• Where do you want to go for dinner?
• How much do you want for that painting?
• We'll give you $400,000 for the condo and that's our final offer.
• What's it going to take for you to do your homework on time?
• I need my website design done by April 1...can you meet that deadline?
• Both of these projects are due at the same time. How do you want me to prioritize them?
• When can you meet? I'm free at 4 p.m. on Friday. You?

But women, how good are you at negotiating your value? Your worth? How good are you at asking for what you want and getting it? How comfortable are you letting go of potential income if the offer doesn't meet your bottom line number? Are you aware of your non-negotiables? Your bottom, bottom line? How good are you at sitting upright through your boss's resistance and rationalizations and counter offers?

Curious what the balance between say, your self worth and your salary look like...

(In honor of Women's History Month (and the fact that we're still seriously lagging in pay equity) jump into the comment box and tell the truth.

In joy,

Lisa

Registering now for guest expert Victoria Pynchon's free telelclass, "How to Negotiate Anything."

Victoria Pynchon

I can think of nobody else I'd want to celebrate Women's History Month with, and I thank her for inspiring me to post what I'd call a declaration (excerpted from the 1987 Congressional Resolution):

Whereas American women of every race, class, and ethnic background have made historic contributions to the growth and strength of our Nation in countless recorded and unrecorded ways;

Whereas American women have played and continue to play a critical economic, cultural, and social role in every sphere of the life of the Nation by constituting a significant portion of the labor force working inside and outside of the home;

Whereas American women have played a unique role throughout the history of the Nation by providing the majority of the volunteer labor force of the Nation;

Whereas American women were particularly important in the establishment of early charitable, philanthropic, and cultural institutions in our Nation;

Whereas American women of every race, class, and ethnic background served as early leaders in the forefront of every major progressive social change movement;

Whereas American women have been leaders, not only in securing their own rights of suffrage and equal opportunity, but also in the abolitionist movement, the emancipation movement, the industrial labor movement, the civil rights movement, and other movements, especially the peace movement, which create a more fair and just society for all; and

Whereas despite these contributions, the role of American women in history has been consistently overlooked and undervalued, in the literature, teaching and study of American history:

Now, therefore, be it resolved by the Craving Balance Blog and the Blogs of all other women who are making and recording the history of the United States of America every working day, that March is designated as "Women's History Month." Every woman blogger and every male blogger whose life has been enriched by the presence of women in it is requested to issue a proclamation each March, calling upon their fellow bloggers to observe March as Women’s History Month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.

This resolution, calling upon "the people of the United States to observe March as Women’s History Month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities" was passed by Congress in 1987 and successive years since then. For more information about the origin of National Women's History Month, or the activities of the National Women's History Project, contact:  National Women's History Project.

How to Negotiate Anything starts April 1. Follow this link to join the How to Negotiate Anything Free Teleclass Intro on March 18! Space limited.

It would be easy to sit in cynicism about pop culture, mass marketed phenoms, commercial tripe, and any other hip and tumble point of view, and we'd be in good company. But we'd be missing the point, and probably missing our life.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to know that nothing could keep you from yourself? That nothing could keep you from expressing yourself? Giving yourself? Finding out what it feels like to snowboard or cook posole, or change a clutch in a VW?

Passion + Possibility = Purpose.
Purpose + Action = Balance.

Inspire yourself:

Ooh, look what we just invented for you in the Craving Balance Journaling and Learning Community:

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Whether you're working in a demanding, so-called 9-5 job that leaves you little room to breathe, or working from home with competing demands that tax your ability to get things done, or a working mom needing to squeeze out a time for yourself, the juggle isn't easy.

No matter where you find yourself on the work+life continuum, this self-guided course will put you in control of how you spend your precious time and get the things that matter most to you in action.

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Purpose Changes Everything $157

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This course will change your relationship with yourself, others, and the world, and is definitely not for dabblers.

You're going to be shaking things up, challenging ways of being that have become routine and comfortable, and getting in action not only in your practical everyday doings, but perhaps with big projects or lifelong wishes. You'll discover and affirm your values, strengths and purpose, remodel your schedule to get your goals to show up reliably on your everyday schedule, learn how to say no and when to say yes, and develop ongoing accountability and productivity practices.

• Learning sessions are released incrementally over three months, and include journal comments and coaching with life balance specialist and coach Lisa Gates, cpcc.
• Available at your request / upon payment.

All courses delivered through the Craving Balance Journaling and Learning Community. Register here.



