One of the realities for women is that of being pregnant and working a full-time job.Actually, even if you were home all day, you’d be working around the house, so it isn’t a new or unusual condition, but for the first-time mother you do need to take some things into account:
Pregnancy changes your physical needs. You really do need to get more rest and pay attention to nutrition! Now is not the time to pretend you are superwoman.
Pregnancy changes the way your emotions and brain work. Give yourself space and permission to make some mistakes, then plan to correct the mistakes as they happen.
Pregnancy changes your insurance needs. Take the time to find out exactly how any benefits you have on the job apply and what the exceptions are for coverage. Don’t assume anything and be good friends with Human Resources if your employer has that asset.
Pregnancy changes your housing needs. You don’t need to have a fully-equipped nursery at first, but you will need some things like a car seat and a plan for the future. And lots of diapers. Oh, and did I mention diapers?
Pregnancy changes your future plans. Find out what maternity leave will entail from that good friend in HR. Figure out child care options for your return to the job.
Pregnancy changes your plans for today. You have a job to do and you know your stuff. Be flexible where you can and prepare ahead for days that will be low-energy. If you can work ahead or get organized, good. If you need a nap or have to put your swollen feet up, it will give you a break to get ready for the next thing on your agenda.
Your employer should not discriminate against you for being pregnant. Become familiar with your rights but reassure those relying on you that you have every intention of being responsible to fulfill your obligations on the job. You aren’t alone; network with other mothers and develop your support group (I went to MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers). If your schedule can swing it, I highly recommend it! This will be a big change for you but such a blessing!
Have you ever considered the ways your work comes home — and your home comes to work? One writer recently shared her thoughts in this article titled, “4 Things Business Taught Me About Parenting — and Vice Versa” and I am sure, if you thought about it, you could come up with more things you have learned as you balance career and family.
The reality is that we aren’t compartmentalized into two separate persons who are exclusively at home or exclusively at work. If you are having problems at home, it is easy to bring that stress into the workplace, and the same tendency applies from work to home. But there are good things that overlap, too!
“Treat others the way you’d like to be treated” is a basic childhood lesson that never stops being the right thing to do.
“Be responsible for your behavior” applies pretty much everywhere I can think of.
“Apologize when you are wrong” gets everybody on the same side, and the same team, and frees you to deal with the problem.
“Time out” gives a chance to regroup and respond instead of react. You don’t put a co-worker in the corner, but you could suggest a break and set up a meeting to discuss solutions.
“Nap time/Snack time” acknowledges the physical limitations of a child. But grownups, too, have physical limitations and repeatedly working through lunch or excessive overtime will reveal that fact.
“Respect each other’s boundaries and differences” goes past teaching kids to get along and into the working world with people from many backgrounds and perspectives.
“Do your chores”, or your to-do list, because sometimes you just have to get it done regardless of how you feel about it.
What are some things you have learned from work and applied to home, or vice-versa? I’d love to hear from you!
If you’ve been dreaming of being able to work from home and have finally started to live the dream… the first month of working from home is a reality check.
This is the time you figure out what will and will not work for you. You might have set up your working space according to cute ideas on the internet and discovered that you hate actually working that way. You may realize that you need to get dressed in order to be productive. You certainly will discover that everybody (including you) thinks you can do all the household chores as well as your job. Working from home does not mean you can “do it all.” It means you can be flexible in figuring out what works best for you and your family, but some things will still need to be delegated or eliminated from your lifestyle.
Get everybody’s input on what is important and prioritize the top three for each person. One couple’s list looked like this: wife wanted laundry kept up, kitchen neat, and bed made. Husband wanted laundry kept up, living room neat, and cookies always in the cookie jar. So the family priorities were laundry, picking up once a day, making the bed in the morning, and keeping cookies around.
Everybody living in the home has a job. Let little kids make their own beds and put their toys away. They get better at it the longer they do it by themselves. Really!
Relax standards. Health & safety hazards are important, but perfectly folded towels aren’t.
Working from home means you CAN do a lot more! Most of the time you have the flexibility to move the laundry from washer to dryer during the day or keep an eye on something in the oven. You can plan work times around naps or get a mother’s helper a few times a week. Every family has different needs, and those needs change as its members grow. The reality of working from home isn’t like a daydream, but it is the best choice for many families.
