If we can get our heads around being responsible for creating own reality then we can have weekends in the middle of the week! No, this is not a bizarre notion, today was an example of that. I took Friday off – and that’s the great thing about living in the Age of Possibility. My four year old goddaughter arrived from Cape Town for a fleeting visit so I put aside all work for 24 hours to experience life through her eyes for a day. And it was well-worth it and such a refreshing experience! It was a reminder of what fun life can be when you’re only four and play is your primary language. Children really are a great excuse to break out of the “system”, whether that system is living up to “society’s expectations” or just your regular, daily routine.

By 8.30 in the morning we had dropped my two boys at school, chatted all the way home, had breakfast, baked for my nephew’s birthday party and had a swim. Oh, and during that time her future literate dad and I had an interesting chat (while I was stirring the pecan nuts into the carrot cake!) about ways of altering our quality of life and maintaining an income. It all boils down to having a vision and connecting the dots differently in order to get there. Children give us reasons to this. Do we want to spend more time with them and less time with our boss / clients? Do we want to decide how much playtime we have and when exactly we work? Do we want to be the heroes in our own stories and those of our children? How are we going to stand out from the crowd in an era where one must choose to be distinct or extinct (as management guru Tom Peters puts it), where it is no longer what you sell but who you are, and how and why you do things that will determine your success.

Anyway, back to my story. By 8.45am I was floating on a lilo in the pool, giggling with Olivia and gazing at the azure blue sky. I marvelled at how wonderful it was to have a flexible career that enabled me to break out of my usual routine and enjoy this precious moment. (Yes, even self-employed entrepreneurs get into routines and ruts that they find hard to break out of!). As an entrepreneur (of 13 years) I often work nights and weekends to make up for time spent with my family. I know of few employed people who have a 9 – 5 job these days and most of them are expected to work a 12 hour day even though they are paid no extra for it. If I am to truly enjoy the flexibility I have created for myself I also have to change my mind about taking time off. If I can’t have a full weekend each week, then I deserve to create off time during the week, and Friday was just one example of this.

This is a new kind of thinking that is so characteristic of the X-generation (born 70s -80s) in the workplace today, and is a concept that Ricardo Semler, of the renowned company, Semco in Brazil, has got his head around. This conglomerate, which has 24-hour factory operations in Brazil, is the non-US based company with the most case studies written about it for Ivy League business schools. In Semler’s book The Seven-Day Weekend, he outlines a plan to democratise work-life integration/balance. He poses the question we should all be asking: “Why not?”.

The concept behind the title of the book – a seven-day weekend – is not what you think. It isn’t about having a seven day weekend. It’s about recognising that in the 21st-century most of us, especially people in the professions and entrepreneurs, no longer get to have a traditional weekend – two consecutive days off in a week. We need to stop feeling guilty about this, but also realise that we do need to take some time out for ourselves and for our families and friends. So, what we need to do is find a way to have a weekend during every seven-day period. And that maybe means taking Tuesday morning off because I worked Saturday night.

“Flexibility is obviously one of the keywords in this type of approach. But there is a word of warning here: you are not being flexible if you work an extra half an hour every day so that you can take every second Friday afternoon off. That isn’t flexibility, that’s just a different deal – a different type of contract. If you claim to be flexible, then you need to be flexible. Flexibility means being able to take Wednesday morning off because your child is sick. Flexibility means being able to leave at lunchtime on Thursday to take your dog to the vet, and working extra hours in on Friday to make up for it. Flexibility is not about a new type of schedule – rather it is about freedom, choice and the ability to respond to circumstances,” says futurist Dr Graeme Codrington, who is a business and strategy consultant with TomorrowToday.biz.

Children give us reasons to break out of the system. Their arrival brings with it all kinds of chaos that could never be anticipated, and for each family this will be different. Children often present their parents with opportunities to make decisions about work/life integration requiring a lot of soul searching and introspection. Here is one such example:

When my eldest son was Ryan was just 3 years old, I had been going through a particularly busy few months with my direct selling team. We were doing very well, breaking our sales targets each month, and I was working towards earning an incentive trip to the tropical island of the Comores. Now, to put you in the picture, we were selling educational toys to parents and I did this by educating parents on the importance of playing with their children. Needless to say, as I was so busy working towards my goal that quality playtime with my own son was diminishing by the day, the closer we got to the end of the qualification time.

I will never forget one afternoon while I was throwing a meal together in the kitchen, answering a dozen phone calls and completing countless orders, all at the same time. My 3 year old son looked me straight in the eye and pronounced: “Mummy, you so boring (pronounced boarwing).” It was as if Ryan had actually slapped my face. The truth cut through me like a knife and in that moment I knew I was being called to make a very important decision, as much for his good as my own. I spent the next four months considering my options. A threatened miscarriage with my second child finalized my decision to quit a position where I had learnt what I could learn and had reached an income ceiling. This decision opened up a whole new avenue for expressing my talents and abilities, building on everything that I had done to date, but in a more creative and flexible way that enabled me to be true to my values as a parent and to my vision of myself in my various roles of wife, mother and businesswoman.

Such moments cause us to take a breather and look deep inside ourselves. What do we want out of life? What kind of life do we want for our children? What kind of old age do we want? All these questions deserve serious thought but they must also be framed in a relevant context. Today, looking back doesn’t give us much guidance. We need to be forward looking and taking our cues from what we know of the future, and not just our future but the one our children will inherit too.

We can create our own reality if we are prepared to take full responsibility for every move we make in this new Game of Possibility that we are playing. The choice is ours.
“You are the storyteller of your own life and you can create your own legend or not.”
Isabel Allende, novelist.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 10:17 am and is filed under 21st Century Parenting, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.