Work Life Integration

What if I don’t just want “balance”, but I want to be both an engaged, high-performing employee at work, and also a present and active parent at home?

Photo by Mahmud Ahsan on Unsplash

I thought I could have it all. I have always enjoyed taking on challenges and when my husband and I found out we were expecting a baby, I was so excited for the next chapter — the next challenge. One of my biggest fears about starting a family is caused by the common understanding that people generally take a step back in careers once they have a baby. I have always felt so engaged and passionate about my job that I knew I didn’t want to give that up.

My parenthood adventure has been filled with endless surprises of both good and bad nature. It has well-exceeded my expectations and cravings for challenges. Pregnancy itself was already a sudden and drastic challenge — it forced me to change how I operate on a day-to-day basis. Parenthood feels at least 10x harder than that. I planned to break up my parental leave into chunks: returning to work only 4 weeks after delivering the baby so I can adequately support my teams. I would then switch off taking parental leave with my husband. I thought I could plan it all out and power through — oh boy how wrong I was!

I have to admit I have not figured it out yet! My journey to figuring out how to integrate work and life such that both aspects feel fulfilling is just beginning. However, I did gather some useful thoughts that have helped me get through particularly hard moments. Trust me, these hard moments come up a lot as a new parent.

• Every baby is unique. There is no “one size fits all” model. It’s similar to people management in that way — be adaptable and work with your baby to find what works for your family.
• Build a support network. Your old support network can help, but creating a new one with other parents is incredibly powerful as they can relate to and validate the emotions and talk through all the random situations that come up.
• Taking care of a newborn feels like starting a new job every week. Because the baby changes so fast, your job changes along with him. It can be a shock to adapt so much as an adult as we’ve spent many years finding stability.
• When things feel extra hard, recognize that these feelings and this time period are both temporary. If all else fails, your job changes again in a few days and you’ll get a new set of problems :)
• Accept that everything in life as you know it has changed. It helped me to return to first principles. I’m values and goals oriented and I acknowledged my old goals no longer worked. I had to rethink and redraw who I wanted to be today and… in 10 years, 20 years.
• Energy is limited: Be aware of your energy and how to add to it and what subtracts from it. Making a mistake pre-baby is easy to correct, sometimes you can just sleep it off. Post-baby, the tiny human drains as much energy as you’re willing to give so that leaves very little for yourself. For example, I found that screen time was draining for me, while reading felt stress-relieving. So despite how easy it was to stare at my phone every time I fed the baby, I had to resist that urge and instead pick up my kindle.
• Building resilience, practicing emotional regulation, and using methods to calm yourself down helps a lot. So many feelings; so many hormones.
• Protect your time and energy. Ruthlessly prioritize. Protect your sleep. Time-box things. Leverage a todo list to pick things back up. Inbox zero is a dream of the past and it may become a new reality in the future but be okay with it not happening in the near future.
• Context-switching becomes a way of life. There is no way to avoid it. Even if you can focus on just baby alone — there’s context switching required between cleaning to feeding to changing diapers to making sure the baby gets enough vitamin D just to list some examples. (Don’t worry, it does get easier …after the 200th diaper)
• Find energy-building hobbies that are easy to context switch to and from. Babies sleep a lot, but in so many tiny blocks.
• I don’t know how single patents make it, but your partnership really helps
• Let things go. Don’t strive for perfection.
• Practice gratitude 🙏 This helped my husband and I as we were both so mentally and physically exhausted it was easy focus on the negatives and lead to fighting.
• Taking the glass-half-full perspective to situations helped me stay more positive. For example, parents like to say “we had to make so many sacrifices for our children.” Instead, try this phrasing: “we made a conscious choice to prioritize our baby and family.”
• Set and respect boundaries. You set them for a reason. Shut it off. Shut it all off. While I was back at work with my newborn, there were days I worked well into the night on a project or a promo packet for a fellow team member. I sacrificed sleep and baby time for these projects. Despite the outcomes, I always regretted losing time with my baby for work after the fact.
• It is incredibly hard to mix work with family, and work with friendships because the social rules are different. You wouldn’t talk to a coworker the way you’d talk to a child or vice versa, so why add in that challenge of context switching your persona throughout the day? Unfortunately, Covid and WFH culture makes this extra challenging.

I look forward to writing a followup to this article once I have more things figured out in hopefully another few months (or years). People use to tell me “your baby will teach you so much” and I never believed them until my son popped out. Even in his first year, he has taught me so much about unconditional love, about myself, about my emotions, and challenged my core principles and values. This has been both set the record for some of best times and some of the worst times in my life. What an exhilarating journey I did not know I signed up for and one I honestly don’t think anyone can really prepare for.

Please share your experiences and what has worked or hasn’t worked for you. Stay adaptable and stay strong; we’re all in the learning journey together! :)