Okay, there’s long been talk that women, in particular, can’t ‘have it all’. 

The argument goes that we were duped by feminism when we were told we could be amazing mothers, career zealots and domestic goddesses, whilst still getting enough beauty sleep.

The modern day mantra now goes that we can’t ‘have it all’.  There are only so many hours in the day, and fuel in the tank so something has to give.

I don’t entirely disagree with ‘there are only so many hours in the day’ argument. But I want to challenge semantics.

I do believe you can ‘have it all’.  I just don’t think you can ‘do it all.’

People say to me, How do you find time to run a business, raise two kids, and write books?

It is simple.  There are many other things I don’t do including:

I don’t keep a pristinely clean and tidy house
One of the major domestic duties that goes astray in our house is putting away clean clothes.  The clothes go from the dirty clothes basket into the washing machine, onto the line, and then into the spare room where they get dumped into piles.  Looking for something to wear?  It’s probably in the spare room.

But my domestic life is relatively ordered.  There are decent meals, set bed times, and lots of love.

I don’t have as many hours as I would sometimes like to work on my business
My husband and I are both business owners with a fair degree of flexibility.  And we negotiate pick ups and drop offs depending on who is interstate, who has meetings and who has important functions.  I often fit my work around my kids - and work nights and weekends to make up time.  But sometimes I wish I could work more.

Instead, I’ve had to learn to work a bit smarter.  I’ve learnt to be more efficient, better focused, and to celebrate my achievements.

I don’t get time to read for pleasure
One of my greatest indulgences has been to curl up and get completely engrossed in a good book. Unfortunately, with lots to do and interrupting kids, I rarely get the opportunity to indulge.

But on holidays, I always head off to the bookshop and the library, get a stack of books and work my way through as many as possible.

As a working mum, I don’t believe I can do it all.

But I do believe I can have it all - because, to me, having it all means living a good life.

This is what I have:

I have a wonderful family
My kids amaze me every day.  Watching them grow into little people is an incredible privilege. And I also have a wonderful husband.  He is a true partner.

I have a wonderful job
I absolutely love my work.  Writing books, developing and delivering workshops, and helping people enjoy work and life is my passion.

I have a wonderful life
My life is rich and fulfilling, and although it is difficult and demanding at times, I still feel incredibly blessed.

I can’t do everything I would like to do.  But I can have a good life.  And to me, that is much more important.

Michael Gartner, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, wrote this beautiful column for USA Today about the secret to a long and rich life.

It’s about simple rituals, deep love, and yes left hand turns. Although if you live in Australia or the UK, substitute for right hand turns.

Here’s the beginning:

My father never drove a car.

Well, that’s not quite right.

I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:

“Oh, bull–!” she said. “He hit a horse.”

“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”

And you can read the rest here: A life without left turns by Michael Gartner.

By Laura L.C. Johnson. First published on Positive Psychology News Daily.

In the “Love Lab,” researchers claim they can predict with 91% accuracy whether a couple will thrive or fail after watching and listening to them for just five minutes.

The Love Lab is actually Dr. John Gottman’s Relationship Research Institute near the University of Washington in Seattle.

Gottman and his team have been studying how couples argue and resolve conflict and have followed hundreds of couples over time to see if their marriages last.

Using a scientific approach, they have found four negative factors that can predict divorce and seven positive principles that predict marital success.

The Four Horsemen
Gottman says he looks for certain kinds of negativity, which he calls the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” to predict a relationship’s failure:

Criticism - Global negative statements about your partner’s character or personality.

Contempt - Sarcasm, cynicism, name-calling, eye-rolling, sneering, mockery and hostile humor can be poisonous because they convey disgust.

Defensiveness - This is a way of blaming your partner and can escalate the conflict.

Stonewalling - A partner may disengage from the relationship, signaled by looking away without saying anything and acting as though he/she doesn’t care about what the other is saying.

Repair attempts are efforts a couple makes to deescalate tension during conflict - “to put on the brakes so flooding is prevented.” The Four Horsemen alone predict divorce with 82% accuracy but when you add in the failure of repair attempts, the accuracy goes to 90+%.

