September 27, 2013 • 23 mins
In the third installment of a special "Lean In" series, Cristen and Caroline discuss why "work-life balance" and the idea of "having it all" is a myth.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to your Stuff Mom Never Told You from How
Stuff Works Not comed Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristin and I'm Caroline, and this is part three
of our Stuff Mom Never Told You plus lean In series,
and today we are kind of stepping outside of the
(00:26):
workplace to look at life surrounding and intertwining work and
debunking this idea of work life balance. Yeah. Sandberg focuses
a lot in her book on just the fact that
there really is no such thing you. There really is
(00:46):
in in this day and age, with our smartphones and whatnot,
there really is kind of a blurred line now between
our personal lives and our work lives, and we kind
of shouldn't be expect did and maybe can't be expected
to be too completely separate people. Yeah, and there's this
idea that I hadn't thought about before before I read
(01:09):
Lean In, that really framing it as a work life
balance and trying to achieve some perfect balance between the
two often is an exercise and futility that we may
be wasting a lot of energy on instead of just
embracing the fact that the two collide and they're going
(01:30):
to collide and intersect all of the time, and the
chapters that we're focusing on for this discussion come from
chapter eight, making your partner a real partner in chapter nine,
which is the myth of doing it all. Um. So,
just to kick things off, we are working a bunch,
especially if you are married with kids. For instance, in
(01:53):
two thousand nine, married middle income parents worked eight and
a half more hours per week paired to parents in
nineteen seventy nine. But you're still expected to go home
and do all of the things that parents did in
nineteen seventy nine, on top of probably more work from home. Right. Yeah.
(02:13):
Twelve survey found that of working adults work after leaving
the office. I mean, how many times do you get
emails after hours? Like, I mean, it happens all the
time because people are still plugged in, and they're expected
to be plugged in exactly, and especially for moms out there,
And this is something that we've talked about a lot
and stuff mom never told you motherhood and career and
(02:34):
work and how all of those things tie together. Um.
And the fact of the matter is, it's so much
work out there for moms because one analysis found that
among working parents, moms do forty more childcare and thirty
percent more housework compared to working dad's and that leads
(02:55):
to a lot of unequal leisure time. I mean, I
I know I would be resentful. Um So, a two
thousand nine survey found that only nine percent of people
in dual earner marriages say they share housework, childcare, and
breadwinning evenly. But this isn't to place blame immediately on
husband's and dad's shoulders, saying you know what, if you
(03:17):
would just do the dishes more than everything would be fine. No,
there might be first a need for us to look
at ourselves. What are we doing? Are we maybe kind
of claiming that housework in childcare as our own rather
than taking a more collaborative approach, because, for instance, wives
(03:38):
to engage in gate keeping behaviors do five more hours
of family work per week than wives who take a
more collaborative approach. If you're sitting there like looking over
your husband's shoulders when he's loading the dishwasher and saying, actually,
that's not gonna fit there now. And I'm saying this
as a very anal retentive dishwasher loader for sure, me too.
(04:01):
You gotta you gotta let go sometimes or you know,
do what you're good at. Kristen is good at letting
the dishwasher. I, for one, rearrange I go behind my
my dude roommate and rearrange the dishwasher completely because I'm like, why,
why would you just put a glass in the middle
like that? Exactly? You've got to line it up on
the sides. That's my strength. Vacuuming, Oh god, just can
(04:23):
someone else do the vacuuming? Like I don't mind doing it,
but I don't want to do it all the time,
and I don't our apartment living room is so big,
so it would probably save you and due roommate time
if you just do the dishes. Do that dishwasher to
your heart's content. He does the floors right, Yeah, he
is much better and and actually chooses to pick up
(04:45):
things off the floor. You know, he might throw my
shoes in my room. That's fine. I don't take that
as passive aggressive or anything. But that's his strength. So
it's it's better to work to your strength and allow
your partner, spouse, roommate, whoever, to do what they're good at,
to allow them to take some of that responsibility off
your shoulders instead of being like, well, no, but I
(05:07):
want to change all the diapers, and I'm better at
putting the trash bag in the trash can, and well know,
but I vacuum better, Like instead of claiming all of that,
give some of it up exactly, and also find a
partner who is cool with accepting the stuff that you
want to give up. This was something that I really
appreciated Sandberg bringing up in the book, which is the
(05:30):
importance of choosing a partner. Wisely, she writes, I truly
believe that the single most important career decision that a
woman makes is whether she will have a life partner
and who that partner is. Right, And she even urges
