Page 73 - Free Yourself From

56 It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor

Five Keys to Work-Life Balance

Another valuable way to sort your priorities and examine your life is
to make a list (on paper) of the many roles you play and determine
what success looks like to you in regard to those roles.
We all have a myriad of roles we play in life. We have our title
and an image of who we are at work. In our personal lives, we might
also be mothers, daughters, wives, girlfriends, lovers, sisters, and
friends. These roles define who we are in relation to people who
are most important to us. Each role can be a tremendous source of
joy as well as a significant drain on our time and attention.
Then there are the roles we play in our greater community: neigh-
bor, caregiver, volunteer, community leader, a member of organiza-
tions or a spiritual community. These provide fulfilling opportunities
to make a contribution beyond our jobs and our close circle of fam-
ily and friends. They can also be a source of guilt when we are unable
to participate in public life as much as we think we should.
For most of us, there aren’t enough hours in the day to be suc-
cessful in each of these realms—personal, professional, and communal
—all of the time. Unless we prioritize and say no, we can be busy
every minute of every day and not feel that we’ve accomplished any-
thing when we crawl into bed exhausted.
How do we define success in these broad roles? In their book,
Just Enough, Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson examine what busi-
ness leaders concur are the four essential elements of lasting and
worthwhile success. I find this premise useful because it provides a
simple way to look at goal setting in relation to these public and pri-
vate spheres of our lives.
The four elements are:

• Happiness: having feelings of pleasure or contentment
about your life