Whenever I do a speaking gig somewhere nice, I take my family and we have a mini holiday.

At the end the MC always says, “I'm sure everybody in the audience has lots of questions, so are you happy for people to come up to you?” And I unapologetically tell them where to find me if they want more: “No problem, but I'm here with my family so if you want to speak to me I'll be in the pool playing with them. You're welcome to come up and ask me anything.”

And they do. And I answer what I can, to these guys in suits hanging around the pool, getting splashed by my kids. I'm pretty sure I'm the only entrepreneur at the conference giving business advice in her bikini.

****

That old idiom that you should keep business and pleasure separate is dead.

You're human. Your colleagues know that. If I weren't friends with the people I work with I'd never have any friends. (My friends joke that the best way to get me to spend time with them is to go into business with me.)

It doesn't make you unprofessional to admit that you're answering a work call from home, or during the school pickup run. You don't have to find a quiet corner and pretend to be in an office when somebody “important” calls. And you don't have to feel guilty for taking that call on the weekend. You love your work, don't you? Sometimes it needs you, just like your family does.

In the same way, you need to give yourself permission to have some availability for personal things during work hours. There's plenty of evidence that allowing people to be more “human” at work actually benefits the organization and increases productivity, not the other way around. So cut yourself some slack. If you duck out early some days to do the school run, you're going to impact your day's work about 5% and improve your family-related guilt about 1,000%. So go for it.

It's just not realistic to manage your personal life and run your business or career well without this flexibility.

So what's my answer to work-life balance? My friends and I call it blending.

We're all familiar with the picture of “work-life balance”: It's a woman standing with her arms stretched out on either side, work stuff balanced in one hand and personal stuff in the other. Or a set of scales with career on one side and personal on the other. Your job is to get both sides to balance each other out.

What if you just threw away the scales and chucked all of it in a blender? And depending on your priorities and what you feel like at any moment, you're allowed to blend in anything you want.

Depending on how I feel today, maybe I'll blend afternoon drinks with my friends with a discussion about the business projects we're across together. Or I'll blend the school run with a work call (and if I call you from the car with my kids, they'll be saying hi to you on speakerphone).

It's important to respect people's time and ask for permission, but their having to put up with a bit of background noise and a quick hello from the kids often outweighs them having to wait until tomorrow for an answer or some direction.

It's all about giving attention to what's important right now, without worrying about whether you're on the clock or not. It's about managing your commitments so that everything you want to do gets done, without forcing yourself to conform to “work time” and “personal time.”

In Part II of this book, we're going to get into every area of your life and talk about how you can blend across them all, so that you're always giving your energy to what's most important.

Here are some examples of what makes it work for me:

• My executive assistant knows everything about me. Her job description is totally blended, personal and professional: She's across everything. Having an assistant who's on top of everything in my life is the only way I can make it work.
• In my organizations, we don't have any meetings before 9:15 a.m. or in the evenings. We do daytime meetings and lunches only, so that people can drop their kids at school and be home with them at night (or I have the team around for a barbecue and we talk business while the kids are playing). On the other hand, if a staff member is at their child's soccer game and they get a work call, I'd encourage them to take it if they can. My staff know it's fine to say, “I'm at the kids' soccer game. I can talk for five minutes.”
• If I have to go away for two weeks or more for work, the family comes with me. When I do go away by myself, I extend the break for half a day per every day that I'm away, and spend some time with the family at the beach or somewhere away from home once I return. I go back to work with my batteries recharged.

Obviously your blending choices aren't going to be the same as mine, because your life isn't set up exactly the same as mine. You might be reading this and thinking “good for you, but I couldn't do those things.” That's fine—what could you do?

Take a second now and imagine how blending might work for you. What kind of freedom could you create if you let go of the idea of work-life balance and started blending instead?

• What would change if you stopped apologizing to your husband and kids for giving attention to your work, and instead showed them how much you love it? Or invited them to be involved?
• How empowered would you feel if you started setting boundaries unapologetically around work, and managed your time according to what you know serves your productivity best, instead of what makes you look like a hard worker?
• How free would you be if you stopped switching between different versions of yourself and started being the same person all the time—whether you were with your family, on a date, drinking with your girlfriends, or talking to your colleagues?

All of that is possible. You just have to know what you value most, promise not to compromise, and live unapologetically in line with what's most important to you. It isn't always easy—it's bloody hard sometimes—but that's why I'm writing this book. I'm inviting you to become part of a new wave of women, a community committed to rising without compromising.

I read this great story about Sallie Krawcheck (who was at the time the CEO of Citigroup's Smith Barney division), told by her colleague Anne Greenwood:

About six months into Krawcheck's tenure, the company announced an all-office conference call. “It's very unusual to have all 600 managers from all offices call in—not unheard-of, but you don't do it that often, because a Wall Street firm doesn't want to freeze everybody.”

The call begins and Krawcheck starts talking. Suddenly, she interrupts herself, Greenwood recalls. “She says, ‘Everyone please bear with me, I have to put the call on hold.’ We're thinking, okay, the head of the Federal Reserve Board must be calling. Something huge has happened in the world economic space.”

Ninety seconds later, Krawcheck comes back on the line. Greenwood remembers what she said next as if it happened yesterday. “She says, ‘I'm so sorry, you guys, that was my daughter and I promised her that she could always reach me. I made a deal with her that if I take this big job, no matter where I am, what I'm doing or who I'm with, I will take your call. The funny thing is, she couldn't find the pink nail polish. I'm the only one who knows it's in the upstairs bathroom.’”

“Immediately there was buzz among the few women in elite positions around the firm,” says Greenwood. “I couldn't believe she was so honest about what had happened. Never in a million years would I have told a male workforce that my daughter couldn't find the pink nail polish.”¹

If one of the most senior women on Wall Street can do it, so can you.