By Cali Williams Yost
A couple of months ago, I stopped by a store in my town to buy a birthday present. As I was checking out, a young woman approached and said, “Hi, are you Cali Yost?” I responded, “Yes, I am.” She explained, “I saw you speak recently and I loved what you said about how to manage your work+life fit, not balance. You must be an expert at managing your own work and life.”
After thanking her, I couldn’t help but start laughing. I decided I needed to make a confession.
Cali Williams Yost
“Had you been in this same store a couple of months earlier you would have experienced a very different scene,” I told her. “I was short on both time and patience. I had a work project that I needed to get done, and I was locking horns with my 12-year-old daughter over a dress she wanted to buy that I didn’t like. Trust me, even I don’t always have a perfect handle on my work+life fit, and that’s okay.”
This mother-daughter moment must have been so memorable that even the boutique owner chimed in: “Oh gosh, I remember that.”
“Wow,” the woman sighed. “That’s good to know that even you lose it now and then.”
Yes, I do — and we all will. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t deliberately and consciously try to manage the way work fits into our lives day-to-day and at major personal and career transitions. I do. And 70 percent of the time I accomplish what I want, when I want. In fact, the trip that day to buy the birthday present was planned and fit perfectly into everything else I had to do.
But 30 percent of the time, I do rush into a boutique with a strong-willed daughter, too much on my mind and too little time. I make compromises I might regret (for instance, we bought the dress even though it was too big and she never wore it). But I need to let it go. We all need to do a better job of letting it go.
I may be considered a work+life fit “expert,” but 70 percent is my bar of success. What’s yours?
Connect with Cali Williams Yost on her Work+Life Fit and Fast Company blogs, on Twitter @caliyost, and on LinkedIn. You can also learn more “how tos” in her book, Work+Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right for You (Riverhead/Penguin Group 2005).
You can also click here to learn more about Cali and the other experts featured in Good Enough Is the New Perfect.
Knowing you, Cali. I’m guessing your success rate is higher on average! I love the 70% goal, though. And I’m sure Hollee & Becky would echo how that is more than good enough.
Cali: Terrific post! I think what you discussed is often missing from the work-life discussion. Too often, we assume that a perfect fit is really attainable. I’d love to meet the person who never feels a time crunch or who never feels the strain of competing demands.
The important part about flexibility, though, is who gets to call the shots on how we respond to competing demands. In an inflexible, non-autonomous life, someone else always calls the shots, which leaves us feeling powerless, stressed beyond belief, and at our wits end.
Giving people flexibility and autonomy doesn’t mean competing demands are eliminated completely. It means we have the flexibility and autonomy to eliminate some of them, but we also get the power to make choices. Of course, then we have no scapegoat to blame for why we chose work over something else…the blame falls squarely on our shoulders. Accepting that responsibility is an important by-product that comes with autonomy.
Sorry for the tangent. To actually answer your question (in my usual long-winded fashion) – I think I’m good at achieving a good fit about 65% of the time. Of course, I’d like to be closer to 80%, but that would mean a rigid set of rules that failed to account for the dynamics of life – at least in my opinion!
Matt
I like that you reveal your work-life realities, Cali. My bar is probably at 80%, but it’s not a fair comparison as I’m in the empty nest phase of life.