In this new podcast episode, I discuss strategizing our careers as working women and moms at the beginning of a new year, on our own terms and in a way that serves our vision, values and purpose best.
Take a listen!
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It’s the beginning of a new year, and you may be wondering which direction to take your career in in the next few months. As a matter of fact, this may very well be the question you ask yourself at the beginning of every year. As much as you may be excited (or not) at the prospect of a clean slate of time ahead of you, you may not be sure of the best way to strategize your career going forward. As a working woman and mom, you may not even have the time to devote to thinking about it as you juggle all the plates you have balancing in the air. Career strategy? How about a strategy to get through last week’s laundry?
The reality is, not having a career strategy in the long run, may leave you without a sense of purpose in your career, along with the feeling that you’re somehow stagnating professionally. In the worst case scenario, it may end up hurting your overall career prospects. This is even more significant as a working woman who may already be at a professional disadvantage as compared to your male counterparts as a result of the various gender-based biases experienced by women in the workplace, from the gender pay gap to the glass ceiling or concrete wall for women of color, to cite a few.
If you’re reading this and nodding along, you certainly are not alone. It took me decades to understand the importance of strategy as a crucial component of our careers, especially as working women and moms. I remember once when I was still in the corporate trenches, one of my mentors telling me: “It’s as if they put all the men in one room, and told them the rules of a game we were never told about.” By “we”, she meant professional women in general. Years later, I realized the rules of the game she was referring to, were really ways to strategize one’s career. Yet, I could not help wonder at the time: “How about the value of hard work? How about endlessly proving yourself by going above and beyond? Wasn’t that supposed to be the only career strategy?” Right? Wrong…
For many women like myself, hard work, endless dedication and unending service are often confused with an actual career strategy. Actually, it’s a mindset that has been tacitly imposed on women for the longest time, falsely rewarding us with the praise of self-sacrifice and devotion in and out of the workplace. So much so that working hard at work and working hard at home became the norm, until it wasn’t, that is…
With the advent of the work revolution during and after the COVID 19 pandemic, many women have been redefining the meaning of work in their lives and careers. From the “Great Breakup” to the “she-cession”, women have begun and continued abdicating the heavy crown of thorns that is underpaid, inequitable work and unpaid household labor, in favor of increased equity on the work and home fronts. Many women are choosing to start their own businesses as an alternative to underpaid careers riddled with gender bias and inequities. Others are opting for flexible schedules allowing them to strive in all their roles and capacities. Others yet again are stepping completely out of the career path, choosing to refocus on themselves and their families.
What this also means as women’s work is being reinvented, is that women’s career strategies also have to be reinvented accordingly. It’s no longer about emulating a masculine model of work, founded on a patriarchal system relying on women’s free labor and on the paradigm of trading time for elusive and unsustainable success. Nor is it about abandoning purposeful ambition in favor of choosing the safe harbor of inaction and passivity. Instead, it’s about aligning our career strategies with the priorities and values guiding us as women in and outside of the workplace.
Here are three steps that may help:
Outlining your priorities
Have you been operating on everyone else’s priorities and timetable but your own? I know I did too…Too often, it’s all about what’s urgent at work, what needs to get done on the home front, and everything else in between. As a result, it’s easy to have an entire career and life based off of priorities that are not yours.
What are your work priorities? What areas of your career are most important to you? What are your personal and collective priorities? How can these be aligned in a way so as to feed off of and serve each other?
As I started outlining my own career and personal priorities, I realized flexibility in my various roles as mother, partner, and professional, as well as being able to practice my writing and teaching craft, are at the top of my list. This has led me to orient myself toward a career that offers me a flexible environment, and encourages me to practice my craft.
Eliminate or delegate unpaid or invisible labor
One of the biggest obstacles to women’s careers is the “extra” fluff that gets in the way of the true, purposeful work. From excessive and unwarranted amounts of invisible and unpaid service work, to the unseen mental and household load, there are too many silent and frustrating obstacles in the path of women’s work.
Part of devising a successful career strategy as a working woman is addressing these obstacles. Reducing or streamlining the amount of service work is one way to do so, whether through less volunteering or bringing increased attention to the need to share the service load in the workplace. Having honest conversations followed by intentional action at home to help share the household labor and mental load can also go a long way. Underneath it all, ridding yourself of the guilt of not doing it all is also essential.
Applying the rule of 80/20
The rule of 80/20, also known as the Pareto rule, essentially dictates that 80% of our efforts produce 20% of our results. While this rule is most often used in business, it can be extended to any area of work or life. From a career perspective, it is a call to focus on the 20% of inputs that will produce the most, and best, results.
