Balance is another term that we often mistake for meaning “equal”. Work/life balance is not about spending the same amount of time and energy on work and “life”. It’s finding an equilibrium, a still point that allows for a sense of stability, even though things are still in flux around us. Likewise, equilibrium does not mean “equal” - where the equilibrium point is could be 80% of A and 20% of B or any other combination. It simply means that there is a stable quantity of each.
Freezing office? It impacts more than just your wardrobe choices. It's time to speak up. It’s July, which means that pretty much wherever you are in America, the corporate overlords have set the thermostat to somewhere in the range of your average refrigerator/freezer. If you’ve noticed that it feels harder to concentrate in your freezing office while furiously rubbing the goosebumps on your arms, it’s not just you.
Change is inevitable and if our only plan to stay on track with our goal is to have everything go perfectly, we’re in trouble. It’s important to keep track of what we are working towards and WHY it’s important, preferably somewhere easily visible so that in the midst of chaos we can come back to our center. What we need is a clear and simple statement that reminds us of what we are striving for and how we can best attain it.
In my own in-house survey of women in STEM, a common source of frustration they mentioned was seeing women constantly overlooked for promotion. A seasoned engineer I spoke with reported a lack of change in the number of women at conferences in her field over the last 20 years. In networking events, I hear a lot of frustration over finding ways to self-promote that doesn’t feel gross or inauthentic.