people to date all of the wrong people. I mean,
(05:51):
she says that her advice is to date the bad boys,
the cool boys, the conmitven phobic boys, the crazy boys,
but don't marry them. The things that may the bad
boys sexy don't make them good husbands. And I can
totally see what she's saying, because it's not so much Okay, well,
you can't marry somebody who's cool or whatever, but like,
you just want somebody who will support you in your decisions,
(06:13):
whether that's to work seventy hours a week or whether
that's to work from home. Yeah, and that's such a
crucial starting point because I feel like a lot of
the research focuses on where women are by middle age,
they're probably married, they probably have kids, and talking about
the whole juggling act of all of those things. But
(06:36):
it's so important and worthwhile to take it a few
steps back and say, Okay, why don't we start from
square one, which is all right, if we want to
partner up with somebody, let's think more about who we
partner up with. Is that some someone going to be
able to support our ambition in our career? Right? And
(06:57):
then once you've gotten to that point, she stresses how
how important communication is. Yeah, actively communicating with your partner
about going fifty fifty is obviously a really good thing
to do. Of saying, you know what you do this,
I'll do that. Let's play to our strengths. And that's
one way that you can practice the consciousness that Glorious
(07:18):
Synem talks about when she says it's not about biology
but about consciousness. Right, going ahead, like I was saying earlier,
like establishing what your strengths are and what your partner
strengths are and working from there instead of going ahead
and establishing early in the relationship or early in the
marriage that you are gonna be the one shouldering both
(07:40):
work and all of the home life. Yeah, because if
you adopt the roles of say, cook and caregiver first thing,
whether you have you know, a prince or a toad,
he's probably just gonna be okay with it, you know,
and kind of by no fault of his own and
be like, oh, okay, well, sure you can dinner. That's
(08:01):
totally fine. And when I was reading this, it totally
resonated with me because I have had to take a
step back from cooking all of the time, doing grocery,
shopping all the time, doing although my boyfriend is very
adamant that he does his own laundry, which I'm fine about.
(08:24):
But but I realized, and it wasn't before I read this,
to be honest, I realized that I had just taken
on all of these roles. I was doing everything and
it wasn't that he didn't want to. It was that
I wasn't giving him a chance to. Yeah, I mean,
it was the same thing with dude roommate, Like I
(08:45):
was feeling so resentful because I was doing everything to
clean up this freaking apartment. And finally I just told him,
I was like, you're driving You're driving me crazy, like
I'm gonna end up, like I don't know, setting all
your shoes on fire or something, and he finally was okay.
He finally chipped in and started doing some of the
counter wiping down and some of the vacuuming. Yeah, And
(09:07):
and that's why Sandbergy talks about how if you want,
you gotta ask for it first of all, and then
crucially step back enough to let it actually happen. And
I still have to stop myself, and it especially comes
up with the dishwashing things, which makes me, once I
realized that I'm doing it, I feel a little bit
(09:31):
crazy because, you know, like thinking about like, oh, I'm
not one of those women who stands over boyfriend's shoulder
tissing while he incorrectly, you know, washes the tupper where
but I totally do it. I totally do it. So
I just have to step back, just like no, actually,
you're I'm going to go in the other room and
(09:51):
I'm gonna read and relax, and it's totally fine. But
it's all about just raising some awareness with yourself to
begin with, but also recognizing like what your psychosis are.
For instance, like my my roommate, and I've mentioned this
before on the podcast, like he is super psychotic about stuff.
(10:11):
He isn't so much like a clean freak as he
is a neat freak. I'm the other way around. I
don't care if stuff is spread out all over the
apartment as long as it's not grimy. And so, like,
you know, I will come out of my room or
you know, come home and he will have cleaned and
like things are stacked in like a really weird place,
and he's like moved all of my personal belongings in
(10:33):
front of my door. And it's like, okay, let go.
You wouldn't clean like this, but this is how he cleans.
And he just sees these things as like interlopers in
the living room space and they need to be removed.
So that's how he does it. I've got to let
it go. Yeah, Yeah, I've had to relinquish some of
my neat freakness as well. I'm just saying, okay, cleanliness
(10:55):
often resides on a spectrum. I'm more of the end
of the spectrum. And my boyfriend is more middling. He's
not low, but middling, and he can at least. It's
not that he wants to live in a pig sty,
but it's that dishes can sit in the sink for
a while, or the floor can look a little bit
dirty for a while, and it's not going to be
(11:16):
the end of the world. I want to clean when
I come home. Well, you have a lot of floor
space in your apartment. I do have a lot of
floor space, so hashtag bless Well, No, I'm just talking
about the amount of sweeping. Yeah, it's a lot of sweeping.
