6 Practical Steps for Work-Life Balance

Dr. Leigh Weisz is the Founder of Coping Partners, a mental health clinic. As a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice, she was on staff and affiliated with The Family Institute at Northwestern University for several years. She has experience working with children, adolescents, families, and individual adults in areas such as child and adolescent family therapy, grief and loss, and relationship issues.

Dr. Weisz earned her graduate degree in clinical psychology from the Illinois School of Professional Psychology with a specialty in children and families. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and Spanish from the University of Michigan, having graduated with honors. Dr. Weisz has practiced in community mental health, hospitals, and outpatient family medicine practice settings.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[01:21] Effectively managing guilt as a working parent
[04:10] How to maintain connections with your children while away
[05:27] The importance of unplugging for quality time with family
[06:15] Tips for adding self-care to your routine to improve balance
[07:23] Long-term benefits of shared parenting responsibilities
[08:40] Why a supportive family is crucial
[09:58] The value of reflecting on your reasons for working
[16:00] Ways to advocate for a healthier work environment
[21:47] Quick relaxation exercise for stress management

In this episode…

Balancing work and family life can feel like an impossible juggling act. Is it possible to achieve a true work-life balance? What steps can you take to manage personal and professional life effectively?

According to Dr. Leigh Weisz, a clinical psychologist specializing in family and child therapy, you can achieve work-life balance with the right strategies. She notes that letting go of guilt is crucial for managing the pressures of both work and family. Additionally, Dr. Weisz highlights the importance of creating a supportive network and finding ways to make your work environment more accommodating. When implemented, these tips can significantly reduce stress and improve overall well-being.

In this episode of The Coping Podcast, host Dr. Leigh Weisz discusses practical steps to achieve work-life balance. She shares six key strategies, including the importance of letting go of guilt, staying connected with family even when away, and the necessity of self-care. Tune in to discover how these steps can help you manage your responsibilities more effectively and create a healthier, more balanced life.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments:

“You’re an amazing mom. You’re contributing to the world. You’re modeling your daughter’s good work ethic.”
“Imagine any shade of green — green grass, sea foam, dark green; breathe it in.”
“It’s really vital to our well-being and to our overall health.”
“It doesn’t have to be family dinner; it can be family breakfast.”
“Advocating for what you need and what small changes may help you is often worthwhile.”

Action Steps:

Let go of the guilt for better mental health: Recognizing and releasing guilt improves our psychological well-being, enabling us to parent and work without the burden of unrealistic expectations.
Make intentional efforts to connect with your children while away: Maintaining emotional connection supports your children’s well-being and reinforces your relationship, despite physical distance.
Schedule unplugged time with family: Being fully present during family time nurtures relationships and ensures that time spent together is meaningful and rejuvenating.
Commit to self-care activities: Regular self-care is essential for our capacity to care for others and handle the stresses of work and parenting.
Evaluate and adjust your work environment to fit your needs: Advocating for changes in the workplace can lead to a healthier balance and reduce overall stress related to managing work and family responsibilities.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Coping Partners.

Coping Partners is a mental health practice dedicated to helping children, adolescents, and adults manage various challenges including anxiety, divorce, behavioral issues, relationship problems and much more in the Chicago suburbs.

Our practitioners are devoted to building on our clients’ strengths and bolstering weaknesses.

To gain insight and tools for getting unstuck check out our website at CopingPartners.com, email us at support@copingpartners.com.

Episode Transcript:

Intro 0:00

Welcome to The Coping Podcast where we share strategies for coping with the stressors of life, especially the difficulties of parenting. And here is your host, Dr. Leigh Weisz.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 0:15

Just a quick disclaimer, the information provided is for educational and informational purposes only. This is not intended to provide mental health treatment and does not constitute a client therapist relationship. The information provided is not a replacement for being assessed and evaluated by a licensed professional, and is not intended to replace mental health or medical advice. This is a special episode. It is a presentation Dr. Leigh Weisz gave about six steps to improving work life balance for working moms, and it was so well received that we had to share it on the podcast.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 0:49

This episode is brought to you by Coping Partners. Coping Partners is a mental health practice dedicated to helping children, adolescents and adults manage various challenges, including anxiety, divorce, behavioral issues, relationship problems and much more. In the Chicago suburbs, our practitioners are devoted to building on our client’s strengths and bolstering weaknesses to gain insight and tools for getting unstuck. Check out our website at copingpartners.com, or email us at support@copingpartners.com.

