I saw Pina today. If you haven’t seen it yet you should. It made me think about the kind of change that individuals and organizations can make and are making in work and life. I learned valuable lessons from this astonishing dancer, choreographer, and in effect, management coach from her dancers and their movement. Inspired by what I saw in the film, the following quotes are taken from this article by Pina Bausch herself. Food for thought.

On Parenting Values:

“My parents were very proud of me although they almost never saw me dance. They were never particularly interested in it either. But I felt myself greatly loved by them. I didn’t have to prove anything. They trusted me; they never blamed me for anything. I never had to feel guilty, not even later on. It is the most beautiful gift they could have given me.”

On Motherhood:

“I have now been allowed to experience how a person is born. And how one’s view of the world changes as a result. How a child experiences things. How free of prejudice it looks at everything. What natural trust is given to someone? In general to understand: a human being is born. Experiencing independently of this how and what is going on in your own body, how it is changing. Everything happens without me doing anything. And all of this then keeps flowing into my pieces and my work.”

On Professional Growth/Development:

“Arno Wüstenhöfer asked me to take over the Wuppertal Ballet as director…I didn’t have the confidence to do it. I was very frightened. I loved working freely. But he wouldn’t give up and kept asking me until I finally said: “I can give it a try.” Then, at the beginning−I was afraid to say, “I don’t know,” or “let me see.” I wanted to say, “OK, we’ll do this and this.” I planned everything very meticulously but soon realized that, apart from this planned work; I was also interested by completely different things that had nothing to do with my plans. Little by little I knew… that I had to decide: do I follow a plan or do I get involved with something which I don’t know where it will take me.”

Pina also said, “I’m not interested in how people move but what moves them.” Likewise, I want to hear from you. If you’ve seen the film, what did you think about it’s messages? If not, what do you think of the quotes above. What moves you?

 

 

PINA – Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost – International Trailer from neueroadmovies on Vimeo.

 

by Jhumur Manglik

Traditionally, compromise has referred to the act of giving up something that you want in order to reach an agreement. It’s a loaded word that makes me cringe at times because it has the connotation of ‘losing’ built into it. The word draws up images of getting a short end of the stick or being on the losing end… constantly taking one’s focus away from what the process does help you get.

Let’s make a case for looking at compromise more as a tool to manage the demands life places on us daily, instead of the necessary evil that lurks in our lives as we make everyday choices.

As a mother, a wife and a professional, I have had my fair share of making choices regarding my family, life and work, over the past several years. Each choice had its pros and cons and entailed a compromise. I realize now though that the process of compromising calls for more than just giving up something I desire or want. It has often involved the tedious process of discussing and identifying priorities; evaluating what is most important to me and my family at that particular point in time and then taking a decision that is meaningful for our situation within our life context.

I would be lying if I said that outcomes of all decisions landed us in a win-win instantly. On the contrary, there have been times where I traded blissful sleep for a much-needed quiet cup of morning tea; or working full-time to being with my daughter full-time; or having invigorating conversations with fellow-colleagues at lunch to having a lunch date with my laptop as I work from home.

What I have come to appreciate is that the process of compromise helps us understand what is important to us in our life and provide a way in which to manage competing priorities all vying for our attention at one time. It helps put things in perspective.

I can’t help but wonder, living in an era marked with our desire to ‘have it all’, are we missing the link between compromise, making choices and happiness? As we wade through the maze of being a parent, professional, partner and a person with his/her own unique interests in life; are we being trained to want everything with no room for compromise?

Another thought on why we judge each other as moms, as dads, as parents.

I just read this huffingtonpost parents article on the topic. (BTW-Congrats to my bococa neighbor who just launched Huffpo parents as the Managing Editor!).

Having just being criticized for talking about allowing young kids to watch the occasional tv program, the author felt the elusive embrace and the intense wrath of the online comment community. And let me say, whether I like it or not, I am in her camp. Sesame street and coffee help us to get out of the house in the morning.