What are your most valuable skills that produce your best results at work? Are you most gifted at writing, public speaking, networking, research, analysis, or any other area? Can you capitalize on those skills to guide and direct you towards the areas and projects that you would be most successful at and prioritize those? Conversely, can you steer away from those areas and projects that do not use your best inputs and as a result do not produce your best outcomes?
Applying the rule of 80/20 in my career and life has been, and still is, much of a work in progress. While it’s been challenging to focus more on my most impactful skills and best outcomes, as opposed to desperately trying to do it all, it’s certainly paying off. One of the greatest side effects is the lessened amount of stress going into managing work and life. The greatest benefit yet is in being aligned with my purpose, and using what I have to do the work I’m supposed to do.
All in all, the right career strategy can be one of the most important tools for working women and moms to thrive in and outside of work. Devising a powerful strategy is about being aligned with one’s vision and values, setting the appropriate priorities, focusing on the best returns and reducing invisible and unaligned work. While it’s certainly not an easy feat, and very much a work in progress, it’s also one of the most profitable career and life investments.
How are you strategizing your career at the beginning of the year?
In the first podcast episode of the New Year, we’re all about being on a mission. I discuss skipping the traditional resolution process, and instead investing time in clarifying our mission by crafting our own mission statements.
In this episode, I delve into the three simple and effective tips to devise our mission statements, whether personal, professional, family or even financial. This episode is inspired by the “7 Habits of Effective People” by Stephen Covey.
Listen In!
Thanks for Listening!
Thanks so much for tuning in and listening to this week’s episode! If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please share it by using the social media at the bottom of this post!
Also, leave me a review for the TCS podcast on Apple Podcasts !
Most people who know me well know I’m serious about money. I’m an accountant by trade, who also happens to teach accounting, which also means finances are often on my mind. Truthfully, I always had an inkling for it, not just when it became my main field of study and work. I believe I can trace it to my upbringing, being raised in a single parent family home by a single mother who taught me the importance of managing what you have, and managing it well. It later morphed into a desire to never go without, a search for the tangible, palpable security the little girl in me had not been able to find growing up without a father’s presence…This is why it’s so important for me to have a financial sense of direction, especially at the beginning of the year. This year, I am going one step further than setting up my usual financial plan and budget, and actually am setting on the path to creating a financial mission statement for myself and my family…
And this is not at random…As a Black woman, mother, wife, professional, among so many other hats I, like other women, wear, I am all too aware of the financial disparities and challenges faced by women. These challenges not only affect women’s levels of financial literacy, but also their financial well-being, and access to financial support and tools to acquire, develop and generate wealth.
According to the 2022 Survey of Household Economics and Decision-Making, women are 79% less likely to pay their bills on time than their male counterparts (84%). They are also shown to be 52% less likely than men to have sufficient emergency savings to cover three months of expenses than men (at 56%). Lastly, the survey reveals women are 15% more likely to have upped their debt and credit card usage, as opposed to only 12% of men. While the gender wage gap certainly contributes to these statics, increasing childcare costs and the effects of inflation are also notable contributing factors that put women at constant financial risk.
Research also shows there is an acute gender gap in financial literacy explained by household specialization. This occurs when men specialize in financial decisions for the household, while women get confined to other household functions. As a matter of fact, the UBS 2019 Global Investor Watch found that globally, only 23% of women handle long-term financial planning decisions. A majority of women worldwide (57%) keep deferring critical financial decisions to their spouses, with millennial women surprisingly displaying this behavior.
All these reasons (and more) make it not only necessary, but absolutely indispensable for women in particular, to build a solid financial house in order to protect themselves and their families. This is where a financial mission statement goes a step further than a simple financial plan or budget.
A financial mission statement, or wealth mission statement, articulates your unique financial vision, in alignment with your own values, goals and principles, to help you define the steps you need to take to thrive financially. In this sense, it’s not just about following a series of popular, albeit financial guru-approved, rules and regulations. It’s about diving deep into what financially matters to you as a woman, mother, wife, sister and friend, and devise your own path towards the objectives that are uniquely ours.
If, like myself, you are yearning for finances that reflect who you are and what you deem important, here are a few steps that may help to build your financial mission statement:
Articulate your financial vision
Vision is everything. One of my favorite Bible verses is Proverbs 29:18, “Without vision, the people perish.” Often, especially when it comes to finances, we as women tend to adhere to other people’s visions, whether it’s our spouse’s, families’, or whatever financial authority is trending at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big Suze Orman fan. However, what I’ve come to understand, is there is a BIG difference between being inspired by someone’s advice, and having one’s own vision.