And I know that these kinds of things, talking about
dishes and cleaning, et cetera, seems so negligible and maybe
(11:37):
seem like minor points if we're talking about career in
capital C career. But it's time, and it's time that
either takes away from our work or contributes to stress
all around. And I do think that it makes a
major difference for sure. I mean, yeah, if you feel
like you have to work eight, nine, ten hours a
(11:57):
day and then come home and continue working, but that
work is sweeping and doing dishes like it's crazy making Yeah,
and it just gives you. It gives you no extra time,
and the benefits of fifty fifty partnerships, not just at
home but also in the workplace, have very real results.
(12:17):
There was a finding that Sandberg talks about in the book,
which is that the risk of divorce reduces by about
half when a wife earns half the income and a
husband does half the housework. Yeah, that would be that
would be nice to I know my mother, Well, I
just like, look at my parents, you know, they've been
(12:38):
married for so long, and my mother's like, I would
just really love it if he would chip in. I'm like,
how long have you been married? You know? And my
dad does he If you look at it more objectively,
my dad does do a lot. He does everything outside.
He does all the bill paying, all the financial stuff.
My mom is the one who does more of the
like cooking and cleaning and laundry and that kind of stuff.
So it's like, as an outside or who lives thirty
(13:01):
minutes away from them. Thankfully, um, I can I can
see that they do a lot of equal work. It's
just that when you feel like you're the one who's
putting in all of the time doing something, you know
that can put a strain on things absolutely, um and
one thing that we might want to liberate ourselves from
two that can put a strain on us mentally and
(13:24):
make those differences feel even bigger than they are, is
just abandoning this notion of having it all. This is
a phrase. I feel like it's been coming up ad
nauseam in magazine articles focused on women. It's always focused
on women. It's blog posts, it's tweets, it's everything talking
(13:46):
about can we have it all? Oh, we can't have
it all? No, maybe we should. You know what I'm
gonna say, Let's just forget about those words. Yeah, period, Yeah,
forget about them. I mean Samberg calls it the trap,
biggest trap ever set for women. Um, and I would,
I mean, I would kind of agree. I think it's
more important to this is gonna sound totally hippy dippy.
(14:08):
I think it's more important to find your happiness and
your happy spot, in your sweet spot in life in general,
more than it is to try to have some like
magazine created ideal of having it all. Yeah, Because then
the question is, well, what is all that's going to
be different to everybody? Right? When I when I hear
the phrase having it all. I picture a stock shot
(14:28):
online of a woman in a business suit with a
briefcase and a baby and a cell phone, and she's
very slim. I guess she's very slim and has impeccable
hair somehow. Yeah, I would love impeccable hair, but I
can't have it all, that's right. Uh Yeah. There was
a quote from the book. He says, long term success
(14:49):
at work often depends on not trying to meet every
demand placed on us. The best way and I highlighted
those a million times. The best way to make room
for both life and career is to make choices deliberately,
to set limits and stick to them, which sounds radically
different and also radically more manageable than some idea of
(15:10):
having it all. Well, not only the idea of having
it all, but the idea of I'm going to feel
guilty if I don't take it all on, you know,
that idea of relinquishing that guilt of like, now, I'm human,
and I need to set these boundaries for myself and
for you, as the person who's depending on me. If
I tell you I can deliver X y Z, whether
you're my partner or my co worker, you know, if
(15:33):
I tell you that I can do all of this
stuff and then I have a nervous breakdown, You're gonna
be like, where's that TPS report? And I'm like, I
couldn't do it right. And and that this resonates not
just with our TPS reports metaphorically speaking, but also with
those things at home, of the cooking, including and all
of the unpaid work of maybe relinquishing some of that,
(15:56):
letting it get a little messy every now and then,
and not worrying about it, because the idea of striving
for having it all is just chasing some made up
construct exactly, and a lot of other women have realized
these kinds of things. Um Tina Fey one of our favorites.
(16:17):
In her book Bossy Pants, she talks about this idea
of having it all and the fact that you are,
as a woman so judged for whether you have it
all and how you got there. She says, what is
the rudest question you can ask a woman is how
do you juggle it all? People constantly ask me with
an accusatory look in their eye. And again, that image
(16:39):
that you talked about of the well dressed, pants suited
woman with the briefcase and the baby looking harried but
also put together at the same time. I feel like
sums all of that up. But yeah, that idea of
having it all unless we get like twelve more hours
in each day somehow, I you know, I mean, but
then I would use it to sleep, Let's be honest. Um.
