We CAN have everything - just not at the same time - so set priorities and stick to them
We all go through time in our life of tremendous change where it feels like a million things seem to happen at the same time and all have an impact on us. For women, one of the most prominent examples of this can be having children and becoming a mother. It is probably one of the most life changing events both parents can experience. The question is what comes with it. The need to set priorities. Whenever we face a lot of change in our life, it helps to set focus again on certain things, while we neglect others. We must understand that this is totally ok, as there are times when we MUST set priorities to not get overwhelmed. Hence, the saying is true, we can have it all, children career, wealth, but not all at the same time. If we try to push through our own perfectionism without setting, clear priorities anxiety and very often unhappiness overwhelm us and lead to unhappiness.
To prioritize we need both, to make sometimes hard decisions and be Master of Planning and organizing our day-to-day activities. Sometimes, many of us find this difficult, especially when we are generally happy with our lives and tend to be very active people that are used to doing a lot of things at the same time and in full swing. It can therefore be difficult to for example decide for a step back in our careers for a while to have a family. A lot of us really like their jobs and get a lot of satisfaction from there. We often fear that our standing and progression will be diminished once we turn our back on our career for a while and focus on family instead. There are two thing that can help here.
Firstly, by cutting back on one ting, let’s not focus on what we might be afraid of giving up, rather than on what we gain. A family is probably one of the most valuable things to have. It provides a safe space to really be ourselves that offers us full support and love for our whole live. To sacrifice a few years of potential career progression for that does not sound too bad after all.
Furthermore, the question is, do we really have to make such a hard cut for deciding for one thing or the other. It does not have to be one thing or the other. We can have both if we don’t do everything to perfection. For example, we can still work and have a career as a mother, but we might have to take the steam out for a while. We can still be a mother but might have to sacrifice time with our kids that we spend at work and organize great childcare to pay for. We therefore do not always have to make this hard black and white decisions; we can do things simultaneously but setting priorities is key. What is important to us that we do not want to sacrifice and how can we ensure a balance that makes us happy, rather than having to decide for either or? Setting priorities and thinking about what really makes us happy and is important to us in our life can really help here and precent us from jumping to conclusions and hard decisions too quickly that we might regret at some point later.
Again, we can have it all, just not at the same time. What this means is we will get there in the end, but we must set priorities and cannot focus on everything 100% at the same time. We can focus on our career a bit less, and more on family, while later reversing this again. Learning to prioritize without making hard core black and white decisions that will also make us unhappy is an art that requires a lot of reflection and skill. However, if we take our time and master the skill of planning and being organized, we can achieve it all, one step after the other, with skill and patience, rather than wanting immediate success and happiness. We can have it all, one after the other, but we have to put a lot of work and skill into it to get there.