She decided to look into the reasons for why parents judge each other. Here were some of her main conclusions. We judge because…

• we have too many expectations and responsibilities to juggle
• it’s too hard to put yourself in someone else’s shoes
• we are jealous
• it’s easier than dealing with what our kids are doing
• we are terrified we will make big mistakes

All true, and what resonated with me the most was this:

We judge because we are all unsure that we are actually doing this whole parenting thing correctly.

We want to look to others to see how they are doing horribly wrong, or perfectly. Consider the shock and sadness that came up for many with the recent divorce of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. Many people felt betrayed, that their model for modern parenthood, and of modern marriage had cracked.  I was never a huge Sonic Youth fan, but I felt it too.

We want to feel like someone is doing it right, be able to tell which is which and do what they are doing. Meanwhile, we forget that no matter how hard we try none of us can do  this whole parenting, living and working thing correctly all the time. The more we talk openly about our challenges and the close the door to idealization and judgement the easier the shift to mutual support.

At a meeting with fabulous Brooklyn working moms last week, we talked about clearing things off our plate-the value of automating. Coordinating routine things simply or automatically not only saves time and money, it can boost your sanity.

I thought it might be useful to post all of the links I like in one place for easy reference. Most if not all of these sites are free or have a free trial. (Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with any of these companies/sites, I have either found them useful or heard great things from people I trust.) So here it goes:

Grocery Delivery
Freshdirect: This is a classic. Need groceries, they will deliver (quickly).
Organicdirect: If you prefer organic, or are vegan, kosher or have other dietary restrictions, AND live in NYC, this is a good site for you.
Urban Organic: NYC Organic produce lovers may appreciate this year round produce. Not know for their enormous variety, but very dependable.
CSA Finder:  We joined a CSA this year. I’m not sure we are making use of all the produce as best we can, but we get amazing quality food at a great price. Bottom line: CSA’s make you feel like the farmer’s market is coming to you. Worth it.

Ordering Take Out
All I can say  about the sites below is you can avoid any miscommunication about your order by typing it in. Minutes later you have the food you ordered.
Seamlessweb
Grubhub
Delivery.com

$ Management & Paying Bills
Manilla : I just found this site. I am in the process of setting it up but it’s a one stop shop for automatic bill paying. Definitely worth checking out.
Mint: I use this pretty religiously to keep track of spending, investments, college fund saving. Super helpful.

Baby Supplies
Diapers.com: This is a favorite. So many brands, and good discounts.
Amazon: Ok so this is obvious, but few people know how much you can do with this site. We’re prime members so things come really quickly. Also, you can buy baby stuff and dry goods. If you set up subscriptions on things like diapers, cheerios, baby shampoo, you save a bit. So that’s good.

Calendar
Google Calendar: We’re a family of 3 and one of us is under 2.  So my husband and I use this to let each other know when meetings come up at night, or we want to make plans for the family and make sure there are no conflicts. We can add tasks etc if we need.
Cozi Family Calendar: I think this is great for families with multiple, older kids, with tons of activities to track, lists to make and pics to share.

Organizing
Shoeboxed: We can all end up with a lot of paperwork, receipts, bcards etc. They scan stuff for you and put it into spreadsheets. Helpful.
Evernote: A great way to keep track of things you see online.
Remember The Milk: A good task management site.
Page Once: Keeps all your internet passwords together.

Misc
Task Rabbit : Get someone to run errands for you.
Fill any PDF: Fill out preschool applications, or other forms, without having to print it out. Helpful, I think.
Ommwriter: I like this a lot. When I need to focus on writing and shift gears quickly, this helps me focus.
Shuttercal: via NestingNYC This is a great way to store pics and put a date on each to see how quickly your kid is growing.

Hope these are helpful. Have other suggestions or comments on these? Please post below! Thx.

