When I became a mother, I suddenly experienced guilt like I’d never felt before. No matter what I was doing, I felt like I should be doing something else. I was stuck in work-family guilt purgatory. And I’m not alone. Do a quick google search for “working mom guilt” and you get almost 50,000 results.

As our families transition back to school, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with all the new demands coming your way. For example, this is the first year I’ve ever had to think about homework after school! In today’s post, I wanted to share five practical tips to make this transition easier on you and your children. It’s my hope that my trial and error over the last few years will help you confidently tackle this new season.

We recently went on a family vacation that my husband and I have been talking about taking for several years – a family road trip out West. It felt really amazing to finally do something that until recently had just been a dream; something we would talk about but never really take the steps to plan it out and go.

Ask a busy woman if she’d like more time and her answer would likely be “Yes!”. Time is one of our most valuable resources, mostly because it is finite. Each and every one of us only have 24 hours in a day and cannot do anything to add a second, minute, or hour to it.

Those of us with children are headed into summer break. Due to the pandemic, some of you may still be on summer “break” from last year. Although the title of this post refers to surviving summer, I hope that the tips shared here help you to do more than just survive.

“No.” It’s such a small, but incredibly powerful word. It’s one of the few words that can be understood around the world. And yet, many of us don’t use it often enough!

Experiencing work-family conflict is not fun and it’s actually been linked to several undesirable consequences for employees and their families such as burnout, exhaustion, and stress. This is where our friends step in; or as Jane Fonda puts it “our renewable source of power.”

Ready for a spring cleaning? In this post, I share my straightforward process for cleaning out your closet; helping to reduce overwhelm and increasing the elegance of getting dressed each morning.

Some sources suggest that we make approximately 35,000 decisions per day. Granted, it is hard to estimate the exact number of decisions any one person makes, I think we can all agree that when balancing work and family demands we are bombarded with decisions left and right. Making multiple decisions throughout the day, particularly complex or difficult decisions, drains our cognitive energy. This phenomenon is known as decision fatigue .

Coco Chanel, one of the most elegant women I can think of, famously said “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” This same principle applies to our lives – we need to pare down and remove the unnecessary accessories of life so that we can enjoy the beauty of a simple and effective life – in other words so that we can live elegantly.

Today’s post is a bit different – I wanted to do a “research spotlight” focused on a book chapter that my colleagues and I published last summer entitled “Invisible Grief: An Examination of Miscarriage in the Workplace.” Not only is miscarriage more common than most probably realize, but there are also several reasons it is relevant to the workplace.

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, I thought it would be fun to talk about LOVE – just kidding. No, but really today’s topic is related to love because we are going to talk about how you and your spouse (or even just the people that you live with) influence each other’s psychological and physical well-being.

When your engagement and experiences in one role (e.g., work) help you to improve the quality of your life in another role (e.g., family), you are experiencing work-life enrichment.

It’s by setting these goals, in accordance with our values, that we can achieve a sense of competence and satisfaction across our life roles. This practice, identifying your values and goals for the different areas of your life is called life planning.

This year was definitely not what we had in mind this time last year, but it has been an opportunity for growth and learning.

The goal is to make things easier, to open space in your week, to eliminate the constant “What’s for dinner?” questions and get you one step closer to your ideal work-life balance. We’re striving for elegance, remember? So, we need a system that is beautiful in it’s simplicity and effectiveness.

By engaging in a weekly planning exercise you are able to take control of your schedule and plan for a balanced life instead of just hoping it will happen to you and then be stuck wondering why you always feel so overwhelmed.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, but intentional gratitude is something we should practice throughout the year.