(17:03):
Samberg also sided Dr Lorie glimpse Er, who's the dean
of the wheel Cornell Medical College, who was talking more
about balancing career and childcare. But I feel like her
advice really resonated to women like us who might not
be married with children. She said, I had to decide
what mattered and what didn't, and I learned to be
(17:25):
a perfectionist only in the things that mattered. Oh, this
is something I struggle with all the time because I
want I want to do my best. And this goes
back to our whole self doubting issue that we talked
about before, Our whole like feeling like a fraud and
I'm not good enough and I have to put in
a thousand percent or people are going to think I'm, like,
you know, terrible at my job or or my life
or whatever. Um. I mean, I also struggle with noe
(17:49):
pick the things that matter, like the things that are
really important at work, but also the things in life
that really make you happy. Pick those things and put
your energies into him. Don't try to be everything to everybody. Yeah,
as a recipe for anxiety city, for sure. No, trust me,
it is um. There's also the great Nora Fhron who
in her Wellesley commencement speech said, it will be a
(18:11):
little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated,
but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything
like what you think it will be like, but surprises
are good for you, and don't be frightened. You can
always change your mind. I know I've had four careers
and three husbands. I think she's totally right. You're looking
(18:31):
at a girl who went to three colleges and four
years like I don't. I try to pursue the things
that make me the happiest. And if that means getting
a little messy and transferring a lot of times, uh,
then you've got to do what you've got to do exactly,
and Sandberg herself says, if I had to embrace a
definition of success, it would be that success is making
(18:53):
the best choices we can and accepting, and to me,
part of that is unbalanced saying this whole work life
balance notion that we hear over and over and over again,
and I understand why because thinking about it, yeah, like
it makes sense. But sort of in the same way
(19:13):
that having it all, maybe he's leading us astray. Focusing
on work life balance makes it sound like we can
neatly discriminate between oh, well this is this is my
work self, this is my life self. Well, I have
a great real life example. This is not my example.
But my friend Brandon Um does Humans of New York
(19:36):
on Facebook. Maybe you've seen it. He post a lot
of pictures from New York, obviously, and he took this
picture of this older gentleman in a park and he
starts talking to him and they have this conversation that
Brandon writes about where he's like, you know, what is
your greatest achievement or what advice would you give to
a large group of people, And the man starts talking
about how, you know, he's proud that his children grew
(19:57):
up to be the great people that they are, the
successful people that they are, but how filled with regret
he is that he was so focused Laser focused on,
you know, climbing the ladder in his career, that that
was his focus. He was glad he could provide for
his children, and he was glad they turned out okay.
So when Brandon said, you know, would you regret it
(20:17):
if you had given up a few rungs on the
ladder to have been home more often? And the man said, no,
you know, like that's that's a person, that's a real
life person who didn't have whatever balance we are seeking,
whatever your version of balance is. He and he regretted it.
But you know, so I I take that that man
(20:39):
that Brandon spoke with as a great example of like,
find what makes you happy and find it before it's
too late. Yeah, And I think one of the first
steps along the way to doing that is dismissing this
idea that it's even possible to have it all, that
that even that that even makes sense in any way whatsoever,
and that it's not going to you get a little
(21:01):
messy sometimes along the way. Now, that's totally fine, and
I feel like, you know, the more we can kind
of accept that, then that can possibly lead into, i
don't know, opening up some breathing room in the workplace.
Day to day as well. So I'm sure that listeners
have lots of experience with this as well. So I'm
(21:23):
curious to hear from folks about what they think about
that idea of work life balance. Do we need to
unbalance the work life balance? Do we need better language
or just get rid of it and start fresh? I
don't know what what do we do about this? Yeah?
I want to I do want to hear how people
do achieve any sort of balance, or you know, are
(21:45):
you in a super corporate environment and and you're working
with maybe your superiors to help achieve some sort of flexibility,
or you know, do you feel like you're slaving away
in a in a little box all the time? Let
us know your thoughts. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
is where you can email us. We also highly encourage
you to check out what is going on with lean In.
It's not just a book, it is also a movement,
(22:07):
so head over to lean in dot org. They also
have a great Facebook network, not surprisingly since CEO of
Facebook Cheryl Sandberg is at the helm of this. There
at Facebook dot com slash lean in, and there you
can find a lot of women who are sharing their
experiences and you can share there as well. And next
(22:29):
week we're gonna tie up our series. It's gonna be
over Caroline. What are we gonna talk about. We're going
to talk about the word bossy and why that is
a quirrel out of word. So this series we will
have started square one with negotiation. We're gonna end things
at the top of the ladder and we're hopefully the boss.
