Yesterday, I had the great fortune to get out of work by 4pm to get mee-self to a Working's Mom's Night Out in the city. The event was put on by Mommy Track'd and Flexperience with a panel of delicious working mommas (one of them, my fave Sarah from the Sarah and No-Name Morning Show). The idea: Mothers + Professional = New formulas for Success.
Besides having to enter 12 reminders into my calendar to make sure that I left the office in time and having to bum seven bucks off Glennia to buy a glass of wine, I had a great time hearing about the lives of the professional women. I even managed to swipe an extra swag bag (giveaway details will be up soon).
What I loved about the event was that there was no ONE way to get it done. There were women with flexible arrangments, women who worked part-time, women who worked from home, women who worked full-time, women who customized their career path. It was great to hear from the 7 panelists and moderator Leslie Morgan Steiner that there are lots of ways to create a professional arrangement that can work with your personal life. And it felt good to know that even though the may appear to have it all, they still struggle with getting dinner on the table or having sex more than once a month like the rest of us.
The key take-away from me was that all the panelists were driving their changes to balance work and life. They didn't wait for their manager to bring it up. They didn't complain and complain and never actually do anything about it. As I take a break from writing my performance review, I'm using this as my insipiration. No one else can change me. No one else can change my situation. So I'm crafting a plan, a vision really, of what would be ideal for me. And then I'm going to execute my plan. It's what I get paid to do in my professional life and I'm going to use the same principles to transform it.
The event was over before it really started and some moms had to usher out before everything was wrapped up. Getting nearly 600 working women to arrange for babysitters or husbands or grandmas (like I did) to watch the kids was an example of how working mommas know how to get things done.