Newly Wed And Newly Working — Tips To Make It Work
Getting married means adjustments in your life. Often, there is a new address; always, there are attitude shifts. A new job has many of the same challenges as a new marriage, and sometimes both appear in your life at the same time! The challenge of training, learning to live or work with new people, and adapting to a new schedule at home and the job can be intimidating. Here are some tips to make it work:
Give yourself permission to mess up. It’s like someone gave you a beautiful, shiny new trumpet and now you have to learn how to play it. The first few attempts for every trumpet player sound pretty bad! Any trumpet player will tell you that there’s a lot of practice and a lot of mistakes involved with learning to make music. Marriages and new jobs are the same way — nobody does it perfectly the first few times they do it, no matter what ‘it’ is.
Look at the big picture. Every hour is part of a day, every day is part of a week, every week is part of a year, and every year is part of a life. The bigger your perspective on your marriage or your new job is, the less stress you will feel about smaller parts of it and the easier it will be to see how those smaller parts fit.
Prioritize. It isn’t possible to have every important thing be the most important thing; there will be times you have to choose. A schedule helps a lot here, so the priority can change if you are at work or at home. Expect to mess up here, too, because it takes a while to figure out what works for your new family or job.
Don’t take on any new challenges for a while. Now is not the time to learn a new language. You are already learning a new life and/or a new job, so your energy is limited.
Realize that “this, too, shall pass.” Do you remember how completely intimidating starting at a new school was? How about learning how to drive? You are at the beginning of a steep learning curve, but it will get better every day.
Some of the same characteristics that help you with a new job help you with a new marriage. These “trainability factors” really apply to just about every area of life I can think of. So if you are at the beginning of a kind of scary new phase of life, relax. It will be worth it!
Balancing work and family can seem like an impossible task. I struggle with this every day, especially once summer comes and the kids are home ALL THE TIME. As a mother of two young children, figuring out how to juggle everything has become a personal quest of mine. A recent article in The Atlantic looks at some of the numbers in recent studies on work-life balance in the U.S., and it makes an interesting read. Why do so many struggle with this balancing act? Is there ever a happy medium? The reality is that the process of balancing is dynamic, and it changes as the situations change. Here are some tips to help put this seemingly impossible task into perspective:
Recognize that family life has seasons. The demands on your time and energy will change as new members are added to the family and as kids get older. Homework becomes more independent for kids as they get older, meaning less homework for mom and dad to help with.
Schedule family times, just as you schedule business meetings. It might sound cold, or not spontaneous, but it works– especially if you are like me and live by your calendar. Plan some vacation time now and write it into your calendar. It doesn’t have to be two weeks at the shore, but you do need to have fun together as a family. A weekend at a cabin, a walk through town or your neighborhood, or an evening at an ice cream store works, too.
If the traditional family dinner hour doesn’t work for you, set a 8:30 meetup in your family room with a snack. The idea is to connect at least once a day for a short time because it is cumulative: all those short times build on one another to maintain relationships.
Turn off the electronics during that connection time! Think face-time instead of screen-time. You can’t give your full attention to anyone if you’re getting texts.
Say “no” to a few things. Choose not to “do it all” and just do one extra-curricular activity per family member.
Delegate and get help when you are overwhelmed. You can’t do everything. Sometimes you need to break down and ask for help. I finally did just that. After years of taking care of children, keeping a clean house, and managing a growing business, I finally had to break down and admit I needed some help– in one area in particular– my landscaping. Now, I must add that my husband is a huge help in keeping the house organized and picked up, and is a great with the kids and their schedules, but does he know the difference between a weed from a Spring bud? NO. To him they all get pulled out. So, I hired Joanna. She came in, took one look at what I was attempting to do with the yard, talked with me for awhile about what I wanted to see, and went to work. What a difference a professional makes! I never knew my landscaping could look so good. Delegating that task was the best thing I ever did.
There will be times when family has to be the priority over work: sudden illnesses, crisis situations, school activities, etc. There will also be times when work has to have priority over family because of deadlines. Balance is that shifting of resources to adapt to changing needs and keeping your focus on the priorities you’ve set. If you work outside the home, the bulk of your waking hours is spent on the job, away from your family. When you are at work, that has to be your focus and your priority. When you are seeking work, you need to spend time on the things that will help you get the job: resumes, networking, and research. Most of us would say that we work to provide for our family and that our families are also a priority. Deliberately investing your energy into connecting with your loved ones on a daily basis with occasional longer times together helps you maintain that critical balance between work and family. Delegating, limiting commitments, and asking for help allows you to focus on what is important.
