Do you feel like you are failing at balancing marriage and career?

I’ve been there!

It is a struggle I hear about often from couples, but it is also a struggle I’ve personally experienced.

I told myself I wanted to balance home & work, but I was working 70-80 hours a week 😱 and my marriage was suffering.

If I could find a new planner, hire another employee or grow my business to a certain place then I would have this idyllic work / marriage balance.

I told my husband and my kids that they were the most important thing in my life. But day after day, I had pressing projects and unexpected issues that needed my urgent attention.

Balancing my marriage and work seemed impossible.

The truth is my issue wasn’t that I needed a better balance. My issue was that I didn’t know how to resolve conflict with my husband and so work was a good escape.

• I found winning at work easier than winning at home.
• At work, I got to hear clients praising my work while at home I seemed to say all the wrong things.
• When conversations at home felt like they were hitting a brick wall, I knew I could break through at work.

Those were things I didn’t want to acknowledge or admit. But I didn’t have a balancing problem. I had a conflict resolution problem.

As I began to work on communication and conflict resolution with my husband, things changed at home. I found myself wanting to be there a lot more often.

I thought now that my passion for my marriage and my work were equal, I would finally be able to obtain the elusive marriage/work balance.

But really all that did was bring me to my next discovery.

I still felt like I was failing and knew something had to be missing.

I realized I needed to think deeper about the notion that these two things can be balanced.

The definition of balance is an even distribution of two things.

What are the two things we are trying to evenly distribute in our marriages and careers?

• Time?
• Creativity?
• Passion?
• Energy?
• Intelligence?
• Attention?

Could I really give equal amounts of time, energy, attention, etc. to my marriage and my work?

I don’t believe it’s realistic. Sometimes work is going to need more from you and sometimes your marriage is going to need more from you.

I believe that as we give ourselves to our marriage & family while at the same time giving ourselves to our work, it is going to create tension.

It may seem counterintuitive but tension is what we want!! Tension is how growth is created.

As you give yourself to your marriage & your work, you are going to face obstacles.

• You will have big projects at work that need more of you
• You will have situations arise at home that need more of you
• You will be experiencing something magical in your marriage that makes it hard to focus on work
• And you will have seasons at work where something so beautiful is emerging from you.

This is the reality when you are investing in something worth having!

If you are focused on balancing them, YOU WILL PULL YOURSELF BACK from the depth wanting to happen in your marriage and the greatness wanting to call you up in your career.

So if balancing the two isn’t the goal, what is the goal? What could you be doing instead?

Tune into the episode on the Hey Julia Woods Youtube channel on balancing marriage & career to learn about the alternative to balance.

My invitation to you is to shift out of a conversation about balancing marriage and work. And focus on a conversation about reality. I’ll show you exactly how to do that in this episode.

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