Framing the issue of work-life balance—as if the two were dramatically opposed—practically ensures work will lose out. Who would ever choose work over life?¹

—Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook

In Chapter 10 I talked about choosing your own adventure and checking your career moves against your values. The dream is to create a career where your typical workday includes doing things that fill up your soul.

A lot of us see work as something we have to get through so that we can afford the money to spend on the nice things that make our life worth it. Or so that we deserve to reward ourselves with a glass of wine at the end of the week, or a massage or a vacation. Or as a way of earning awards and recognition, so that we feel like we've done something worthwhile with our lives. Work is a way of earning pleasure and proving ourselves.

But the idea that the work itself can fill up our soul? Unfortunately, not many of us are “lucky” enough to like our jobs. We often resign ourselves to the idea that work isn't pleasant; that's just the way life is. People are living for the weekend.

As usual, I think the opposite. Let me be really clear on this: Work and life are not two different things. My work is part of my life. It's actually one of my favorite parts of life.

If this isn't true in your life, how do you get there? When you read Chapter 10 you might have been thinking, “easier said than done.” Well, nothing worth having is ever easy. That's what this chapter is going to be about—making small changes, drawing bigger circles, and figuring out how to create a daily blend of work and everything else.

But first I want to deal with this “work-life balance” myth.

THE MYTH OF “WORK-LIFE BALANCE”

The pursuit of work-life balance seems to be mostly a female problem. I think women have been conditioned to feel ashamed of loving work. For some reason, work is seen as an intrusion on what's supposed to be our life—raising a family, looking after our home, and having enough “me time” as well.

I personally find that working on something satisfying can be great me time, but apparently that doesn't count. There's also the implication that being at home with your kids isn't work, which is a joke if you've ever raised children!

If we do have kids and a career, we're not supposed to love work too much in case it looks like we don't love our children enough. If you're a mother, you know how much you love your children. As if work could ever take away from that!

Love is like the universe; we don't know how big it is and where it ends. People treat it like you've only got a finite amount of love to give. That's bullshit. I don't split my love in half and give 50% to work and 50% to my kids. If you've got a passionate personality, you're going to be passionate about everything in your life. It's not an either/or situation.

In general, men have the opposite problem from women: Nobody judges them for loving their jobs, but lots of men feel like it's not okay to say they want to spend more time at home. A 2015 study found that many of the men interviewed were pretending to work more hours than they did, figuring out smart strategies to meet targets and pass as ideal workers while sneaking off to do the school run or even go skiing with their kids.² The men who openly voiced their dissatisfaction or proposed reduced work hours (including requesting the type of flexibility that was usually offered to women in the same organization) were typically met with harsh penalties and marginalization.³

That's ridiculous when you consider that the men who cut their hours back without asking still managed to do what was required of them at work; many of those guys were perceived as star players who worked harder than their coworkers. They were proof that blending works, but they did it under the radar because their bosses weren't on board.

FACT: WOMEN GET PREGNANT

Pregnancy and childbearing do not have to kill your career. When I was pregnant I was the most productive I've ever been. It really worked for me; I was on fire! You're not drinking alcohol and you have 30% more blood being pumped around your body and your brain. I've never felt greater.

My husband, Florian, parented our children full-time from the day we brought our first daughter home from the hospital. I'm talking 3 a.m. feedings and everything, so that I could sleep through the night and get up to focus on work in the morning. I already had a thriving business that I'd built up over the previous 10 years. It made sense for me to go back to it almost right away.

But I know my situation is really unusual. A lot of women don't have the great experience with pregnancy that I did, and even fewer women have a partner who cares for the kids full time.

I'll talk more about stay-at-home daddies in Chapter 14; maybe that's an option you'd like to explore for your family. But for the vast majority of heterosexual couples, having children will be more disruptive to the woman's career than to the man's. Even if Dad does decide to stay home with the kids and let Mom go back to work, most couples don't start this arrangement until the baby is several months or even years old.