Last week, I attended @momcentral’s event at internet week and met dozens of wonderful mommy bloggers balancing their work and passions online. This week I hosted the first (of many more!) facilitated working working moms night out in collaboration with @babybitesbrooklyn. Fourteen women discussed all of the benefits and challenges of working mother good.  Tomorrow, we will have the closing session of a new moms group I’ve been leading. At the end of six weeks, many of these new moms have or are returning to work and thinking about what that transition means to them.

Work/life, career transitions, and defining success: These are topics I think long and hard about on a daily basis–both professionally and personally. But at the moment, I am carrying all these individual stories around with me at once, refining strategies to help large groups of working women, in addition to individual coaching work. More on that to come…

Tonight, my fabulous friend and fellow mom Lee  (yup shouting you out!), sent me Sheryl Sandberg’s commencement address at Barnard. While I wasn’t completely taken with her TED talk, this speech blew me away. Here are some highlights:

You’re going to find something you love doing, and you’re going to do it with gusto.

So, what advice can I give you to help you achieve this goal?  The first thing is I encourage you to think big.  Studies show very clearly that in our country, in the college-educated part of the population, men are more ambitious than women.  They’re more ambitious the day they graduate from college; they remain more ambitious every step along their career path.  We will never close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap.  But if all young women start to lean in, we can close the ambition gap right here, right now, if every single one of you leans in.  Leadership belongs to those who take it.  Leadership starts with you.

The next step is you’re going to have to believe in yourself potentially more than you do today…So, to all of you, if you remember nothing else today, remember this:  You are awesome.

If you think big, if you own your own success, if you lead, it won’t just have external costs, but it may cause you some personal sacrifice.  Men make far fewer compromises than women to balance professional success and personal fulfillment.  That’s because the majority of housework and childcare still falls to women.  If a heterosexual couple work full time, the man will do—the woman, sorry—the woman will do two times the amount of housework and three times the amount of childcare that her husband will do.  From my mother’s generation to mine, we have made far more progress making the workforce even than we have making the home even, and the latter is hurting the former very dramatically.  So it’s a bit counterintuitive, but the most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is.  If you pick someone who’s willing to share the burdens and the joys of your personal life, you’re going to go further.  A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world.

I want my son to have the choice to be a full partner not just at work, but at home; and I want my daughter to have a choice to do either.  But if she chooses work, to be well-liked for what she accomplishes.  We can’t wait for the term “work/life balance” to be something that’s not just discussed at women’s conferences.

My daughter has always loved the drums. J used to show her videos of famous drummers youtube when she was tiny and she was mesmerized. Her favorite book is Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb. The other day we were over at our friends’ house, who have an amazing kids’ drum set. S picked up a stick and started to play. Tapping the stick on the drum at her own pace. She looked up at me like “Mom! Check me out! I’m amazing at this.”

The look on her face reminded me of when I was four and used to ” tap dance” on the stone floor in our basement. With only a pair of shiny patent leathers, I was convinced that I was a fantastic tap dancer. I performed in front of my parents and their friends, completely confident that I knew what I was doing or that I could figure it out.

The other day I met a woman who was returning to work after staying at home for 8 years. “It’s no use,” she said. “When I sit down to write my resume, I’ve got nothing. I feel worthless.” After I asked her some questions and she revealed MANY transferable skills. She felt so out of place in the workforce that she was paralyzed by self-doubt and had completely lost her confidence.

When we change careers, jobs, work environments, or just move on to a new project, our fear of change makes it easy to forget all we’ve got going for us. Losing sight of our own value only compromises our ability to achieve our goals, at a time when making concrete positive change is our most pressing priority.

This wonderful video made by Kronos is a fabulous tribute to the women’s movement.

This is a guest blog post by Alethea Cheng Fitzpatrick, family photographer, architect and mom. Her company, nestingNYC, specializes in the unique integration of baby photography and interior design. Her upcoming 12 week online photosanity workshop helps parents not just take better photos but get a handle on organizing, editing and sharing too.

