How Women in High Visible Jobs Manage Competing Priorities?

As the news that Marissa Mayer the new CEO of Yahoo is expecting a child landed on the front page of the CIO Magazine it propelled the never ending debate around the popular question: Can Women Have it All?

Her announcement and the subsequent debate took place just few weeks after another female in a high office chair Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of policy planning at the State Department, wrote about the challenges of managing family and work in a widely read Atlantic magazine cover story titled "Why Women Still Can't Have it All."

A key message in my book “Connecting My Dots” from numerous successful women in leadership roles is that to find a BALANCE (or to be more practice to find an ALIGNMEMT) among career , family and personal goals women need to plan, set priorities and make trade-offs alone the way.

Often when we hear about work – life balance, we think that we need to equally distribute the weights across career, family and personal priorities.

Guess What? This is a Big Mistake?

You need to think in terms of an optimization problem where you are forced to align the weight between priorities to balance the total weight of Your “Priority Wheel” - a tool for alignment of your career and family priorities.
In addition, your personal values and preferences as well as what stage of your life you are in at that moment are a critical consideration on how you decide to assign the weights among priorities in the “Priority Wheel”.

I believe and I know from personal experience as a bank executive who raised two children in a new country that professional women can have it all but not always at the same time. What do we have at any given time fluctuates and depends on what lifestage we are in and the trade off we are willing to make. Sometime career has the most weight on the “Priority Wheel” other times your children.

Inspiring Women Like You

Yesterday, my husband and I had dinner at a friend’s house and I brought them a copy of my book “Connecting My Dots” as a gift. As soon as we opened a bottle of red wine I heard the already familiar question: What motivated you to write the book?

Those that have read Connecting My Dots already know the answer. My motivation for writing the book was to inspire young women to balance their priorities and achieve multidimensional success. The Five Leadership Lessons from the book show them examples on how to connect their different dots in a Priority Wheel to achieve success in their own terms.

The best way to summarize the impact of my mentoring lessons is to say that nothing have been more rewarding to me as an author and mentor than to hear personal stories directly from many women who were inspire by my book to achieve their goals.

I want to share their stories of personal success hoping that YOU too will be inspired by their resolutions. I selected five stories from women who had different goals and dreams.

By mentioning these women here I hope that their stories will inspire many other women to achieve their goals.

1- Having a Baby: This young professional woman overcame her fears of having a baby and learned to be a mom while at the same time she continues to advance in her professional career as a financial analyst.

2- Becoming an Author: This season executive woman was inspired to write and publish two books while she continues to have a very successful career as a bank executive. Check her first book Person of Interest currently available at Amazon.com

3- Opening a Business: This young woman who is a mother of two boys decided to follow her longtime dream to open her on boutique while learning to balance priorities between business and family. Check her store Sanaryalba

4- Playing Sports: Looking after my own example of overcoming personal fears, a mother of two decided break with her indecision and started playing tennis in sport club.

5- Losing Weight: A mother of two boys and a very athletic woman could not keep her weight down. After reading my last article about 2010 resolution she finally was inspired to create her own personalized plan and achieved her goals.

Just like these women have done you too can achieve your goals. Use the Priority Wheel and empower yourself to achieve Multidimensional Success on Your Own Terms!

Happy New Year!