(22:50):
That's right. So tune in next Friday for the conclusion
of our four parts series and partnership with main In
for more on is in thousands of other topics? Is
it houstof works dot com
Welcome to your Stuff Mom Never Told You from How
Stuff Works Not comed Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristin and I'm Caroline, and this is part three
of our Stuff Mom Never Told You plus lean In series,
and today we are kind of stepping outside of the
(00:26):
workplace to look at life surrounding and intertwining work and
debunking this idea of work life balance. Yeah. Sandberg focuses
a lot in her book on just the fact that
there really is no such thing you. There really is
(00:46):
in in this day and age, with our smartphones and whatnot,
there really is kind of a blurred line now between
our personal lives and our work lives, and we kind
of shouldn't be expect did and maybe can't be expected
to be too completely separate people. Yeah, and there's this
idea that I hadn't thought about before before I read
(01:09):
Lean In, that really framing it as a work life
balance and trying to achieve some perfect balance between the
two often is an exercise and futility that we may
be wasting a lot of energy on instead of just
embracing the fact that the two collide and they're going
(01:30):
to collide and intersect all of the time, and the
chapters that we're focusing on for this discussion come from
chapter eight, making your partner a real partner in chapter nine,
which is the myth of doing it all. Um. So,
just to kick things off, we are working a bunch,
especially if you are married with kids. For instance, in
(01:53):
two thousand nine, married middle income parents worked eight and
a half more hours per week paired to parents in
nineteen seventy nine. But you're still expected to go home
and do all of the things that parents did in
nineteen seventy nine, on top of probably more work from home. Right. Yeah.
(02:13):
Twelve survey found that of working adults work after leaving
the office. I mean, how many times do you get
emails after hours? Like, I mean, it happens all the
time because people are still plugged in, and they're expected
to be plugged in exactly, and especially for moms out there,
And this is something that we've talked about a lot
and stuff mom never told you motherhood and career and
(02:34):
work and how all of those things tie together. Um.
And the fact of the matter is, it's so much
work out there for moms because one analysis found that
among working parents, moms do forty more childcare and thirty
percent more housework compared to working dad's and that leads
(02:55):
to a lot of unequal leisure time. I mean, I
I know I would be resentful. Um So, a two
thousand nine survey found that only nine percent of people
in dual earner marriages say they share housework, childcare, and
breadwinning evenly. But this isn't to place blame immediately on
husband's and dad's shoulders, saying you know what, if you
(03:17):
would just do the dishes more than everything would be fine. No,
there might be first a need for us to look
at ourselves. What are we doing? Are we maybe kind
of claiming that housework in childcare as our own rather
than taking a more collaborative approach, because, for instance, wives
(03:38):
to engage in gate keeping behaviors do five more hours
of family work per week than wives who take a
more collaborative approach. If you're sitting there like looking over
your husband's shoulders when he's loading the dishwasher and saying, actually,
that's not gonna fit there now. And I'm saying this
as a very anal retentive dishwasher loader for sure, me too.
(04:01):
You gotta you gotta let go sometimes or you know,
do what you're good at. Kristen is good at letting
the dishwasher. I, for one, rearrange I go behind my
my dude roommate and rearrange the dishwasher completely because I'm like, why,
why would you just put a glass in the middle
like that? Exactly? You've got to line it up on
the sides. That's my strength. Vacuuming, Oh god, just can
(04:23):
someone else do the vacuuming? Like I don't mind doing it,
but I don't want to do it all the time,
and I don't our apartment living room is so big,
so it would probably save you and due roommate time
if you just do the dishes. Do that dishwasher to
your heart's content. He does the floors right, Yeah, he
is much better and and actually chooses to pick up
(04:45):
things off the floor. You know, he might throw my
shoes in my room. That's fine. I don't take that
as passive aggressive or anything. But that's his strength. So
it's it's better to work to your strength and allow
your partner, spouse, roommate, whoever, to do what they're good at,
to allow them to take some of that responsibility off
your shoulders instead of being like, well, no, but I
(05:07):
want to change all the diapers, and I'm better at
putting the trash bag in the trash can, and well know,
but I vacuum better, Like instead of claiming all of that,
give some of it up exactly, and also find a
partner who is cool with accepting the stuff that you
want to give up. This was something that I really
appreciated Sandberg bringing up in the book, which is the
(05:30):
importance of choosing a partner. Wisely, she writes, I truly
believe that the single most important career decision that a
woman makes is whether she will have a life partner
and who that partner is. Right, And she even urges
