Finding a balance between life, raising kids, and your career
Dr Lee Kingma, a professional coach, offers advice on how to not lose yourself while taking care of everything else.
Times have changed and unlike the olden days where most women were housewives and stay-at-home mothers, many women today are in the corporate world.
Having to juggle work, life, and kids is not always easy.
Some people might even find themselves struggling with depression or losing themselves in the process.
Dr Lee Kingma, a professional coach, shares tips on how women can find the balance to ensure that they don't lose themselves.
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The importance of self-care
She says the first thing that women need to realise is that self-care is important.
She says that is the foundation of keeping the balance and being a better version of ourselves to be able to serve others better.
"Most importantly, as women, we need to accept that in order to meet all our responsibilities, we first need to take care of ourselves," she says.
She says when one is taking care of themselves, they are able to perform better, even at work.
"When we replenish our own internal resources, we have the capacity to take care of those we love, we show up in our work and can deal with the added burden of living through a pandemic more easily," she says.
READ: Six tips to help boost women's mental health during the pandemic
Letting go of false guilt
Dr Kingma says in order to find the balance "it is important for us as women to distinguish between true guilt and false guilt."
Coach Kingma says it is okay to be selfish in taking care of your needs.
"We need to let go of the negative guilt of being selfish in taking care of our needs, and rather use ‘positive guilt’ to make time for ourselves in the ways which feed our bodies, minds, and spirits in positive ways," says the coach.
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She adds that false guilt will result in you shaming yourself, instead of working toward improvement.
"Positive or true guilt gets us up to exercise, eat healthily, finish a project or enrol for a study course. Negative or false guilt makes us withdraw into shaming ourselves – often because we believe the ‘shoulds or musts’ others impose on us," says the coach.
So, before feeling guilty about something, the coach says figure out whether that is true guilt or guilt that is imposed on you by others.
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Image courtesy of iStock/ @grinvalds