Which means that if you want to have children, you'll have to navigate a period of your life where you step out of your job for weeks, months, or even a few years, then try to resume your career where you left off before babies. And then you've got all the practical challenges: how to function at work when you were up all night feeding, who does the school run, and the agony of abandoning your kid at the daycare centre while she's sobbing “Mommy, don't go to work!”

Here are a couple of typical solutions women have come up with for handling work during our child-rearing years.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE MYTH #1: “JUST WORK PART-TIME!”

I thought success would be combining career and family successfully at the same time. I thought I could scale back to part-time, and I'd ramp back up as the kids grew … [But my] industry offered few if any professional part-time positions.

—An anonymous female respondent to a survey of Harvard Business School graduates⁴

The mainstream solution to finding a balance when you have kids is to go back to work part time. Great! There are so many fulfilling career opportunities for a woman who needs to leave at 2 p.m. every day to pick up her kids.

Of course, to compensate for the fact that we're mothers, a lot of us will end up accepting part-time pay for a full-time workload, doing unpaid overtime to push up our performance. It's like a huge apology for the fact that we have other priorities during these years of our lives.

Some women do survive and thrive in part-time jobs. Part-time hours and job sharing are legitimate options in plenty of workplaces. If that's you and you're fulfilled, that's fantastic.

If you're the breadwinner in your family, it's unlikely that part-time is a sustainable option for you. This is a book for ambitious, rising women. A lot of you will want to resume your career at a certain level, and it's hard to do that unless you're willing to throw yourself back into it full time. There are no part-time jobs for C-level executives. Women may find themselves accepting a job well below their experience and pay grade, just because they're not in a position to be as available as they'd need to be for the higher-level roles they aspired to do (or actually did) before they had kids.

And even if you could land a flexible, challenging part-time role in your chosen field, if your career is a major source of satisfaction for you, the part-time option will be ultimately frustrating. You're allowed to love your work. It's okay to choose to spend eight or more hours a day working on a project or running a business, if that's what makes you happy.

The key word here is choose: If you've got young children, you might still want to have a lot of freedom around when, where, and how you work. It's not as simple as getting a nanny and going back to your 80-hour-a-week corporate job.

Maybe you don't have young children or even a partner, but you'd still like a lot of flexibility around when, where and how you work. That's valid, too. I'm talking a lot about having babies in this chapter because that was my experience and it's the experience of a lot of women, but you don't have to have children to earn the right to demand freedom in your work life.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE MYTH #2: “JUST BE YOUR OWN BOSS!”

If you can't carry on your career without committing to full-time hours plus travel and overtime, what other options have you got?

For a lot of women, the answer is to start their own business. The myth tells us that being our own boss will offer flexibility and freedom.

The reality is that running a small business is hard. If you run an operation with fewer than 10 employees, it probably all depends on you. It takes time and strategy to break through to the point where your business doesn't depend on you being available and active all the time. In the meantime, your lifestyle suffers. You probably would have experienced more flexibility if you'd gone back to work.

When I joined Entrepreneur's Organization I was placed in a group of peers who had much larger businesses than I did. Yet they had plenty of time to take vacations, their offices weren't calling them anywhere near as much as mine did, and they were playing golf all the time. I compared my lifestyle to theirs and thought I was doing something wrong.

In fact, it wasn't that I was doing anything wrong, it's just that the business I had at the time relied on my name, my face, and my personal involvement. The brand was associated with me, and clients wanted to deal with me personally even though I had a team of people who could implement the strategies I developed. I felt stuck because the success of the business was dependent on me working in it all the time. I couldn't get away—plus if I sold it, it would come with “golden handcuffs” and that's never going to suit me, having been self-employed since I was 19.

I believed that a bigger business would mean I would become even more stuck. But the opposite is actually true. If you can grow your business past the point where you personally need to be there all the time, you can become more free of it.