The Craving Balance Journaling and Learning Community is part journaling, part e-learning, and part social networking. Here's what you get for free:

1. Receive a full year of weekly journaling prompts you can share with just me, or with the entire community.
2. Enjoy frequent comments and a bit of coaching from me to help you unravel your balance challenges.
3. Track your progress with our Goal Setting and Tracking feature.
4. Get members-only access and discounts on Special e-Learning Courses and Workshops.
5. Get your questions answered in our free monthly Community Teleclasses.
6. Discover why connecting with like-minded women catapults you out of indecision, dithering and flatlining and into action.

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Lisa Gates
Life Balance Specialist and Coach

The message hurled toward women that work+life balance issues are ours to solve used to infuriate me, until I realized that our capacity for holistic change makes us perfect leaders for promoting humanity in the workplace, and purpose in our work style choices.

Treating the Cause of Work-Life Imbalance

It also used to annoy me that work+life balance issues were so unconsciously tethered to productivity tools as the first and usually only line of defense for handling what’s on our plates (plus all the stuff that should be on our plates if we were just better multitasking employees, wives, mothers, sisters). Women consistently tell me that this very yang perspective is what helped them become aware that they were treating the symptom and not the cause.

Even though we now know better, the tragedy is that as a culture, we’ve internalized that better multitasking and productivity leads to balance. Instead of investing in a rigorous inquiry into purpose and right livelihood, we ply technological tools and bandages to give us oxygen in our breathless days. We think we know ourselves, but sooner or later we wake up in our careers and relationships and realize we’ve made some unconscious choices and assumptions, and we’re pissed off! The scene in Up In the Air in which George Clooney explains to J.K. Simmons as he's firing him that his youthful dream of being a chef is now possible exquisitely captures this modern tragedy.

It’s tricky to unwrap the personal from the political or the collective think on the issue of balance, but one thing is certain. The MadMen Effect has done and continues to do a great job of selling us on our failings and our “true place in the world.” Yet the fortunate fallout of the recession is that so many women are using their forced unemployment as an opportunity to reinvent themselves. These formerly breathless-with-busyness humans are now finding out that wacked out work-life balance is a crisis of purpose, not productivity.

So as we become more aware of the influences we’ve internalized, the more important this personal work becomes. To create joyful livelihoods and quality relationships we have to know precisely who we are, what our strengths are, and what we want and don’t want. We have to give up the ghost of wishing our circumstances were different, and get on with taking responsibility for creating new circumstances. Yes, easier said than done, but who said it had to be easy — MadMen?

Purpose Changes Everything

Finding our passion and purpose is not gratuitous navel gazing. It’s basic training. And just as we start great swelling movements of social change at the grassroots level, our personal changes will create ripples in the social and political landscape of work+life balance, flexible workplaces, humane, family-promoting legislation, etc.

So, we start where we are. Where we live. And this conversation is best lead by women because we get it.

And just to put this into the down and dirty daily perspective, my husband washes dishes every other month, and when he does he never actually cleans them. I mutter and complain and re-load the dishwasher. He leaves a trail of stuff from one end of the house to the other, and Helga the Maid tries to breathe deeply as she stoops to conquer. He works 14 hours a day, and all the housework, banking, office work, and school and childcare needs fall in my domain. The difference between 1965 and now is that the choice is conscious. I don’t work on my husband. I work on me. We have conversations of alignment, rather than blame. Requests and agreements replace demands and victimization. Usually. Fundamental to this process is the recognition that we both have certain strengths and preferred ways of being, and we either fight it, or acknowledge it and work with what is.

This dance requires agility, doesn’t it? I reckon we’ll do what we’ve always done: change the world one letter, one word, one conversation, one friendship, one baby, one business, one movement, one cause at a time.

in joy,

Lisa

Register today for Purpose Changes Everything: A Life Balance Blueprint. Last day for advance discount on the 12-week online course and telecoaching series.

Mmm. Yes, yes, yes. To quote Dr. Phil, "How's that going for you?

I invite you to slip off your shoes and your headset, turn off your Blackberry and join me for our FREE Winter Wake Up Call: Invigorating your Goals and Resolutions. We're going to find out how to focus on getting that ONE THING DONE.

Friday, February 12
12 noon PST | 1 MTN | 2 CEN | 3 EST

Follow this link to the Craving Balance Learning Community to register and get the call-in details!

