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Interesting article in the NYTimes magazine, August 7, 2013, on choices made by high-powered, elite credentialed working mothers to leave the workforce to become full-time mothers for extended periods (10+ years) and the consequences for their marriage relationships, financial standing, and re-entry options for returning to work. Bottom line: every decision yields both good and unanticipated impacts, new opportunities, and closed doors especially when the decision to depart is made prior to a recession, and the decision to re-enter workforce occurs after recession.

Great short post by Oprah on getting unstuck. The quote by Turecki is so true: "Nothing happens until you decide." Excerpt: When our expert, Dr. Stanley Turecki, finished watching, he said something that made the hairs on my arm stand up: "Nothing happens until you decide." The reason her 3-year-old didn't sleep in his own bed was that the mother had not decided it would happen. When she did, the child would go to his bed. He might cry and scream and rant until he fell asleep, but he would eventually realize that his mother had made up her mind. Well, I knew he was speaking about a 3-year-old, but I also knew for sure that this brilliant piece of advice applied to many other aspects of life: Relationships. Career moves. Weight issues. Everything depends on your decisions. For years I was stuck in a weight trap, yo-yoing up and down the scale. I made a decision two years ago to stop wishing, praying, and wanting, wanting, wanting to be better. Instead I figured out what it would really take to improve my life. Then I decided to do it. When you don't know what to do, my best advice is to do nothing until clarity comes. Getting still, being able to hear your own voice and not the voices of the world, quickens clarity. Once you decide what you want, you make a commitment to that decision. One of my favorite quotes is from mountaineer W.H. Murray: "Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep res

"The way mothers and fathers spend their time has changed dramatically in the past half century. Dads are doing more housework and child care; moms more paid work outside the home. Neither has overtaken the other in their "traditional" realms, but their roles are converging, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of long-term data on time use. At the same time, roughly equal shares of working mothers and fathers report in a new Pew Research Center survey feeling stressed about juggling work and family life: 56% of working moms and 50% of working dads say they find it very or somewhat difficult to balance these responsibilities."

recommended Pinterest Boards to follow for your career, by Brie Weiler Reynolds, March 2013. Inside Jobs CareerBliss BrazenCareerist Careerrealism Splash Resumes Working Mother Workshifting

blog post by Jennifer Gilhool, 6.4.2013 "You are connected to work 24/7. You don't need your lap top to be connected. You are connected via BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad to name just a few. These devices no longer provide flexibility. Instead, they tether you to the office. They enable you to work all the time and anywhere. And, now, many companies believe that is the definition of flexibility: "'What flexibility means today is not part time,' the head of work-life at one large organization told me recently. 'What people want is the ability to work anytime, anywhere.' That's true if your target labor pool is twenty-somethings and men married to homemakers. The head of HR at another large organization asked, when I described the hours problem, 'What do you mean, how can we get women to work more hours?'" - Why Men Work So Many Hours, Joan C. Williams, May 29, 2013 Harvard Business Review Why Your Manager Doesn't Want You To Innovate Ron Ashkenas Ron Ashkenas Contributor LinkedIn: Busting 8 Damaging Myths About What It Can Do For Your Career 85 Broads 85 Broads Contributor Someone has taken the "human" out of "Human Resources" departments across America. And, this behavior is not limited to operations in America. I work for a multi-national corporation that cannot seem to wean itself from the 24 hour work day. Colleagues in China often begin their day with a 6:00 a.m. meeting and end it with a meeting that begins at 10:00 p.m. or, worse, 11:00 p.m. To combat this problem, the company leadership agreed to a global meeting policy. The policy provides that global meetings should occur only between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. and that no meetings should occur on Friday nights in Asia Pacific. Further, the policy provides a 10 hour fatigue rule. In other words, there should be 10 hours between your last meeting of the day and your first meeting on the next day. First, if you need a global meeting policy, you are in

blog by Kathryn Sollman, April 18, 2013 on when you have to reinvent yourself workwise

Mother lode of social media leadership ideas from BlogHer Conference, July 2013, from Ananda Leeke's talk Seven archetypes of social media leadership: creativista, empirista, empowerista, enchanista, evangelista, flowista, lifestylista Excerpt: ) The Digital Sisterhood Leadership Project has identified 12 key leadership roles that women in social media are currently playing. They include the roles of: Advocate Community builder Content creator Content curator Educator Influencer Mentor Motivator Promoter Social do gooder Storyteller Thought leader

short video by Kathryn McClendon on many women not seeing themselves as leaders yet have a long list of accomplishments to show that they are. Distills leadership to three actions: Inspire. Persuade. and Influence. 8.5 minutes long. Talks about her leadership table of women who have touched her life. Women of courage include her mother who immigrated from Guyana with two year old child (speaker). Claudette Colvin--an unwed, pregnant teenager who refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, ALA months before Rosa Parks emerged. Marian de Forest--Buffalo, NY woman who became a playwright and journalist. Founded Zonta. Set a place for yourself at table of four.

Good five minute video on women entrepreneurs and how they overcome internal self-judgments/fears to succeed. "Hard to succeed without failure..." "Grateful to mother for failure is a stepping stone to success" "It's fine to risk it." "Way workplace is structured means that a lot of women don't want to be there--pay that price." "If we take the time to regenerate, to renew ourselves, we will be much more successful..."

New York Times, May 28. 2015 by Claire Cain Miller "The biggest obstacle to women in joining the highest ranks of the business world is a lack of family-friendly policies. That, at least, has been the conventional wisdom in recent years, and it has been embraced by progressive companies that offer flexible schedules or allow people to work from home. But some researchers are now arguing that the real problem is not the lack of family-friendly policies for mothers, but the surge in hours worked by both women and men. And companies are not likely to want to adopt the obvious solution."

From the Atlantic July/August 2013 edition by Stephen Marche "Men's absence from the conversation about work and life is strange, because decisions about who works and who takes care of the children, and who makes the money and how the money is spent, are not decided by women alone or by some vague and impersonal force called society. Decisions in heterosexual relationships are made by women and men together. When men aren't part of the discussion about balancing work and life, outdated assumptions about fatherhood are allowed to go unchallenged and, far more important, key realities about the relationship between work and family are elided. The central conflict of domestic life right now is not men versus women, mothers versus fathers. It is family versus money. Domestic life today is like one of those behind-the-scenes TV series about show business. The main narrative tension is: "How the hell are we going to make this happen?" There are tears and laughs and little intrigues, but in the end, it's just a miracle that the show goes on, that everyone is fed and clothed and out the door each day." He goes on to criticize Sheryl Sandberg for perpetuating an outdated model of women acting like men to get ahead. Marche advocates for a new paradigm of family friendly policies that reflect the reality of today - couples making decisions based on economic and social factors, not whether they will get to the C suite.

LA Times article by Matt Pearce, January 20, 2013 on infrequent Office MAx customer who received a solicitation from Office Max with his name on it followed, by "Daughter Killed in Car Crash." How did the company get the information and why did it appear on the envelope because the recipient had lost his daughter in a car crash a year before?