Having It All... and Making It Work: Six Steps for Putting Both Your Career and Your Family First

Chapter 2. Pursue a Process that Creates Balance: Balancing What Is Most Important to You

You don’t achieve balance by accident but rather by pursuing a process that includes setting priorities, gaining perspective, and establishing boundaries and internal benchmarks. Bottom line: You need to define career and family success in your own terms and balance what is more important to you.

How might we achieve a satisfying balance between our work and family activities? And how, by balancing the things that are most important to us, might we have more time and energy for each? In this chapter, we address these important questions.

First, we need to face a simple fact of life:

Note

Balance won’t happen on its own; we have to create it.

Although this fact ...