Your Work, Your Life...Your Way
7 Keys to Work-Life Balance
By: Julie Cohen
Published: March 4, 2010
Format: Paperback, 258 pages
ISBN-10: 0984247408
ISBN-13: 978-0984247400
Publisher: Julie Cohen Coaching, LLC
"Please think of work-life balance as a shorthand way to represent the many unique perspectives that each person has when working and struggling with the often crazy mix of time, commitment, priorities, and responsibilities that make up one's professional and personal life", writes career and leadership coach Julie Cohen in her inspiring and hands on book Your Work, Your Life...Your Way: 7 Keys to Work-Life Balance. The author describes how people are often dissatisfied with the way their work lives overwhelm their personal lives causing stress, concern, and emotional concern over a lack of balance between work and life.
Julie Cohen takes the approach, unlike many popular books and television programs, that achieving a balance between work and personal life is an ongoing, evolving process, and not an end in and of itself. The author recognizes that each person defines the work-life balance differently, and will face different barriers and challenges from another person. In keeping with the basic premise of the book, that achieving work-life balance is a journey, Julie Cohen offers her seven keys to navigating that ever changing voyage successfully. Those seven keys are:
* Develop priorities
* Create boundaries
* Manage your day efficiently
* Design reasonable expectations
* Reprioritize your values
* Navigate an unbalanced organizational culture
* Engage in self-care
Julie Cohen (photo left) understands that real change requires commitment, but also needs a workable process that is easy to follow, and produces tangible results. The author takes an action oriented approach that goes beyond merely thinking about seeking more rewarding work-life balance, but provides the action steps needed to create real change. The process is broken down into achievable actions that take small steps on the larger journey. The entire book is designed to be solution-oriented and future-directed to not only think about action, but to actually move forward in the process. The author helps the reader to personalize the process to their own needs, and not impose someone else's preordained solution. At the same time, the author gives permission to let a bit of imbalance slip into one's life if pressures require a person to be more flexible in approach.
For me, the power of the book is how Julie Cohen provides an action oriented process for making real progress on the work-life balance journey. The individualized concept that all people are different, with different goals and needs, sets this book apart from those that offer a one size fits all prescriptive technique. Helping the person define what is work-life balance, on their own terms, guides the reader toward their own best fit and combination of how best to balance their work and personal lives. Julie Cohen is refreshingly honest about how the reader will never achieve the ideal work-life balance. Instead, she describes the more realistic and reassuring concept that balance is a journey and an adventure, and not an end point. The seven keys to navigating a successful course, along the way to better balance, are action oriented and reasonable for anyone to apply to their own life.
I highly recommend the practical and change oriented book Your Work, Your Life...Your Way: 7 Keys to Work-Life Balance by Julie Cohen, to anyone seeking a personalized coaching guide for working toward their own balance of work and personal life. To assist in the journey, Julie Cohen also offers a handy and very hands on workbook 7 Keys: Workbook & Journal, to be used in conjunction with the book itself. The workbook is not required, but it does provide a journal for keeping track of progress and overcoming obstacles.
Read the thoughtful and personal breakthrough creating book Your Work, Your Life...Your Way: 7 Keys to Work-Life Balance by Julie Cohen, and discover your own definition of work-life balance and live a more satisfying, purposeful, and fulfilling life.
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