep up with your offerings, help your children learn their multiplication tables, and go to their soccer games, it can be a real challenge.

Juggling Lessons
As the profession of sales has grown over the last few generations, high-achieving women in sales who love their children have developed some strategies to deal with this challenge. Here’s a quick history of the evolution of their juggling strategies.

First, they…worked, but they wanted more sales. So then they tried… working harder. This grew their sales, but they also got tired. Then they turned to… work smarter, not harder. This strategy was their first try at prioritizing. It required making tough choices.

Meanwhile, many in our culture were clamoring, “I want it all.” As a compromise, this led to … “work-life balance.”

Although work-life balance sounds good, mothers in sales worldwide are realizing that it is the wrong goal, and an impossible one, to try to “balance” their livelihoods and their lives. There are two basic reasons it’s a bad idea - physical limits and relative value.

Physical Limits. No matter how many vitamins you take or assistants you bring on, you still have personal limits because there is only one you.

For example, let’s say your schedule is already full, and your boss asks you to take on an extra sales territory for the next few months, so you also agree to coach your child’s sports team two nights a week. In theory, you’re in balance, but in reality, you’re overbooked.

Relative Value.  Your sales job and your family can’t be balanced because they don’t have the same relative value to you. For example, if you lost your sales job today, you could get another one and you’d soon be back in the workforce. If you lost one of your children today…OK, I’ll wait while you get a tissue, but you get my point. You can’t balance the replaceable with the irreplaceable.

Solution
So what’s a busy, quota-busting, saleswoman who loves her kids do?
Instead of “balance,” it is wiser to prioritize “family first and work a close second.” I talk about this new way of thinking in my new book, Hug Your Kids Today! 5 Key Lessons for Every Working Parent (Good Friend Publishing, 2008.)

If you’ll put “hug (or show my love to) my kids” at the top of your Things to Do list every day, you’re guaranteed that at the end of the day, no matter how much or how little you sold, at least you got the most important task accomplished. That’s better than balance!

The truth is, no matter how much love you feel toward your children, your most loving feelings and intentions don’t really matter. It’s putting them into action that counts. Now, go hug your kids. And tomorrow, remember to hug them again. Hugs matter!

Michelle Nichols is a cutting-edge thinker on work-life balance, the creator of the Hug Your Kids Today project and the founder of National Hug Your Kids Day (3rd Monday in July.)  She was the Savvy Selling columnist and podcast host for BusinessWeek.com from 2001 - 2007. She is a wife, mother of three children and a chocolate chip cookie connoisseur. For more information: www.HugYourKidsToday.com

Michelle Nichols will be my guest expert  for The Promo Biz Women Working Smarter Teleconference on August 21st. Not a member of Women Working Smarter?  

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