Has your life become a juggling act, requiring you to keep everything in the air, barely allowing each aspect to register on your fingers before the next one comes flying at you?
Are you unclear about which direction your life should take?
Are you constantly struggling to "find the balance" in your life?
It's no surprise. According to the book Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham from Thomas Nelson Publishers, though both men and women suffer under life's pressures, women suffer more.
In Buckingham's book, he shares that:
- As men and women age, men become more satisfied as women become less satisfied with every aspect of their lives;
- An extra hour of free time doubles a man's feelings of relaxation, but it does nothing for a woman's;
- Contrary to popular belief, women are not better at multitasking than men and that your IQ actually drops ten points when multitasking;
- Women, in general, have become less happy over the last forty years than men, in spite of increased availability of education, better jobs, better pay and more freedoms.
Buckingham suggests that finding balance is not the answer, that we should be tipping the scales toward ourselves in certain areas of our lives. He tells us that we are not taking advantage of our strong moments, that our lives should not to drain and exhaust us, but fill us up. By offering the Strong Life Test, Buckingham helps the reader to focus on the areas of her life that bring her the most strength based on her Leading and Supporting Roles, to trust her own judgment about what fills her up, and, maybe more importantly, to determine what exhausts us, even in our relationships, and what we should do with those aspects.
This is not a book I would typically choose to read, but from the first few pages, I was drawn in and compelled to read more. Some of the book seemed to delve into an overly-strong self-importance, but Buckingham reminds the reader that it's impossible to give effectively to those we love if we're drained by life.
While a large portion of the book seems to be tailored to the professional woman, especially working mothers, including the online Strong Life Test, Find Your Strongest Life offers plenty of suggestions for women from all walks of life, and even includes chapters titled Tactics for Stronger Relationships and Tactics for Stronger Kids.
If you believe you need to find a balance, don't have a direction, or feel unhappy with the role you're playing in your own life, pick up Find Your Strongest Life and discover the role you were born to play.
Leave a comment in the comment field to win my review copy, underlining and all, of Find Your Strongest Life by Marcus Buckingham. A winner will be chosen at random on Friday, October 9th.
