Women's Issues

Are We All Just Superwomen?

Have you noticed the way us women seem to think we can do it all? We are all now capable of juggling our careers, being good wives, fantastic mothers, keeping our home pristine and looking like we have just stepped off the front page of a magazine. So how do we do it?

We don’t. We are now spending a lot of time chasing our tails, trying to keep up with our alter ego, and prove that we are in fact superwomen. But if doing it the way we are doing it is wrong, what is the right way?

Are you enjoying yourself? If every day you feel like you have to climb Mount Everest and then run the marathon. Then it is not fun! There is nothing to say that you cannot be the best, but you have to ensure that you have time for you. And that means not ticking off your things to do list every second of the day, or having your mind racing consistently with what you need to do to stay on top.

1. Take a day out to enjoy…be it nature, your family, your garden. Benefit from your hard work. I recommend you spend a couple hours over the weekend in the garden reading a good book with only birds singing as background music. “Chicken Soup for the Soul” Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hanson is a fantastic feel good book with short stories that remind you about how lovely this life can be.It always seems like we are too busy for everything and the result is that we don’t give our time to others as much as we could. You know the way we say, I can’t go and see Aunt Sally, I have far too much work to do. Or going to see Mary and her new baby will have to wait, I am far too busy with something or the other.
2. Make appointments in your diary to spend time with others. Be it spending an afternoon after work with your mother, or leaving work early to see a friend. Giving to other feels really good and when you actually get around to it you wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.
3. Factor in time for your relationship. By spending alone time with that special someone, you can work on bringing some excitement into the relationship.
   Structure your work/ life balance properly. Know that you are in control at work and plan your days well so that you don’t feel guilty that you haven’t completed a project or presentation. Poor organisation makes you put more hours in at work and less time at home.
4. Write your things to do list the night before. Ensuring you have everything you need to get going as soon as you arrive in the office. Put time for work on priority projects in the diary so you do not overload on meetings. Brian Tracey’s book Eat Your Frog looks at the principles needed to plan your day to get most things done. Tracey argues that if the first thing you do each day is eat a frog, then the remainder of the day becomes pretty easy. What he is actually saying is get that by getting the hardest task out of the way first the rest of the day will be plain sailing.
5. Get yourself a coach of some sort to help you along the way and provide structure in your life. The book LIFE DIET by Allison Blondell is like a having your own personal life coach that supports you in making changes in your life and will be available from Amazon in early 2012.We need a lot of energy being a superwoman and with time constraints we cannot always make it to the gym to keep fit, or eat the food for that healthy lifestyle we so crave.
6. Do your exercise at home. Get up half an hour earlier and do some sit ups, yoga or anything that takes your fancy. There are currently 10 minute solution exercise DVDs that can blast off fat in any of those problem areas (bum, thighs, stomach etc) and if like me, you want to take it easy, they have a beginners pack.

Tags: chicken soup for the soul, jack canfield, mark victor hanson, time, work