Dr. Leigh Weisz 1:21

So I just am going to dive right in and ask, is there really such a thing as work life balance? Does any of this sound familiar to you or vaguely familiar to you? Picture this, I wake up to my three year old climbing into my bed at 5am wide awake, and she wakes up the baby who then needs to feed. I hurry to get both kids dressed amidst a mini tantrum because the older one wants to perfectly match her socks with her outfit, and we can’t find the one pair that’s a perfect match. I miraculously shower myself, put on real clothes, as opposed to mommy gear, get both girls in their car seats, finally ready to drop them off before I go to work. Then I work a 10 hour busy day, and I’m anxious to attend to my older daughter’s bedtime routine and spend some time with her before she gets to sleep. Since I missed my infant’s last nursing, I had to pump everyone following what kind of pump, not gasoline, but I didn’t want to deal with getting all the pumping equipment set up while closing down my computer at work, so instead, I decided to pump while driving. Do not do this at home. I did this one time only so I could multitask and so that when I pulled in the driveway, I could attend to my daughter and her bedtime routine. I felt there just wasn’t enough time in the day that I needed to attend to, every moment I needed to make use of every moment in order to say goodnight to my older daughter after working a long day before her bedtime, and forget about having any time to sleep for myself. By then, it was 9pm I was exhausted, and I still hadn’t eaten dinner yet. So I am a clinical psychologist. My name is Leigh, and I work with families, children and couples. I am also a mom, as you’ve gathered, of a three year old in the lovely three major stage, in addition to my almost nine month old baby. So when Claire asked me to give this talk, I thought, who really has this work life balance thing all figured out? We’re all on this journey together to strike our own good enough, but certainly not perfect to balance. So let me tell you a story about one of my clients, a client of mine who is highly successful in her job and career, once told me how she goes to work and is filled with doubts about not being good enough, about not giving work her all because she’s trying to schedule doctor’s appointments and her head is just never really 100% in her job. At the same time, she felt like she was never really a good enough mother to her children who missed her when she traveled and so forth. In other words, she felt she was never fully present in either realm of her life, at work or with her parenting. She wondered, how could she continue at the pace she was working? How could she keep up with her never ending multitasking and impossible juggling act? She came to see me in therapy actually, because of many physical symptoms of the stress of doing it all and then waking up the next morning, only to repeat again. She had hives, she had headaches, muscle tension and occasional palpitations, and nothing medically was found to be contributing to these physical symptoms, nothing that is besides stress. So there are a lot of women, it turns out, who actually fantasize about being homesick or even having to go to the hospital. They’re called hospital fantasies due to a minor accident. Very brave of you, you know the accident would be just serious enough to be relieved for a few days from your daily task. But of course, nothing more than that. And if you’ve had these fleeting thoughts before, you are not alone. It is tough to do what we do. I want to share with you what you can do starting tomorrow to achieve a better work life balance. The six simple steps that I’m going to teach you tonight are ways to achieve a better work life balance and to cope with the stress of the balancing act. And here they are. Drum roll, please. Number one, let go of the guilt. Number two, connect while away. Number three, unplug to allow quality time. Number four, add self care and get back to the basics. Number five, remind yourself why you work in the first place, and then surround yourself with support of others, this group being a great example. And number six, ask yourself, How can I make my work environment healthier for me? Before we dive into more detail for the six simple steps, I want to say that everyone, men and women alike, stay at home, parents and working parents all have this work life balance dilemma that merits our attention. It’s not just women, however, we are still absolutely stuck in traditional gender roles, which is why oftentimes, oftentimes women do seem to struggle with this issue a little more family issues are still pervasively seen as a female problem, no matter how high up a woman is in the career ladder. So I want you to know that it’s not just for our own happiness that we should try to work on the issue of work life balance. Work life stress actually leads to very serious health conditions, heart attacks, diabetes, palpitations and so forth. So it’s really not just a luxury to be working on achieving a better balance for ourselves. It’s really vital to our well being and to our overall health. One interesting study I wanted to share is one that I learned from a TEDx Talk called Max Out, which I highly recommend. The study took place in Sweden, where they had a very generous parental leave policy, including a stipend, not just for women, not just a maternity leave, but for dads as well. However, dads rarely took advantage of this, for fear that they would be looked upon as unmanly. And so policy makers in Sweden decided they would do an experiment in 1995 in which they set aside one month of parental leave for dads, daddy leave, and the dads were not forced to take the leave, but if they took less than four weeks, can you imagine this? Four weeks off, or took no leave at all, they actually lost their family’s subsidies. So can you imagine what happened? Anyone? Yeah, dad started staying at home with their babies for the first time, and even after they returned to work, there were longer term gains years and years later, the dads, again, years later, took on more responsibilities within the home, like giving baths and clipping toenails, and women returned to work earlier the employer saw work life balance, again, is not just a women’s issue, but an everyone issue, and in turn, they added more flex time and better solutions.

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