The Classic Work/Life Balance Conundrum – My Experience

When my daughter started school recently, I experienced a bit of a crisis.  I had been blessed to be in this wonderful bubble of being her mother. Starting off with intense COVID lockdown times and gradually progressing to building in the coaching work that I love around small and increasing amounts of childcare. But that being her mother was first and foremost what I did – and that suddenly felt like it was crumbling and I now had a child in school full time and that meant that I “HAD TO” spend all of her school hours working. I love the work that I do, but this HAD TO feeling was new and wasn’t comfortable.

The crisis took a few different forms.  There were some questions around what type of work I wanted to do – did I want to grow my coaching business to fill the gaps (but I was a bit exhausted with the marketing – I have been doing this 16 years and the market becomes increasingly saturated with new coaches), did I want to take some kind of paid employment that I could just forget about when I wasn’t there (that felt too disruptive to my lovely coaching practice), did I want to retrain and try something different?  All these questions were swirling around in my mind, but underneath it all was this feeling.  This feeling that filling all my “free time” with work didn’t feel right.  It actually felt really out of balance.  It wasn’t what I wanted for myself, or for my family.