Balancing life and children is a challenge at the best of times. Now imagine balancing your life, your high-earning career and your kids at the same time – seems impossible right? Wrong; it is not impossible. It’s not easy, but it certainly is not impossible. Sure, there are some women who work high-power, high-earning careers and struggle to spend time with their kids, failing more often than not. The biggest challenge most of us working moms face with our kids is learning to balance our lives. I work from home, and it’s not easy all the time. Sure, it sounds ideal, and it is. I get the best of both worlds. For me, my life is all about living my dream and doing what I love; writing from home while being with my kids.
But it’s not easy. It’s a challenge. You want to spend more time with your kids, but you have work to do. You feel guilty when you are with your kids because you’re neglecting your work. It’s a difficult balance whether you work from home or you get to go into an office every day. But moms who are successful, those who make six-figures or more, have a lot of advice to offer to other mothers. They know what it takes to be successful, and they know what it’s like to be miserable. They have experienced all the same emotions that mothers everywhere else face, and that’s taught them many lessons that make it easy for them to share with other mothers.
Read on to find out what the world’s most successful working moms have to say about balancing their lives, their careers and their kids at the same time. Perhaps these lessons can help you as a parent, as a working mother, or just in other life situations.
Learn the Split Shift
This is, perhaps, the most effective way of working when you have kids. For me, the split shift works best in the mornings. I get up at 5 am and work for an hour or so before my kids wake up. This allows me some uninterrupted time to get up and get things done while they’re still in bed and I’m not feeling as if I’m neglecting anyone in my home. Additionally, it also allows me to come home from cheer practice and our kid’s activities in the evenings and spend that time with them and my husband so that I can relax and still feel I’m focusing on what’s important.
As a working mother, you will never get it all done during set hours of the day. Something happens every so often that inevitable makes this impossible, and you have to work around that. The best way to do it is to split it up. Do some work in the morning when everyone is asleep. Do more in the evening when they are asleep. It works, trust me.
Learn to Let it Go
There are going to be days when perfection is never going to be even close to possible, and you have to learn to let it go. You have to learn that sometimes that little bit of additional work that you wanted to add into your day is not possible. You have to learn that there are only so many things that you can actually do in one day, and that there are days that are better than others.
For me, this time of year is the worst. This is when our kids have all their extracurricular activities, and time at home is scarce. I cannot take on any more than I already do this time of year, and I always think that I can. I can’t, and it always stresses me out. I have had to learn to let it go and realize that I am not, in fact, a machine.
Learn that You Cannot Make Everyone Happy all the Time
We are not all Jesus – and even he cannot make everyone happy all the time. So there you go; if the most perfect person in the world cannot make everyone happy, what makes us think that as mother we can do the same?
Learn that Time is always more Valuable than Money
There is never a point in life in which you’re going to wish you spent less time with your kids and more time on your work. This just will not happen. You will never feel that your work is more important than your kids, so remember that at the end of every single day. It’s often this knowledge that makes tough decisions seem easier.
Prioritize
You will never accomplish anything in the day if you do not learn to prioritize. This means you have to figure out what is most important to you. What is going to make your day easier, your life easier? What is going to make everything happen for you in a way that will make you most productive, the best mom and the most successful?
Delegate
Certain things are not worth your time. Sometimes you have to delegate and have someone else take care of things that are not worth your time. For example, how about paying someone to mow your lawn, pick up your dry cleaning and do your grocery shopping? When you have these things removed from your list, it leaves you more time throughout the day to accomplish more, and that’s going to be helpful to both your career and your kids.
Take care of Yourself
The one thing that many moms give up first in their lives is their ability to care for themselves, but they should not. It’s not okay to ignore you and your needs. Sometimes you have to spend time on you to ensure that you’re well-rounded. You give so much time to work, you give so much time to your kids, but how much time do you give to you? Without caring for yourself, you put yourself in a very unhealthy situation, and it’s not good for anyone involved.
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