In joy,

Lisa

But after a time, that old curmudgeony feeling is likely to creep back in. You know...that sense of not being quite right with the world. Burdened. Stressed. Your Moleskine will sit in the back seat where you tossed it, your VA won't be able to reach you, and the same projects and tasks show up on your brand new calendar every week. Why? Because you can't solve the puzzle of balance by layering gadgets, tools and toys over what's really broken. Your integrity.

So these three anti-productivity productivity practices will bring your life into sharp, direct, clear focus and give you immediate spaciousness, completion and integrity.

Tell the truth:

I really wanted to attend your party but I was working late and the kids had a meltdown when I came home and by the time things were calmed down it was too late. Besides, someone boxed me in and I couldn't get out of my parking space even if I wanted to. I'm sorry if you were counting on me. How can I make it up to you?

Say no:

I really don't have the time to add one more thing to my plate, but I guess I have to do this. I mean it won't look good if I don't. I'm really working at creating balance in my life right now. No thank you.

Stop Talking:

I'm really working at creating balance in my life right now. No thank you. I mean, I'd really love to take on this project, and I know you're going to be disappointed in me, but I just feel really overwhelmed, and if I bring home one more project I think my husband will divorce me. You're not mad are you? Oh heck, just give it to me, I can do it. I don't know why I said no.

Imagine what it would be like to do these three things every day, all day long. Imagine the impact to your experience of integrity and balance.

In joy,

Lisa

Two Things to Do Today:

Register for the FREE Winter Wake Up Call: How to (re)Invigorate Your Goals and Resolutions.

Join the Craving Balance Learning Community.

Here's the confession:

None of it mattered. Not only were the tasks meaningless in the bigger picture of my life, not one of them could be traced to joy. Or to fun. Or to connection. Or to collaboration. All the values I say are non-negotiable were missing in action from my list. It must follow, then, that they were missing from my life.

Don't get me wrong...I know we all have to do routine errands and tasks every day. This was the real learning: Who was I being that I couldn't have brought the values of joy and connection to a lunch meeting, or to laundry?

That’s when I realized I hadn’t been using my eraser as the goddess of possibility intended. And I certainly wasn’t using it as the god of productivity intended either. There it sat, on top of my pencil, winking at me like a delicious cupcake and I hadn’t been reading the signals correctly.

Here’s what I now know:

• Pencils are for scribbling random and incongruent bits of thought and feeling.
• Pencils pine away for you to start writing from the middle of the page and make connections between the random and incongruent with big arrows and loops and childish stars.
• A pencil will fly out your hands in paroxysms of joy when you doodle, or write the same word over and over just to see how the letter “B” looks each time.
• A pencil won't complain when you're stuck or lost in thought and put teeth marks in its side, or stick it behind your ear.
• But most of all, pencils have erasers. They’re not for erasing. Their sole purpose is to remind you that it’s all temporary and none of it matters…except who you're being.

…so why not pencil in some joy?

Lisa

Apparently, the author of the note below, Maureen McGregor, was asked to reply to "The Toast to the Lassies" portion of the dinner to educate us about how far we've come, and what we've learned over the centuries about football, beer, kilts and what's under them, err, um, I mean equality. Enjoy!

Toast to the Lassies - the Reply

Robert Burns represented the aspirations of the "common man". He put into song many of our better ideas and ideals and verbalized our higher instincts. He also had a hawkish sense of bawdy humour, and in that vein then, let me make a sincere effort to begin this reply on a complementary note - by beginning with a look at the "size" of Scottish manhood. (Raise hand to indicate "height.")

Some years ago, whilst still living in Scotland, a television commercial for "Scots Porridge Oats" showed two tall, strapping men in kilts and string vests tossing the caber and strutting their stuff, after having consumed a hearty breakfast of hot porridge. The commercial however had to be filmed using English actors as no Scottish actors of the right build (i.e., tall and strapping) could be found to play the parts. A 5'2" Glaswegian man to whom I repeated the T.V. commercial story, theorized that all la creme-de-la-creme of Scottish manhood had been used as cannon fodder by the English in two world wars... leaving the runts at home to breed.

And what about the Scotsman's sense of style and dress? There is a theory that our ancestral Pict men painted themselves indigo so their wives could not see what they were up to in the heather with the woman next door. Nowadays though, Scotland is possessed of a tartan obsession. According to one historian, prior to Robert Burns the average clan gathering looked like a parade of tattie bags. A chief purpose of the original tartans was camouflage. Dressed in modern tartans the only way you men could hide would be to fight your battles on a ludo board.