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
Based on Gottman’s research, he has developed seven principles that help improve a marriage’s chances of success:

1. Enhance Your Love Maps
Emotionally intelligent couples are familiar with the details of each other’s world. They remember the major events in each other’s history and keep up to date as the facts and feelings of their partner’s world changes. They know each other’s goals, worries and hopes in life.

2. Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration
This is one of the most critical elements in a rewarding and long-lasting marriage. It involves feeling that your partner is still worthy of honor and respect in spite of their flaws. Gottman found that 94% of the time when couples put a positive spin on their marriage’s history, they are likely to have a happy future.

3. Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away
When a partner makes a bid for your attention, affection, humor or support, turning toward your partner is the basis of emotional connection. The real secret is to turn to turn toward each other in little ways every day.

4. Let Your Partner Influence You
The happiest marriages were those where the husband was able to convey honor and respect for their wife and did not resist sharing power and decision making. These husbands actively search for common ground instead of insisting on getting their way. Gottman found women were more likely to let their husbands influence them by taking their opinions and feelings into account.

5. Solve Your Solvable Problems
Resolving conflict involves five steps: soften your startup, learn to make and receive repair attempts, soothe yourself and each other, compromise and be tolerant of each other’s faults. Some suggested practices include:

Complain but don’t blame.
Make statements that start with “I” instead of “You.”
Describe what is happening, don’t evaluate or judge.
Be clear, polite and appreciative.
Don’t store things up.

6. Overcome Gridlock
Ending gridlock doesn’t mean solving the problem, but rather moving from gridlock to dialogue. Some steps are:

Learn to uncover your partner’s dreams.
Understand why each of you feels so strongly about the gridlocked issue.
Soothe each other to avoid flooding.
End the gridlock by making peace with the issue, accepting the differences between you, talking without hurting each other and compromising.

7. Create Shared Meaning
See if you can agree on the fundamentals in life. Create an atmosphere where you can speak candidly and respectfully about your values and dreams. Accept and respect that you each may have some dreams that the other doesn’t share.

How the Principles Work
Gottman did a nine-month follow-up of 640 couples who attended a two-day workshop where couples were trained in the seven principles for making marriage work. He found that the relapse rate, or return to their previous level of marital distress, was only 20% for couples who attended the workshop versus 30% to 50% for standard marital therapy.

This article first appeared on Positive Psychology News.

Laura L.C. Johnson, MBA, MA, is working toward licensure as a marriage and family therapist in California. Visit www.lauralcjohnson.com. Laura practices a positive therapy approach to help her clients learn skills to build positive emotions, optimism and resilience while decreasing unhelpful thinking, behaviors and emotions.

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

One source of unhappiness for people is feeling out of control of their spending - and this is a problem that’s far more widespread now than it was a year ago. Feeling regret about having bought something is a very unpleasant sort of unhappiness.

Being an under-buyer, as opposed to an over-buyer, I don’t generally have much trouble avoiding overspending. I have more trouble prodding myself to make the effort to buy things I actually need.

Nevertheless, even with my under-buying ways, I sometimes come home with something I didn’t really need to buy. Stores use extremely clever strategies to winkle customers into making purchases. Here are some strategies to make sure you don’t make purchases you regret:

1. Be wary of the check-out areas.

There are lots of enticing little items here; ask yourself if you really need something before you add it to your pile. How many times have I picked up a jar of Balmex?

2. Get in and get out.

The more time you spend in a store, the more you’re likely to buy. Even better: don’t even go in the store. Then you definitely won’t buy.

3. Question the need for an upgrade.

You might want that device with a slick new function, or to get the improved version of what you have now, but do you really need it?

4. Be polite to salespeople, but don’t feel like they’re your new best friends.

Don’t buy something because you’re worried about hurting their feelings or having made them do a lot of work helping you or explaining products to you. (At the same time, be respectful of clerks’ efforts. The other day, I was in Gap Kids, and I saw someone rifle through a pile of beautifully stacked shirts in a way that meant that they’d all have to be re-folded. Was he malicious or oblivious? I couldn’t tell.)