There are many things to consider when deciding what career path to take and one of the most important is your family.Whether you have a family or are planning to start one in the future, it is important to consider when choosing a career. Here are some questions that you should ask yourself to help you decide what path to take.
How big do I want my family to be? Depending on how big you want your family to be will help decide where you want to work. You will need a salary that will be able to support your family.
What kind of lifestyle do you and your family want to live? Whether you want to live simply or decadently is another factor to consider. If you want to live in luxury, then you need to find a career that has an appropriate salary and even the option for career and salary advancement.
How much time do you want to spend with your family? Your work will take some time away from your family. You need to decide how much time away you want. If you want to spend a lot of time with your family, then you need to choose a career and a company that will allow you to spend as much time with your family as possible. Full time, part time?
Perks? You may be able to negotiate your benefits or perks, i.e. having a bigger vacation package and little to no health insurance. If you don’t need to carry insurance, you may be able to negotiate more vacation days or even flex time with the amount of money you will be saving the company on health insurance.
Considering all these questions will help you make the best decision on what career path to take. While these questions can help you, you should not make this decision on your own. Talk to your family and get their input. They can be your most valuable resource in making this decision.
Job sharing is one way to get work hours flexibility, especially if you need it because of child care or elderly parent responsibilities. My mom did job sharing when I was young. She worked Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning, and her co-worker worked Wednesday afternoon, Thursday and Friday. Both loved the arrangement and through careful planning, this went on for 15+ years. Sharing a job with another person requires flexibility and good communication skills to keep the work flowing even on the days when you are not at work. This goes beyond good face-to-face communication skills as you have to be able to communicate with the other worker when you are not working at the same time. Email is one type of communication that helps in a job share situation. Being flexible and able to accept phone calls on non-work time is also helpful. Good documentation skills are critical to job sharing. This ensures that the work gets done properly with no mistakes even when you are not there yourself. One example of documentation skills is medical charting for doctors and nurses. The next doctor or nurse should be able to tell what treatment a patient has received and what he will need next. My mom and her co-worker had ‘in’ and ‘out’ boxes so they knew what the other was working on. They also had lots of sticky notes (this was all that was available 30 years ago!). Neatness counts. If you share supplies or equipment, they need to be checked on a regular basis to ensure that you do not run out of anything critical or misplace a needed piece of equipment. Return all equipment to its storage place. Also check for breakage and let the other job sharer know if something is broken so that this person does not try to use it until it is fixed. Job sharing adds critical thinking and planning skill sets to your resume. It also adds documentation skills and communication skills. All of these skills are a bonus, so make sure you indicate on your resume under Work Experience that a position you held was a job share. You can list the position then put in parentheses: (job share, 30 hours per week).
Everyone knows about job related stress. But few know how to resolve it or to reduce it. Job related stress can make your life absolutely miserable and it’s important to get rid of it altogether, or at least get it reduced so it doesn’t affect your everyday life. It is estimated that a whopping 62% of Americans feel their work is the major cause of stress in their lives. Yikes! At the same time, stress levels have increased 50% since 2007. These are very significant numbers.
Some of the things that induce job related stress are impending layoffs, problems with co-workers or superiors, overtime, no time off, and simply not being in the right job position.
Any number of these things can cause physical problems such as things upset stomachs, frequent headaches, sleep issues and even grinding your teeth. More serious health issues are increased blood pressure, diabetes, weight gain and psychological problems. No one wants any of the above mentioned problems. Therefore, it’s important to make a change. Possible changes include taking time off from work, working out any differences between co-workers and superiors, making sure you are prepared in case there are layoffs, and if you are just unhappy in your position, start searching for another position. Remember, nothing in this world is more important than your health and your well being. A vacation or a job change will affect your income, but it’s important to understand that it’s better to make adjustments and rearrange a couple of bills in order to make things easier on you.
You don’t want to have problems with family or have psychological problems over job stress. If necessary, find a new job. Make the new year count by reducing the stress levels in your life. It is never too late to make changes so that you can live a more balanced, calm life.