Do we agree ladies with the statement that the kilt is an aphrodisiac?

I once heard someone say that your man could hawk himself about in tight jeans or Italian suits and there's nothing doing. But should he (and I quote) "hap his hurdies with the passion pleats" it doesn't seem to matter what kind of women they are - rich, poor, old, young, black, white, yellow - they just melt, go shoogly in the legs, and submit. A social anthropologist who was asked why the kilt should be the world's greatest knee-trembler, just laughed and said "Accessibility old chap, that's what fascinates them, accessibility". Ladies take care - I am not speaking from experience here when I suggest, though, the answer to what a Scotsman wears under his kilt.... is best left to the imagination.

However, Scots men have acquired a few social graces over the past hundred years - they don't belch in the faces of women they are married to, and some of them (so I'm told) even take their socks off before having sex. Nowadays, alibis for bad behaviour based on a deprived Scottish childhood are so commonplace that they're ignored unless you can prove that you were breastfed by your father.

Robert Burns did not tolerate fools easily. In his epigram addressed to a gentleman at table who kept boasting of the company he kept, he wrote:

"What of lords with whom you've supped, And of dukes that you dined with yestreen! A louse, sir, is still but a louse Though it crawl on the locks of a queen"

Robert Burns - who died at age 37 - united music, realism, comedy and humanity in a manner seldom seen. He was a true champion of the common man. But would he still have been today, when the "common man" is as common as Rab C. Nesbitt? What he would have made of contemporary Glasgow - where one definition of an atheist is: "A bloke who goes to a Rangers-Celtic match to watch the football". What would he have thought had he overheard this remark in a local tavern: Q. "What shall we drink to ?" A. "What about to 3 in the morning?"

Still, ladies - and you should know this - according to the result of a British Gas Energy Centre's ''HouseHusbands Day'' quiz - which was a light hearted quiz designed to test men's knowledge of traditionally female tasks - Scottish men outperformed their English and Welsh counterparts when it came to their knowledge of household chores. (I stress the word knowledge - knowing how to do something, and actually doing it are very different things!)

More than 2,000 men all over the UK took part in the quiz. They were asked revealing questions about jobs such as ironing, baking cakes and the best way to remove a red wine stain. Thirty-five percent of Scots answered all of the questions correctly - far more than any other region - proving they really are modern men of the 90's. 99.7% of them claimed they were capable of baking a sponge cake! They were only beaten - percentage wise - on the best way to remove red wine stains - but who bothers to remove alcohol stains in Scotland?

(May I make mention here of a banner seen at a Scotland v Soviet Union football game in 1982, which read: ALCOHOLISM v COMMUNISM).

Ladies - I received a chain letter recently, but unlike most chain letters, this one, despite being postmarked Auchtermuchtie, did not cost anything. It read "This letter was started by a woman like yourself in the hope of bringing relief to other tired and discontented women. Just bundle up your husband or boyfriend and send him to the woman whose name appears at the top of the list. Then add your name to the bottom of the list and send a copy of this letter to five of your friends who are equally tired and discontented. When your name comes to the top of the list, you will receive 3,125 men -- and some of them are bound to be better than the one you gave up...."

There are three rings in marriage. The engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering. Of wedding rings, Burns wrote:

"She asked why wedding rings are made of gold;
I ventured this to instruct her;
Why, madam, love and lightning are the same,
On earth they glance, from Heaven they came.
Love is the soul's electric flame,
And gold its best conductor."

You men may not be great believers in the institution of marriage, but let me remind you of something. There is only one thing worse than being a batchelor - and that is being a batchelor's son!

Robbie Burns was a great believer in the rights of women and held us, rightly so, socially and intellectually as equals. From our present day point of view - but not his - he abused women when he fell in love with them - but a point in his favour, he never deserted any of his misbegotten weans! I ask myself what has really changed in men's behaviour toward the fairer sex from Robert Burns' time to ours? Not a lot... But, despite all their vices - their immorality - and all the troubles they may heap upon us, we continue to love them - those men. We love them for all the little things a man can be loved for (and let's face it girls, some of us can love very little things). Two rugby world cups ago in Italy at the Scotland-Brazil match, as the camera panned into the crowd it picked out a bunch of tartan-clad Scotsmen holding a banner which read "Elvis is alive and living in Partick". You can't help but love them.

So lassies - for those of you who are still looking for Mr. Right - girls, the message is clear - head NORTH of the border.

###

Wink, Lisa