A few years ago I found myself often feeling stressed out and short on time. Constantly panicked and rushed, I was not happy with how I was interacting with my kids. I was irritated and yelling “hurry up!” nearly every time we were headed out the door. I didn’t want to be that kind of mom and I also didn’t want my kids to experience our life as stressful and…
There seems to an unending number of articles written that tell moms to “put themselves first.” The reason that these articles keep getting written is because so many moms feel overwhelmed and stressed out. But the advice doesn’t seem to match the problem — if you are overwhelmed trying to meet everyone else’s needs, an article that tells you to put yourself first, even if it explains why you need…
Today is International Women’s Day and the theme this year is Be Bold For Change. I love this theme. One of the topics I discuss in nearly every Path Forward workshop is that change is hard. Change is hard even when the change is for the good. So it stands to reason that boldness is required. As Goethe said “Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” It is that…
I have a friend who is very accomplished. He’s started and sold companies, built a local startup community, run events and done charitable work. I had lunch with him once and marveled at the long list of achievements on his LinkedIn profile and asked how he managed to do so much. He admitted that he was more involved in some things than others and that he wasn’t solely responsible for…
My dining room table was dirty when I woke up this morning. Some of it was kid debris – a plastic box full of crayons, half-finished drawings, books, birthday cards. Some of it was food debris – crumbs from last night’s dinner. It was dirty when I woke up because it was dirty when I went to bed. If you just read that paragraph and thought “Oh honey, you are…
It’s good practice to find time for gratitude. This week presents a perfect moment to stop and reflect on all that we have to be grateful for. For me, I am most grateful for the people in my life. I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to remarkable people who I get to work with, live with, be with. Here’s my list of the people who make my…
One aspect of working that can be profoundly impacted by having children is business travel. The issues around travel can be both philosophical and practical. When my children were very little I tried to limit my travel. But in the last few years my travel has increased and they seem to be none the worse for wear. On the practical front, I’ve developed a few strategies for helping my family…
This weekend’s episode of Bullseye, an NPR show hosted by Jesse Thorn, featured legendary TV producer Norman Lear. It’s worth a listen for many reasons, but at the very end of the interview Thorn asked Lear what it was like to be producing six network sitcoms – all of which were in the top 10 in the ratings – at the same time. His answer was wonderful. He said “Was…
According to the smart folks at Working Mother today is National Flex Day. Nice! At Path Forward we are fans of flexibility. In my life, flexibility has been the key to making my work/life work. After my daughter was born almost nine years ago (!!), I worked from home three days per week. I also worked part-time for a bit. I kept the three-days at home schedule, working full-time, until…
A story this week on Quartz.com (a publication I’m becoming increasingly obsessed with) was both fascinating and not the least surprising: a study found that mothers outperformed their childless peers, as measured by output of academic research. There are a million caveats to this study, which looked at PhD economists, including the bias found in a pool of high-powered academics. But I think there’s something to this theory, in part because…
