How We Adapt

I play sand volleyball. But not quite the sand volleyball you've been watching with the Olympics. Ours is more of a social league, but we do enjoy winning. Tonight, however, we did not win. And the most frustrating part is that we were beat by a team that was not as good as our team. We have a tendency to rise or fall to the level of our competition. After the first few serves tonight, we could see that the team we were playing was not strong. I'm not sure if we were feeling over-confident, or just mimicking our competition, but we just did not play well.

The same thing happens as I try to balance work and family. The busier I am with work, the better I do balancing between work and family. But when things slow down, I do not do as well. Over the summer when I took more time off from work, I couldn't seem to get it all in sync. I found myself falling behind on housework, cooking less and just feeling like I wasn't getting anything done.

I've heard it from others as well. I know a woman who is a writer by training, but is currently staying at home full time with kids. While her kids sleep a lot, and also have pre-school and other distractions, she can't seem to find the time do any writing. I suspect that if she was working outside of the home and busy trying to blance her work and family, she would be able to figure out where writing could fit into her schedule.

I think that as you get busier, you are forced to spend more time and effort trying to make sure everything gets done. If you are not as busy, it becomes easier to get side-tracked and not accomplish as much. And so as you rise to the challenges of balancing work and family, you may find that if you challenge yourself more, you may just exceed your own expectations.