Nothing about having your own business gives you flexibility. But if you persevere, being a business owner will give you options. You want to grow a reliable team underneath you so that the day-to-day operation of the business isn't dependent on you. Ultimately you want to transition from a goodwill business that depends on your involvement to an asset-based business that can be sold (if that's what you want to do—remember, you're giving yourself options!).

The bottom line is that if you want freedom you need to grow your business, not keep it small. If you're playing a small game based on a myth, you shouldn't be afraid to think bigger.

Selfishly, I'd love to see more women in YPO: To meet the membership criteria, members head up a business with an annual revenue of 10 million dollars (or an enterprise value of 20 million plus). The disparity between male and female members is concerning and women are just as capable of running businesses this size.

Don't let myths around what it means to run a big business get in the way—you have management teams, sometimes boards, CFOs, and of course an asset for your family. I have way more flexibility now than when I had a small business.

FINDING YOUR BLEND

In the Chapter 10 we talked about making big changes, even when your ideal situation feels way beyond your reach right now. Even if you can only make changes 10% at a time, you can start making career moves that align with your values and fill up your soul.

Then once you've created that career that matches your skills and values, I encourage you to tweak the way you approach your work on a day-to-day basis, so that all of the pieces of your pie get the attention they need consistently.

This is what some people call work-life balance. But you already know that I think work-life balance is bullshit. Instead, I call it blending.

I'll give you some examples of what that looks like in my own life. But basically, whenever you find yourself torn between two important things, try and find a way to do both or bring them together: like me at the conference, taking questions in the hotel pool with my kids splashing around.

Once you've started to define what a blended life looks like for you, communicate it to the people around you. Invite a colleague to have a work conversation at your place over afternoon drinks, or talk to your boss about flexible office hours. Invite people to join you in an experiment with blending.

This might feel really uncomfortable for you, but remember, you're always allowed to start small. Try and think of some things you could easily blend right away. Even one thing. Once you've started to blend in little ways, it gets easier, so start with small behavioral changes.

DEFINING THE BLEND

My basic rule of thumb when it comes to blending is this: Whenever you find yourself torn between two things, try and blend them.

Recently I took my oldest daughter with me on a work trip to the States. It's no different from a courier taking his kid on his rounds with him, or like the other day when a guy came to my house to mow my lawn and he'd brought his son along. (This was during school holidays.) The first thing out of his mouth was an apology; he promised that his son would be no trouble and that he'd help out with the lawn. I said, “No problem, but he doesn't have to help you—does he want to jump in our pool?”

We shouldn't be apologizing for having kids to look after! Or for bringing them along to interact in the adult world! Don't ever apologize for that. Own the fact that your children are important, and your personal concerns are important. Be unapologetic about it.

Let's say somebody wants to meet with you in the afternoon, but you're committed to doing school pickup that day: Why not invite them to come to the park to meet you while your kids play on the playground? Instead of apologizing for the inconvenience, think of it as a power play! If they want to talk to you, they have to come and fit in with your life. How powerful is that? And chances are, even if they don't say it to you, they'll be thinking I wish I could do that.

INVITING PEOPLE INTO THE BLEND

People are afraid of blending in case it looks unprofessional. Or, as women who are used to prioritizing everyone else's needs, sometimes we're not comfortable with blending because it feels too self-indulgent. But when you start to blend, you give other people permission to blend too.

Share the concept of blending with other people. Just ask them, “Do you have work-life balance? Have you heard of blending? I'm trying to do it, and this is how it works.” Then if they think it's a great idea, ask them, “How can we do it together?”

You might do it with a colleague at work. You might say Hey, we meet every Friday morning for a coffee and to go over the action items for the next week. Why don't we instead have that conversation on Thursday night on the phone after the kids are in bed, then our Friday mornings will be free. Or you could come to my place at 4 p.m. every Friday and we can have the conversation over a glass of wine and a notepad. Bring your kids and they can swim in the pool while we talk. Open your home to people. It doesn't matter where the conversation takes place—your boss shouldn't care—you're just having a meeting.

