Your Personal Merger: Work and Life

Power Tools for Women
by Joni Daniels

(Page 6 of 6)

Today, our waking hours are filled to the brim with a wide variety of activities. Work outside the home and you deal with an organizational culture and the constraints and politics of the workplace. Live with another adult and you arrange your daily life in connection with someone else. Live with children and you oversee, worry, negotiate, and drive! Relatives who reside nearby can mean that your history follows you around in the present. Family that lives far away can mean a portion of your free time is spent in long-distance obligation, responsibility, and support.

As you develop your Power Tools, you will increase your ability to integrate home and work life more seamlessly. The stress you feel about living in what often seems like two different worlds will diminish. You will stop trying to behave like two different women and will see that work and home have more in common than you think. The most powerful commonality they have is you. With increased confidence in accessing your personal power, rather than trying to compartmentalize and "balance" your work with your home life, you will integrate them into a unified lifestyle.

Why I Wrote This Book

My presentations and training programs are conducted for groups as small as ten and as large as a thousand. For over twenty years, I've made presentations to a wide variety of industries, including business, nonprofit, private and public sectors in manufacturing, finance, energy, insurance, education, and social services. I've taught thousands of women the benefit of using Power Tools. The concept gradually becomes clear: If women don't get better at recognizing the tools and the situations in which to use them, they're limiting their own success.

I listen to their concerns:

• "My boss is threatened by the accomplishments of others, so I can't be too successful."

• "My husband is pressuring me to stay at my job, which pays really well, but I hate what I'm doing."

• "My manager says one thing and does another."

• "I don't know what I want, but I don't want this."

• "I'm tired of being treated like I'm not serious about my career because I'm female."

• "I want the promotion but am afraid of the impact it will have on my home life."

• "My husband sulks if I don't take his advice."

• "I have a great opportunity but not the visibility/title/money that should go with it."

• "I take a lot of heat from other mothers because I work full-time and can't help out at the school during the day."

I can't stand to see women dropping their clout and losing out. I had to write this book.

As I was growing up, my parents made it very clear to all three of their children that we had the ability to accomplish our goals and dreams. I grew up thinking that all parents were like mine. If I had examined more closely the huge number of friends who flocked to our kitchen table for meals and discussions with my family, I would have known what a special home we had. Eventually, I got out into the world and discovered exactly that.

As I moved through college and graduate school, I was surprised to hear other women talk with such uncertainty about their strengths and abilities. It seemed so self-limiting to me. I simply plowed ahead with the enthusiasm of a kid at her own birthday party. My ability to be tactful was a bit underdeveloped, and when I talked about the transferability of personal power, I seemed to irritate rather than motivate. Being a problem-solver was my talent, but I needed the education graduate school provided to develop active listening skills and creative application of that skill.

My goal as a counselor and consultant developed clarity: to take my capacity to see the potential power and ability that people have and provide them with the support, coaching, guidance, and strategies they need to accomplish their goals. In every workplace, I come across people in the same situation: maddened managers, burned-out teachers, pessimistic parents, frustrated administrative assistants, eager camp counselors, fed-up shift workers, restricted supervisors, exasperated CEOs, all trying to figure out how to accomplish their goals. My role morphs into whatever makes sense: coach, costrategist, hand-holder, director, sounding board, counselor, or reality checker. I work with people to identify their goals and abilities, and help them apply new strategies and skills to the situation or system. Where or who it is doesn't matter. It could be at a school, professional foundation, multinational company, manufacturing plant, or corporate campus. It could involve a boss, client, sibling, friend, employee, parent, doctor, or spouse. I teach them all how Power Tools create success in that environment, in that situation, and with that person.

I also understand the importance of role modeling and realize that providing guidance and support are one thing, and doing it myself is another. I developed Power Tools for Women to help others, but I use my toolbox all the time. As a professional woman, mother of a teenage son, and wife for over twenty-one years, I've had to break out the Duct Tape more than once, whether at a client's office, with a friend at a large gathering, or at innumerable company holiday parties. I continue to fine-tune my own facility with Power Tools even as I teach other women about them.

From senior executive to administrative assistant, from part-time analyst to CEO, from the home-for-now housewife to the community advocate, women tell me that Power Tools

• Help them compete professionally. They are better at trusting the intuitive lurch in their gut when they meet with someone, more adept at asking for feedback, better able to remember the value of perspective and humor.

• Allow them to discover ways to parent more creatively by asking more questions before plowing ahead with only part of the information, creating opportunities to strengthen relationships, and reappraising outmoded rules.

• Teach them how to leverage all of their relationships more effectively and develop confidence in their own abilities. They tell me that when they determine a clear goal or think about the energy requirements a task will require, they feel more prepared to handle both the expected and the unexpected that life delivers.

Plan for Success

You will have it! How can I be so sure? Because you already have used a tool well in some previous experience. While you will be using your Power Tools in new and creative ways with situations that will be challenging and conditions that will call on your creativity, you can do this because you have done it before.

You possess everything you need to be more effective, more confident, and more empowered. Success is so close. Why wait? Plug in and power up!

Copyright © 2002 by Joni Daniels. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Joni Daniels is the founder and principal of Daniels & Associates, a consulting group specializing in personal and professional development. Her clients include FannieMae, Educational Testing Services, Marriott International, Merck, the Department of Defense, AIG Life Companies, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.