5. Don’t shop when you’re in a hurry or when you’re hungry.

6. Stick to a list.

I’ve found that after I’ve decided to buy one thing, I’m far more likely to throw in other impulse items, because I know that I’m committed to going through the hassle of paying.

7 . Beware of sale items

They make you feel like you can’t afford not to buy, or limited-time offers, which make you feel like you have to take advantage of a special deal. If you don’t need or want something, it’s not a good deal, not matter how cheap it is. A friend of mine told her husband, “I got this 50% off!” and he answered, “That means it was 50% ON.” Along the same lines…

8. Don’t buy anything that you don’t know you need.

This is especially important with clothes. If you’re not careful, you can buy a pair of pants marked down 75%, then realize that you can’t really wear them unless you buy the right shoes to go with them.

9. Choose cash or credit card.

Some people find it far harder to spend actual physical cash; other people find that paying cash makes a purchase seem trivial, even when the dollar amount is high. Know whether you’re more inclined to overspend with cash or credit cards - and leave that payment method at home.

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

Multi-tasking. Frankly, I’m over it.

As a woman I constantly hear how I am apparently so much more superior to men because of this ability to do a hundred things at once, but I have started to wonder about the effects this skill is having on my brain…

Before having children, it was a badge of honour to have a career, renovate a house, foster an incredibly virile relationship and whip up unexpected and creatively unique social events at the drop of a hat to entertain vast bevvies of fascinating friends.

I even believed that it was an admirable skill to have after having children and beneficial too. I could put the baby down to sleep and within one hour when I knew I should have been resting too, I could tuck the phone into my shoulder and return calls whilst putting the washing away, preparing dinner and removing staples from the timber floor that I was about to sand, all under the pretence that I was actually having some ‘me’ time by having Oprah on in the background!

But the other day as I was cleaning my teeth - do you know how much you can get done whilst mindlessly brushing your molars? I cleaned the toilet, picked up the kids clothes, rescued the bath toys from the depths of the shower recess, opened all the windows in the house to let in the fresh air and started to pack the lunches…my toothbrush still deftly doing its job with the help of my free hand. This is ridiculous I thought.

I have gone mad.

I cannot concentrate on one thing at a time.

Even at work - on the computer- I am constantly side-tracked by incoming emails and requests whilst trying to get one task finished, each email leading to a tangential task that snowballs into a major project tearing me away from what ever the original task was at hand…I know that this is part and parcel of work life but I think it has multiplied since having kids and having decreased time for oneself. In that time you do have, you try to complete a months worth of desired chores in one hour to make up for lost time and so the cycle continues into every pore of my work and play.

I’m sure I would be just as efficient if I did all these tasks consecutively, but before I know it my mind and body are onto the next thing before finishing the last and then I stop mid track and realise that I have completed task 1,2, 4, 5, and 9, but am half way through 3 and 6 and can’t even remember what 8 was!

Me time, I have revised now, is the ability to do, and enjoy, one thing and one thing only.

Its not easy, because you can read a magazine or sift through the school newsletter whilst watching a dvd!…and you can get the washing up done or the skirting boards painted during the ads whilst catching up with your TV friends…and isn’t it amazing how much you can get done whilst diligently listening to your friends on a hands free phone! When will it stop?!

I am trying…to ’stop’..that is.

I do enjoy the small things but always while enjoying other things at the same time!

I stop to smell the roses whilst walking the kids and the new puppy to the park. Did I mention we have a new puppy! I am trying to do that cliched thing of ‘being in the moment’. I never knew how hard that would be to achieve after trying so hard to always ‘achieve’. But for my own well-being now, post small babies, I am practicing.

I think I’m going to try to reduce my multi-tasking down to bi- or tri tasking! - …baby steps!

Admittedly sometimes it serves me well, but there is a limit when I stop and notice the ridiculous things I find myself doing!

Am I alone in this aftermath of a multi-tasking generation!? Is anyone else being affected I would love to know!

Sarah Lamond
Designer and mother of 2