How Working Moms Can Make Guilt-Free Choices
By GalTime .com. Posted on .
by 5 Simple Steps to Choosing Your Path, W. Granville Brown, for GalTime.com
As a professional life coach, I’m privileged to have some very successful career women as clients. I’ve discovered that many of them face challenges quite different than those encountered by men. For example, consider the deep feelings of guilt many working mothers experience. They feel as if they are being split in half and would gladly sacrifice a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes for more hours in the day. There is confusion between making a decision and making a choice. Many of these educated women suffer from the consequences of their choices and struggle with making better choices they can live with and feel good about.
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Humbly speaking, I believe a process and a skill set are associated with decision and choice making. In order to recognize the difference--as well as the need to learn or improve upon the skill set--a person must be open to personal growth. Each new client has discovered that something is “off” in that individual’s life, and he/she wants to turn it back on. Often the issues are related to the choices made, which, in turn, have led the client to seek my assistance.
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Oftentimes the two words (decision and choice) are used interchangeably, when, in fact, they have complete and separate meanings. Let’s start with decision, which means “to reach a conclusion or pass judgment on an issue.” A choice is defined as “a selection from a number of options.” To simplify: you make a decision to have dessert after dinner, and then you choose between ice cream, cake, or pie-- keeping in mind that a moment on the lips is like an inch to the hips. Oh please, I’m a man who loves hips; go with the cake. I do digress.
My helpful guide, “5 Simple Steps to Choosing Your Path,” (sorry, shameless plug) illustrates five simple, but powerfully impactive, steps to making wiser choices. Once applied to our daily lives, these steps have proven quite effective in their simplicity.
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1. Think it out: That should be a logical process, but a lot of times in life, we merely react based on experience, the past, emotions, or a myriad of other reasons, without giving much prior thought to making a choice.
2. Willingness to deal with the consequences through ownership: Yes, we have to own our choices. We can’t point fingers of blame at others when things don’t work out and only take credit for the good. We must own all of our choices.