people to date all of the wrong people. I mean,
(05:51):
she says that her advice is to date the bad boys,
the cool boys, the conmitven phobic boys, the crazy boys,
but don't marry them. The things that may the bad
boys sexy don't make them good husbands. And I can
totally see what she's saying, because it's not so much Okay, well,
you can't marry somebody who's cool or whatever, but like,
you just want somebody who will support you in your decisions,
(06:13):
whether that's to work seventy hours a week or whether
that's to work from home. Yeah, and that's such a
crucial starting point because I feel like a lot of
the research focuses on where women are by middle age,
they're probably married, they probably have kids, and talking about
the whole juggling act of all of those things. But
(06:36):
it's so important and worthwhile to take it a few
steps back and say, Okay, why don't we start from
square one, which is all right, if we want to
partner up with somebody, let's think more about who we
partner up with. Is that some someone going to be
able to support our ambition in our career? Right? And
(06:57):
then once you've gotten to that point, she stresses how
how important communication is. Yeah, actively communicating with your partner
about going fifty fifty is obviously a really good thing
to do. Of saying, you know what you do this,
I'll do that. Let's play to our strengths. And that's
one way that you can practice the consciousness that Glorious
(07:18):
Synem talks about when she says it's not about biology
but about consciousness. Right, going ahead, like I was saying earlier,
like establishing what your strengths are and what your partner
strengths are and working from there instead of going ahead
and establishing early in the relationship or early in the
marriage that you are gonna be the one shouldering both
(07:40):
work and all of the home life. Yeah, because if
you adopt the roles of say, cook and caregiver first thing,
whether you have you know, a prince or a toad,
he's probably just gonna be okay with it, you know,
and kind of by no fault of his own and
be like, oh, okay, well, sure you can dinner. That's
(08:01):
totally fine. And when I was reading this, it totally
resonated with me because I have had to take a
step back from cooking all of the time, doing grocery,
shopping all the time, doing although my boyfriend is very
adamant that he does his own laundry, which I'm fine about.
(08:24):
But but I realized, and it wasn't before I read this,
to be honest, I realized that I had just taken
on all of these roles. I was doing everything and
it wasn't that he didn't want to. It was that
I wasn't giving him a chance to. Yeah, I mean,
it was the same thing with dude roommate, Like I
(08:45):
was feeling so resentful because I was doing everything to
clean up this freaking apartment. And finally I just told him,
I was like, you're driving You're driving me crazy, like
I'm gonna end up, like I don't know, setting all
your shoes on fire or something, and he finally was okay.
He finally chipped in and started doing some of the
counter wiping down and some of the vacuuming. Yeah, And
(09:07):
and that's why Sandbergy talks about how if you want,
you gotta ask for it first of all, and then
crucially step back enough to let it actually happen. And
I still have to stop myself, and it especially comes
up with the dishwashing things, which makes me, once I
realized that I'm doing it, I feel a little bit
(09:31):
crazy because, you know, like thinking about like, oh, I'm
not one of those women who stands over boyfriend's shoulder
tissing while he incorrectly, you know, washes the tupper where
but I totally do it. I totally do it. So
I just have to step back, just like no, actually,
you're I'm going to go in the other room and
(09:51):
I'm gonna read and relax, and it's totally fine. But
it's all about just raising some awareness with yourself to
begin with, but also recognizing like what your psychosis are.
For instance, like my my roommate, and I've mentioned this
before on the podcast, like he is super psychotic about stuff.
(10:11):
He isn't so much like a clean freak as he
is a neat freak. I'm the other way around. I
don't care if stuff is spread out all over the
apartment as long as it's not grimy. And so, like,
you know, I will come out of my room or
you know, come home and he will have cleaned and
like things are stacked in like a really weird place,
and he's like moved all of my personal belongings in
(10:33):
front of my door. And it's like, okay, let go.
You wouldn't clean like this, but this is how he cleans.
And he just sees these things as like interlopers in
the living room space and they need to be removed.
So that's how he does it. I've got to let
it go. Yeah, Yeah, I've had to relinquish some of
my neat freakness as well. I'm just saying, okay, cleanliness
(10:55):
often resides on a spectrum. I'm more of the end
of the spectrum. And my boyfriend is more middling. He's
not low, but middling, and he can at least. It's
not that he wants to live in a pig sty,
but it's that dishes can sit in the sink for
a while, or the floor can look a little bit
dirty for a while, and it's not going to be
(11:16):
the end of the world. I want to clean when
I come home. Well, you have a lot of floor
space in your apartment. I do have a lot of
floor space, so hashtag bless Well, No, I'm just talking
about the amount of sweeping. Yeah, it's a lot of sweeping.
