In last Thursday’s blog I talked about the need for women lawyers to keep life in perspective and avoid the trap of being all things to all people—particularly to your perfectionist selves.  I shared information from Deborah Spar, the president of Barnard College and former Harvard Business School professor.  Here are a few additional thoughts on that subject.

Keeping it all in perspective is really all about choices—the choices that are right for you and your particular circumstances.  Women too often think that they don’t have choices about things that have traditionally been “women’s work.”  They think that they have to have the perfect house, the perfectly groomed children, the perfectly balanced meals (protein, veggie, starch and greens), the perfect this and the perfect that.  I just does not work for the new balance I write about in my books, and the sooner you learn that the better.

Do not sacrifise good on the altar of perfection. When you look back on all the time wasted in pursuit of perfection, it will be a humbling experience and probably include a lot of regret.  Here is a poem that was published in the womaneer.com article that I talked about in my last blog:

I hope my child looks back on today
And sees a mother who had time to play.
There will be years for cleaning and cooking,
But children grow up when you’re not looking.
Tomorrow I’ll do all the chores you can mention
But today, my baby needs time and attention.
So settle down cobwebs; dust go to sleep,
I’m cuddling my baby, and babies don’t keep.

Some of you will not believe this until it slaps you in the face.  Some of you are still chasing every dust bunny in your house and acting like the film crew is showing up at any minute.  This house of cards will come crashing down when you add late night and early morning feedings for your beloved infants, school lunches and after-school activities for your youngsters, and the dreaded homework that gets more and more difficult as the children get older.  Quantum physics is something I had to brush up on a bit when my kids were at that stage, and it took TIME—-more than I wanted to give it at the moment.  The famous scientist Max Plank became my new best friend again—after I thought I had left him in high school like a rejected beau. No such luck when you are a mother.

Time is the enemy, and we all know it.  I write about it in Best Friends at the Bar:  The New Balance for Today’s Woman Lawyer.  Time is finite.  You have to shift priorities to get enough of it for the things that really matter.  So, go forward and shift!  Shift and shift some more, and keep the really important stuff on your screen at all times.

Good luck.  There is a misspelling in this blog, and I don’t care!  You probably did not even notice it, and I doubt that you are going to judge me for it.   Because I am not trying to be perfect, and you should not either.  A messy desk is the sign of a productive person—-and so is a messy kitchen!

Live on, dust bunnies.  We have other things to do!

There was an interesting article on womaneer.com this week that talked about priorities.  It seems that the women of the UK, where womaneer is based, are looking to American women to help them to break away from their enslavement to perfection.  According to the article, the women in American are doing a better job of prioritizing the really important things in life, like family and relationships and career, over housework .

This is good to hear, if it is true. However, I see far too many young women professionals and, yes, lawyers, who are still clinging to perfection.  Many of them were raised by the perfect Baby Boomers, who had the perfect homes, the perfectly groomed children and the perfect meals on the table.  Well, this doesn’t work for the professional women of today, who need to care less about something being out of place and occasional dust bunnies than about keeping relationships with mates and spouses going strong and meeting career goals.

This article reminded me of another article I read last fall in the September 24, 2012 issue of The Daily Beast.   That article was written by the president of Barnard College and former Harvard Business School professor.  Deborah Spar hit the nail on the head with her article, “Why Women Should Stop Trying to Be Perfect.”  In the article, she quotes these words as told to her by a student:

“Girls need to have all that their grandmothers wanted them to have, while looking as pretty as their mothers wanted them to look. You try so hard to be who everyone wants you to be while attempting to maintain some kind of individuality, and in the end you seem to lose everything.”

That is a pretty powerful quote.  Deborah Spar responds in the Daily Beast article by recognizing the irony of the women’s movement and writes, “Feminism wasn’t supposed to make us miserable.  It was supposed to make us free to give women the power to shape their fortunes and work for a more just world.”

Striving for perfection in everything you do will be your demise. You must learn to balance and to prioritize.  It is all about choices, which you know from reading Best Friends at the Bar.  If you have not read the Best Friends at the Bar books, it is never too late.  Learn from women who have been there and done that.

More on the ill-fated quest for perfection in the next blog.