I’ve always loved children, ever since I was a child myself, a proud older sister planning activities for my younger sister’s birthday party, or visiting her nursery school to “help out” as one of the big kids. My interest in photography also came naturally, as my father was an avid photographer and we grew up with a dark room in the house. I remember to this day the photos I took of the five-year-olds at the elementary school where I did volunteer work as a teenager—how much I enjoyed capturing their natural spirit.

But it was architecture I went to school for, drawn by the diverse interests and skills it encompassed, which suited me as I could never pick a favorite subject in school as I liked so many. I also had a fascination for how the built environment shapes and impacts peoples’ lives. After graduating, I worked as an architect and interior designer in NYC for over twelve years.  It was a demanding and challenging, but rewarding, career that I threw myself into and enjoyed.

After having my son, Liam, I just couldn’t do it anymore—I couldn’t go back to a (more than) full-time office job. I desperately wanted to search for work where being a mother would be an advantage and not a conflict.

And so, based on long standing interests, my newly developed passion for photographing my own baby, and a desire for a different kind of work/life fit than I could envision in my previous career, I started my own baby photography and interior design company, nestingNYC. I use my background and experience in architecture and interior design to not just take photographs but to help families figure out how to display them in their home—something I’ve seen so many people struggle with. I meet with clients in their home before our photo session so I can design, create, deliver and install a custom portrait wall gallery to complement a their home and lifestyle. I also design nurseries and kids’ rooms to showcase that wall gallery. I love that the personal and professional has melded as far as my passions and interests go.

I love being a mom, and I love that being a mom is part of who I am professionally now.

I’ve been taking photos daily of my son, who just turned two, since he was born. I was a mom before I was a professional photographer, and I found that, from the start, the photos I had of my son enhanced my experience of being a parent. Beautiful images were a reward for everything that was hard about being a parent, and a celebration of everything that was good, preserved in time for future recollection and enjoyment.

Figuring out what to do with them can be overwhelming, so I’ve started to offer photosanity workshops to help parents get control over their photos. I give tips not just on taking better photos, but on how to get a handle on organizing, editing and sharing them. One of the features of my upcoming workshop (which will run online for 12 weeks and include weekly webinars and e-mailed lessons and a private facebook group) is a photo-a-day project.

I knew from the start that I wanted to do a “photo-a-day” project with photos of him. However, it’s one thing to take the photos, it’s another to actually select and edit one photo from each day and collect them in a format where they can all be viewed together. I only recently fell into the habit of doing not just the taking but the selecting on a regular basis, and I also finally went back and filled in all the sizable gaps (months and months) where I had taken but not selected photos.

The result is… a collection of one photo a day for two years, and the most amazing thing I’ve ever done, aside from being a mother of course, or perhaps I should say in addition to being a mother. When I wonder, as I frequently do, where the time went, I can see it, day by day, in the photos.

I have come to rely on the daily ritual of taking and selecting, editing and uploading a photo. Far from a chore, it has become a gift to myself each day to take a moment to look through the photos of the day (sometimes there are many, sometimes there are only a handful). It’s a moment to pause, reflect, enjoy, love, appreciate, celebrate. My road to motherhood was a long and bumpy one and it’s not an exaggeration to say that I am grateful for and treasure every moment every day that I have as a mom. My photo, each day, is my offering of gratitude. View my photo a day project and check out ShutterCal, an amazing photo a-day hosting, sharing and printing service that enabled me to organize my project.

If you’re interested in starting a photo-a-day project yourself amongst a community of like minded parents check out, my upcoming photosanity workshop, a 12 week online photography workshop designed to help parents get control over their photos! In addition to the weekly lessons and assignments, you’ll design, create and install a portrait wall gallery from several different templates as part of the workshop as well as participate in a photo-a-day project. Participants will also receive discounts of up to 20% off photo services and products from Mpix, ShutterCal, Rag and Bone Bindery and Uncommon as well as the chance to win over $500 worth of prizes!