And I know that these kinds of things, talking about
dishes and cleaning, et cetera, seems so negligible and maybe
(11:37):
seem like minor points if we're talking about career in
capital C career. But it's time, and it's time that
either takes away from our work or contributes to stress
all around. And I do think that it makes a
major difference for sure. I mean, yeah, if you feel
like you have to work eight, nine, ten hours a
(11:57):
day and then come home and continue working, but that
work is sweeping and doing dishes like it's crazy making Yeah,
and it just gives you. It gives you no extra time,
and the benefits of fifty fifty partnerships, not just at
home but also in the workplace, have very real results.
(12:17):
There was a finding that Sandberg talks about in the book,
which is that the risk of divorce reduces by about
half when a wife earns half the income and a
husband does half the housework. Yeah, that would be that
would be nice to I know my mother, Well, I
just like, look at my parents, you know, they've been
(12:38):
married for so long, and my mother's like, I would
just really love it if he would chip in. I'm like,
how long have you been married? You know? And my
dad does he If you look at it more objectively,
my dad does do a lot. He does everything outside.
He does all the bill paying, all the financial stuff.
My mom is the one who does more of the
like cooking and cleaning and laundry and that kind of stuff.
So it's like, as an outside or who lives thirty
(13:01):
minutes away from them. Thankfully, um, I can I can
see that they do a lot of equal work. It's
just that when you feel like you're the one who's
putting in all of the time doing something, you know
that can put a strain on things absolutely, um and
one thing that we might want to liberate ourselves from
two that can put a strain on us mentally and
(13:24):
make those differences feel even bigger than they are, is
just abandoning this notion of having it all. This is
a phrase. I feel like it's been coming up ad
nauseam in magazine articles focused on women. It's always focused
on women. It's blog posts, it's tweets, it's everything talking
(13:46):
about can we have it all? Oh, we can't have
it all? No, maybe we should. You know what I'm
gonna say, Let's just forget about those words. Yeah, period, Yeah,
forget about them. I mean Samberg calls it the trap,
biggest trap ever set for women. Um, and I would,
I mean, I would kind of agree. I think it's
more important to this is gonna sound totally hippy dippy.
(14:08):
I think it's more important to find your happiness and
your happy spot, in your sweet spot in life in general,
more than it is to try to have some like
magazine created ideal of having it all. Yeah, Because then
the question is, well, what is all that's going to
be different to everybody? Right? When I when I hear
the phrase having it all. I picture a stock shot
(14:28):
online of a woman in a business suit with a
briefcase and a baby and a cell phone, and she's
very slim. I guess she's very slim and has impeccable
hair somehow. Yeah, I would love impeccable hair, but I
can't have it all, that's right. Uh Yeah. There was
a quote from the book. He says, long term success
(14:49):
at work often depends on not trying to meet every
demand placed on us. The best way and I highlighted
those a million times. The best way to make room
for both life and career is to make choices deliberately,
to set limits and stick to them, which sounds radically
different and also radically more manageable than some idea of
(15:10):
having it all. Well, not only the idea of having
it all, but the idea of I'm going to feel
guilty if I don't take it all on, you know,
that idea of relinquishing that guilt of like, now, I'm human,
and I need to set these boundaries for myself and
for you, as the person who's depending on me. If
I tell you I can deliver X y Z, whether
you're my partner or my co worker, you know, if
(15:33):
I tell you that I can do all of this
stuff and then I have a nervous breakdown, You're gonna
be like, where's that TPS report? And I'm like, I
couldn't do it right. And and that this resonates not
just with our TPS reports metaphorically speaking, but also with
those things at home, of the cooking, including and all
of the unpaid work of maybe relinquishing some of that,
(15:56):
letting it get a little messy every now and then,
and not worrying about it, because the idea of striving
for having it all is just chasing some made up
construct exactly, and a lot of other women have realized
these kinds of things. Um Tina Fey one of our favorites.
(16:17):
In her book Bossy Pants, she talks about this idea
of having it all and the fact that you are,
as a woman so judged for whether you have it
all and how you got there. She says, what is
the rudest question you can ask a woman is how
do you juggle it all? People constantly ask me with
an accusatory look in their eye. And again, that image
(16:39):
that you talked about of the well dressed, pants suited
woman with the briefcase and the baby looking harried but
also put together at the same time. I feel like
sums all of that up. But yeah, that idea of
having it all unless we get like twelve more hours
in each day somehow, I you know, I mean, but
then I would use it to sleep, Let's be honest. Um.