If you share the concept with your boss, you can point out that you're doing the same amount of work, but you're able to be more effective when it's blended with your personal life. You'll probably find that those blended meetings go an hour longer, and even if you're distracted by your kids you'll cover more ground. People are willing to work a bit longer and do a bit more when they've been given more.

One thing you can't do is say that you want to blend but you're not granting your team the same flexibility. You can't be a hypocrite. If you're going to blend, everybody around you gets to blend to some degree.

One of my employees has a husband who works one week on and one week off; he's at home one week and away at work the next. She shares his roster with me, and she also shares it with our suppliers so that they know when she's available to go to Sydney to check samples. She doesn't travel during the weeks that her husband is home because she values their time together as a family. (She could easily have set it up the other way and traveled during weeks that he is home, when he's there to take care of their kids. But she doesn't travel when he's home, because she values their relationship just as much as she values the children.)

She asked me once, “What will I tell the suppliers as to why I'm not available those weeks?” I told her to tell them the truth! You say that's the week that I want to be at home with my husband and kids and you leave it at that. I knew it'd come back to me (as her boss), and it did.

The suppliers wanted to know why they couldn't have her down there any week they wanted. I just told them, “She's not available to travel. If you have to get on a plane and come up here that week, you can do that.” That valuable employee is only able to blend because she has me advocating for her. It's important that as the head of the family or the head of the business, you be the one to declare that everybody is going to blend.

If you're not the boss, you might be obliged to ask permission to blend. Remember, if you don't ask, you don't get. The worst that can happen is you get a “no.” And you can at least filter the blend down to the people you're in charge of and be an advocate for others.

Remember the study I referred to earlier, about men who feel pressure to pretend to work more than they do? One of the teams in the study managed to create their own blending culture together:

We kind of have a shared agreement as to what work–life balance is on our team. We basically work really closely with each other to make sure that we can all do that. A lot of us have young kids, and we've designed it so we can do that. We've really designed the whole business [unit] around having intellectual freedom, making a lot of money, [and] having work–life balance. It's pretty rare. And we don't get pushback from above because we are squaring that circle—from the managing partners—'cause we are one of the most successful parts of the company. Most of the partners have no idea our hours are that light.⁵

That's my dream workplace: a company where the people are free to manage their own priorities and take turns picking up the slack so that everybody can meet all their commitments. If you run a business, it's within your power to create a place like that. And whether you're the boss or not, you can start by modeling the blend to people around you, and inviting them to join in.

Lastly, let's inspire each other with ways we are blending. I have shared a few ways I blend, so I'd love to hear of your experiences. Jump on our social pages and share what's working and what's not, and let's support each other. No judgment, no opinions, just experience sharing that's authentic and real. We'll get there faster and stand as a constant reminder to each other why it's so important to persist and practice the art of blending.

STARTING SMALL

If you're new to blending, it might feel hard to get started. But it's no different to developing any other habit: Start with small changes.

It might help if you talk about it as an experiment. “Hey, I'm trying this blending concept out for a little while, I'll see how I go.” Just try your own version of it, so you can get a little bit of positive reinforcement.

Here's a great guiding principle: Don't put yourself or other people in a situation where they feel torn. I often want to be in two places at once—what do I with that? Is there a way to bring those two things together so that I can be present for both?

It doesn't have to be as clear-cut as bringing your family to work or inviting your colleagues to your home. There are lots of places you can use as middle ground. We tend to assume that working in a cafe is for people who are self-employed or working remotely online. It doesn't have to be that way. You're allowed to work there, too! You can easily do a work meeting after school in a cafe with your kids. The best way to entertain them is to give them a milkshake. So go for milkshakes and have your business conversation.

There's no reason to feel guilty or unprofessional for blending your business and personal lives. Men have always conducted business over whiskey and cigars; this is our way of doing it. Women are so gifted at relating to people, and we get to bring that authenticity into our business relationships.

We want our work life to blend into our real lives, to be something that's meaningful in the world outside of work. Otherwise what are we doing it for?