What is your financial vision? What do you see, in the eye of your mind, happening for you and your family financially in the next year and beyond? Where do you financially see yourself and your loved ones in the next year, the next five or even ten years? Not just in terms of owning the rarest Birkin bag (which can serve as an investment piece, but that’s a discussion for another day), but in terms of your financial house of spending, savings, and investments?
These are crucial questions that do not just enlist your ability to dream about an abundant future. They are also questions that prompt your sub-conscious to envision a financial future reflective of your personality, history, and desires, but also of your self-perceived limitations and traumas.
Lay down your financial values, goals and principles
What do you value when it comes to your finances? What are you household and family values in terms of money? Where is it important for you to spend, save or invest?
Defining what you value as an individual, and together as a family, is a crucial step in refining your sense of financial purpose and direction. For me, tithing and investing in my children’s education are priorities, based on my own sense of values, but also my story and my mindset. What are financial priorities for you and your family?
Decide on your financial actions for the next year
What financial actions will you be taking based on your vision, values and principles? What goals will those actions lead you to? What are the steps that will get you there?
Reflecting on your financial vision and laying down your financial values, goals and principles, are the prelude to deciding on your financial actions for the future. Usually, these decisions come first, at the expensive cost of proper alignment with one’s authentic vision, purpose and values. It is then no wonder that most of our financial goals end up being abandoned after only a few weeks or months…
All in all, building a financial mission statement is a powerful exercise in laying a solid financial foundation against which to pursue goals well aligned with our unique vision and values. It also provides us with the opportunity to reflect on our core principles and what guides us in general, and question some of our core beliefs as well. For me, it’s been a revelatory process of self-discovery and self-realignment, a journey of sorts into the paradigms I’ve been upholding about money. After all, it’s deeper than money, it’s about who we are, what we believe in and where we are going…
Have you ever built your own financial mission statement?
The story was repeating itself…It was only the third day back to school after the New Year, and the kids had missed the morning school bus…Again…The morning tension was at its usual peak, what with breakfasts barely eaten, work schedules now thrown off, and moods in need of a serious overhaul, all before 7am…At this point, with one teenager, one almost-teen, an unruly dog, and about ten loads of laundry in tow, I felt our family was in need of more than the usual New Year resolutions and goals. We needed something stronger, better, some sort of a purpose or mission that would create a shift in this season of our family…This is where our journey to build a family mission statement began…
As a working mom, the New Year rarely feels like a fresh, clean slate. After all, last year’s laundry is still lingering in the dryer, glitter from the Christmas gifts’ overpriced wrapping paper is still littering the dirty floors, and no one is checking the bank account balance until things somewhat settle…With each passing year as a mom, family resolutions become increasingly obsolete, slowly replaced by the hurried frenzy of the first days back at work and in school…Each year, as I stare at the sheer immensity of Motherhood, I keep asking myself: “So…where do I begin?”
Have you ever thought of building your own family’s mission statement? Have you ever looked at your closest loved ones, and wondered as you were picking up dirty socks off the floor, if there could be a sense of a common mission among you? I know I have, in between two loads of laundry, grading mid-term papers and emptying the dishwasher…
If like me, you and your family are in the process of building your family’s mission statement, these 3 steps may help:
Clarify your vision of your family
How do you envision your family and family life? If you were to close your eyes and picture your idea of what your family would be like, what do you see?
Too often, we don’t have a clear idea, or any idea at all, of our vision for our family. Neither do we talk about it. Growing up in Senegal, West Africa, in a single parent home, there was no time even to begin to think about having a vision for our family. How was that going to help with anything?
Fast-forward a few decades in my own family, as an African immigrant in America, stuck in between the reality of American families and the history of African families. To say there was confusion was an understatement…Clearing this confusion required coming up with a clear vision for our family, not just for me, but for each and every one of us.
Define (or redefine) your values and principles as a family.
What are your family’s values and principles? What’s important to you as a family? What are you and your family members passionate about? What do you love to do together? When are you and your family members at your best, or at your worst? In what ways can you help better others in the family, and vice-versa? How do you want to be perceived as a family?
Defining or re-defining your values and principles as a family can help put everyone on the same wavelength, especially when it feels like everyone in the family has been speaking a different language. It’s especially powerful when children and young adults express their values and principles for the family, as they may not often get the opportunity to do so.
Reflect on your family’s impact
What contributions would you want to make as a family? What impact are you envisioning your family making on others? What have you been struggling to achieve as a family?
Reflecting on your contributions, achievements and desired impact as a family can help explore the goals ahead of you. Not just any goals, but rather the goals aligned with the unique vision, values and principles for your own unique family.
I don’t know about you, but my family is on a mission. We’re not a perfect family, nor do we aspire to be. Yet, in the midst of the imperfect, beautiful chaos that is our life, we’re striving to share a common mission and purpose we can walk towards.