(17:03):
Samberg also sided Dr Lorie glimpse Er, who's the dean
of the wheel Cornell Medical College, who was talking more
about balancing career and childcare. But I feel like her
advice really resonated to women like us who might not
be married with children. She said, I had to decide
what mattered and what didn't, and I learned to be
(17:25):
a perfectionist only in the things that mattered. Oh, this
is something I struggle with all the time because I
want I want to do my best. And this goes
back to our whole self doubting issue that we talked
about before, Our whole like feeling like a fraud and
I'm not good enough and I have to put in
a thousand percent or people are going to think I'm, like,
you know, terrible at my job or or my life
or whatever. Um. I mean, I also struggle with noe
(17:49):
pick the things that matter, like the things that are
really important at work, but also the things in life
that really make you happy. Pick those things and put
your energies into him. Don't try to be everything to everybody. Yeah,
as a recipe for anxiety city, for sure. No, trust me,
it is um. There's also the great Nora Fhron who
in her Wellesley commencement speech said, it will be a
(18:11):
little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated,
but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything
like what you think it will be like, but surprises
are good for you, and don't be frightened. You can
always change your mind. I know I've had four careers
and three husbands. I think she's totally right. You're looking
(18:31):
at a girl who went to three colleges and four
years like I don't. I try to pursue the things
that make me the happiest. And if that means getting
a little messy and transferring a lot of times, uh,
then you've got to do what you've got to do exactly,
and Sandberg herself says, if I had to embrace a
definition of success, it would be that success is making
(18:53):
the best choices we can and accepting, and to me,
part of that is unbalanced saying this whole work life
balance notion that we hear over and over and over again,
and I understand why because thinking about it, yeah, like
it makes sense. But sort of in the same way
(19:13):
that having it all, maybe he's leading us astray. Focusing
on work life balance makes it sound like we can
neatly discriminate between oh, well this is this is my
work self, this is my life self. Well, I have
a great real life example. This is not my example.
But my friend Brandon Um does Humans of New York
(19:36):
on Facebook. Maybe you've seen it. He post a lot
of pictures from New York, obviously, and he took this
picture of this older gentleman in a park and he
starts talking to him and they have this conversation that
Brandon writes about where he's like, you know, what is
your greatest achievement or what advice would you give to
a large group of people, And the man starts talking
about how, you know, he's proud that his children grew
(19:57):
up to be the great people that they are, the
successful people that they are, but how filled with regret
he is that he was so focused Laser focused on,
you know, climbing the ladder in his career, that that
was his focus. He was glad he could provide for
his children, and he was glad they turned out okay.
So when Brandon said, you know, would you regret it
(20:17):
if you had given up a few rungs on the
ladder to have been home more often? And the man said, no,
you know, like that's that's a person, that's a real
life person who didn't have whatever balance we are seeking,
whatever your version of balance is. He and he regretted it.
But you know, so I I take that that man
(20:39):
that Brandon spoke with as a great example of like,
find what makes you happy and find it before it's
too late. Yeah, And I think one of the first
steps along the way to doing that is dismissing this
idea that it's even possible to have it all, that
that even that that even makes sense in any way whatsoever,
and that it's not going to you get a little
(21:01):
messy sometimes along the way. Now, that's totally fine, and
I feel like, you know, the more we can kind
of accept that, then that can possibly lead into, i
don't know, opening up some breathing room in the workplace.
Day to day as well. So I'm sure that listeners
have lots of experience with this as well. So I'm
(21:23):
curious to hear from folks about what they think about
that idea of work life balance. Do we need to
unbalance the work life balance? Do we need better language
or just get rid of it and start fresh? I
don't know what what do we do about this? Yeah?
I want to I do want to hear how people
do achieve any sort of balance, or you know, are
(21:45):
you in a super corporate environment and and you're working
with maybe your superiors to help achieve some sort of flexibility,
or you know, do you feel like you're slaving away
in a in a little box all the time? Let
us know your thoughts. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
is where you can email us. We also highly encourage
you to check out what is going on with lean In.
It's not just a book, it is also a movement,
(22:07):
so head over to lean in dot org. They also
have a great Facebook network, not surprisingly since CEO of
Facebook Cheryl Sandberg is at the helm of this. There
at Facebook dot com slash lean in, and there you
can find a lot of women who are sharing their
experiences and you can share there as well. And next
(22:29):
week we're gonna tie up our series. It's gonna be
over Caroline. What are we gonna talk about. We're going
to talk about the word bossy and why that is
a quirrel out of word. So this series we will
have started square one with negotiation. We're gonna end things
at the top of the ladder and we're hopefully the boss.
(22:50):
That's right. So tune in next Friday for the conclusion
of our four parts series and partnership with main In
for more on is in thousands of other topics? Is
it houstof works dot com
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