How long have you been working in your career 20 yrs? 25?
How long until you retire? 5 years? 10 years?
Would you like to ramp down to retirement?
How many leaves of absence have you taken of 3 months or more during your career? 5? 3? 1?

So let’s say you have a career span of about 30 yrs. You are 2/3 through it now and have managed to get married, give birth, raise a family, care for aging parents, maybe get single or repair a joint, be downsized (more than once?) and perhaps survive cancer. And you did all of this while maintaining your career at a full time pace. Who do you know who took a full quarter of a year off? And all of this doesn’t consider personal preferences you may have forgone during these years. Whether a philanthropic save the world endeavor or a personal improvement course of action, chances are you either wrote a check or devoted a few hours a month to stoke the embers of your personal passion.

Now, I am not judging this path. I would like you to consider however, that the path is not the same path you set out on when you began your career some 20 years ago. There are very few of us who want to repeat the first half of our lives during the second half -only older.

Although it may seem to you like you are managing with your career the way it is going at the moment, I invite you to imagine you are strategizing that time when you are ready to recalibrate your career, work fewer hours and turn some of your focus out to traveling, volunteering, and family. So often I find that women who entered the workforce in the 1980’s and configured themselves to fit the corporate world have adapted so well (isn’t that what women do after all, collaborate?) that it simply doesn’t occur to them to ask for something different. Certainly stress is evident. If you raised a family during your career you will remember feeling guilty for either not being at home or at work depending on where you were at that moment. When you cared for your parents too. You could see there was a deadline on the time you could spend with your parents even more clearly than with the kids.

Perhaps you did ask for an “accommodation” at work. If you did and were a respected contributor you probably got some slack and you were most likely stigmatized for it. And, you know what, you probably believed to some degree that the stigma was justified. You just weren’t as focused as usual during your chemo, for goodness sake!

Over the course of the next few postings, I will lay out a plan for you to RECALIBRATE your career. It turns out that you CAN have everything and you've already earned it!