To kick off the International Women’s Day Celebrations,I jotted down a few suggestions for how employers can recruit and retain working moms for a wonderful site called MonsterThinking.com.

Originally posted here, I’ve included the content of my post below:*

As a career coach and organizational-development consultant working with many new parents, I hear the stories everyday from passionate, driven professionals: from a woman who can’t take a day off to be with her kids without the blackberry constantly buzzing; or from working mothers who hide on the floor of their offices, backs against the door, when it is time to pump.

There are stories of maternity leaves abruptly cut short, bosses suddenly finding new “problems” with their pregnant employee’s work and letting them go—and the lawsuits that followed.  One woman got this sage wisdom from a senior partner: “If you want to succeed in this business you better have a nanny that can stay late.”

Many women feel they are forced to choose between their career aspirations and their roles as mothers, as if they can no longer be taken seriously in their fields with little ones at home. There is a perception among some employers that a woman who chooses to start a family is somehow a less committed professional than her male counterparts or women who don’t have children.

The woman who chooses to start a family is seen as having divided loyalty between her personal and professional life. She may be seen as a transient member of the team, someone who is not worth the same investment.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With adjustments to organizational policies and culture, we can close the gap between the professional horizons of working mothers, working fathers, and their colleagues.

4 Ways For Employers To Make A Major Impact for Working Mothers

To start us off, here are four strong suggestions that can have a major impact on the professional outlook for working mothers and their employers.

1. Let’s Dump Unhelpful Phrases like “Mommy Track” or “On-Ramping and Off-Ramping.”

Yes, employees make decisions about when—and if—they take time off to be with their kids. Employees also decide to go back to school while working, or to take care of an elderly parent: this doesn’t mean they are not committed to their work. It means that, like all of us, they are balancing their personal and professional needs.

As this study by Working Mother Media illustrates, if a mom chooses to be at work, he or she wants to be respected and valued. Parents don’t want to be pushed off to the side, or given less engaging assignments.

2. This Is Not Just A Woman’s Issue.

It is vital that employers regard this as a company challenge—important for all individuals and for the health of the organization—not only an issue for female employees. Paternity leave and flextime are often not as readily available to men, and men don’t feel as comfortable taking it. Companies should encourage male employees to engage in the work-life conversation.

If we level the expectations for both genders, we will not have such an insurmountable disparity in the opportunities available to men and women. This TED talk by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg offers a powerful perspective on leveling the playing field.

3. Flexibility Means Redefining Our Concept of Work.

There are many kinds of flexible work arrangements (job shares, telecommuting, etc.), and not all of them will work for every company or every employee. At the heart of the concept of flexibility, though, is the notion that work can be re-imagined. Work should be about producing results and accomplishing goals, not about logging hours at a desk or showing up at a specific hour.

The evidence is overwhelming that employees will work harder and more efficiently when they feel they have control over their own time (the embedded video from  Life Meets Work is definitely worth watching). When a parent needs to pick up her child at day care and still deliver a report by the morning, a flexible atmosphere can allow her to satisfy all her obligations—on her own time, using her own best judgment. If we measure commitment by who stays at the office the latest, parents will always fall behind.

4. Parents do have unique needs.  Don’t Let That Stand In The Way of Retaining Talent.

We should fully acknowledge that many of these accommodations—such as generous paid leave programs or child-care support—are time-consuming and expensive. These vital conversations can also be difficult ones. Still, the long-term benefits are clear: the return on your investment will be loyalty and productivity from a motivated and capable talent pool.

Countless respected institutions, including the Families and Work Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have demonstrated that offering these kinds of programs and developing these sensitivities is a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Companies that excel in these areas see great benefits in retention, recruitment, efficiency, and innovation. In short, addressing these challenges is more than worth the effort.