Work – life balance is something I struggle with every day. Most people, if they looked at my life, would think that was a strange question for me. You see I work at home. I don’t rush out the door every morning to fight the traffic. I don’t have daily battles to leave the office to get home for dinner with my family. Surely as someone who works from home I now have the best of both worlds?

Most of the discussion about work – life balance is about juggling a career outside the home with finding time for raising children. Very little of the talk is about the real challenges women face as they raise both children and a business from home. How do you get work – life balance when you move the work into your home?

I know this is a real problem. My work is always there. Behind my office door, on my desk are the freelance projects I’m working on and my manuscripts that need editing. It is all too easy to tell my daughter that, “I won’t be long, I just need to check my email.” This always ends up with me cross as I struggle to reply to emails and pacify an irate child who finds watching me on the computer a bit boring! With work just a room away, evenings and weekends can lose their meaning and become just another opportunity to work. In the end, working at home can be just as demanding and stressful as in the office.

In an effort to bring back some balance and calmness into my work at home, here are my top three tips I’ve developed along the way:

• Treat it like a job: Work hours means it is work time and family time is family time. This means that dinner is cooked after work time, not during my work hours. It also means that my emails can wait until I am in my office in my work hours. As Sarah Stein, CEO and Franchisor of Miss Efficiency Bookkeeping said, “…I am very clear about what I do and don’t do. I might put a load of washing on at night, but I will be hanging that out in the morning before we go to childcare. I think of it in terms of if I was an employee I couldn’t come home at ten o’clock and hang out my washing.”

• Focus on what I am doing: Focusing on what I am doing right now is something I practice every day. So when I’m working I am dedicated to producing the best quality outcomes for my work in the time I have. And that does mean turning the Internet off if the job for that day doesn’t need it, and saying “no” to personal calls or household chores. Then when I’m with my daughter, I am focused on her. I’m 100% listening to what she is saying without one eye on the computer screen.

• Respect my work: Before my child, I had a career I loved for so long. When I moved to working from home, I struggled with respecting my work for years. Some how I felt that if I didn’t wear a suit everyday and have back-to-back meetings, that what I did wasn’t “real” work. Now I know that my work is just as valuable as that of my office block, employed friends. It is the outcomes produced that count, not whether I happen to be wearing a suit or not while I worked on them. I then discovered that as soon as I started respecting my work, so did everyone else.

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Jennifer Forest is the author of Work Women Want: Work at Home or Go Part-Time. She is on a quest chasing the promise made to her as a teenager: that women can have it all. Why can’t women have time to take their kids to the playground but still make decent money?

Work Women Want: Work at Home or Go Part-Time will be released May 1^st 2013 in print and e-book.

 www.workwomenwant.com

The post How to Raise a Business and Babies at the Same Time appeared first on AKAMom Magazine.

Take a moment to think back to a simple time in life when we were all bright-eyed little girls playing with our Barbies at home. Sure, Barbie was pretty, smart and could have virtually any career imaginable but being a successful career woman was rarely the topic of our playtime. It was mainly focused on what type of fun Barbie was going to have with her friends. What would she wear? Who would be invited? Would Ken be there? Should she take the convertible? Yes, this was the kind of social interaction amongst mere dolls that would occupy hours of any young girls’ day.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room you were very likely to  nd a young boy playing with his action hero of choice. It was usually something akin to a GI Joe. Yes, these were brave men that spent each day operating machinery and carrying out tasks to meet certain objectives but there was little need for conversation. There was usually just one mission and directives that needed to be carried out to complete it. Once it was over, there was not a long discussion about the outcome, instead just a quick celebratory shout and then it was time to move on to the next assignment.

Most would say that these are fond memories of days gone by, but years later, these boys and girls seem to still engage in the same type of “play”. Women continue to choose professions that are “people focused”, while men opt for more “object focused” professions. It’s the reason why when I speak of an Engineer, most would assume that I am speaking of a man. When we walk into a doctor’s o ce do we expect a male nurse to greet us? Not usually. While it is true that there are female engineers and male nurses, they are not in the majority. Why? One explanation is that we are gently conditioned by society to see that certain careers are more suitable for one gender than the other, but can it be more than that? Scientific research shows that there is more at work here: Hormones.

Yes ladies, once again these mysterious and powerful forces of nature  ex yet another muscle we were not aware of.
A new study done by a team of psychologists at Pennsylvania State University discovered that females exposed to high rates of the male hormone, androgen, in their mother’s uterus are more likely than other females to later be interested in jobs usually preferred by males. Although females with this genetic condition, known as CAH, are exposed to androgen while developing, they are genetically female and reared as females.  is particular study included 46 females with CAH; 21 una ected females; 27 males with CAH; and 31 unafected males.  They were asked to rank 64 jobs based on their like, dislike or indierence to. The females with CAH were less interested in “people focused” jobs such as a social worker and teacher than other females and more interested in “object focused” jobs like a pilot and scientist.

It’s important to note that the more androgen they were exposed to in the womb, based on their type of CAH, the stronger their interest in “object focused” jobs. Male participants with CAH did not answer di erently from una ected male participants. Based on these  ndings, researchers can better comprehend how these preferences begin and could help psychologists develop ways to encourage women without CAH to test jobs in the science, technology and engineering  fields. Presenting these types of  fields as those that will ultimately have a great impact on people may motivate more women to seek careers that they otherwise would overlook. We would experience a more diversified workplace across the board.  is exciting  nd is still a small part of the bigger picture of how we women work, but one thing is certain…It has once again been proven that we are extremely complex creatures and hardwired to  nd purpose in all that we do.

By Patty Mendoza

The post Can your Hormones Decide your Career? appeared first on AKAMom Magazine.