Find Your Strongest Life
Find Your Strongest Life
Marcus Buckingham (New York Times Best-Selling author of Now, Discover Your Strengths) has a new book coming out September 29 called Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently. I know a billion books have been written about women finding happiness and being successful, but this is the first book I’ve ever read on the subject that actually seems to get to the heart of the matter.
We’re under a lot of pressure (thank you!), and we’re really under pressure that men don’t experience, especially when it comes to balancing work and family life. He says in chapter 3,
Some might say that modern life asks men to make similar choices. But that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. For all the dilemmas that men face—and we have our share—there isn’t much of a debate about whether we should put our work or family first. If we take an hour out of our day to meet our child at school, we’re applauded. If we take the whole day, we’re held up as exemplary models. And if we choose to stay at home, we have magazine articles written about us. We are free from the endless questioning, the finger-pointing, the blame, and the guilt that seem to accompany so many of the choices that women make.
Not us. If we’re women to be admired, we have to have a bangin’ career, spend an elusively satisfactory amount of time at home, be heavily involved in our churches, have a beautiful home…I could go on all day. You know where this is going. We have to be this to keep from being deficient somehow, and yet, this way of life ruins us. What the heck are we supposed to do?
Find Your Strongest Life is a breath of fresh air. No, it’s a breath of fresh, beachy, sea-breeze air at sunset in 77-degree weather. He compares women’s lives to juggling (nothing new) and says this is the wrong way to go (that’s new). When we’re juggling the different aspects of our lives, we’re just throwing them away from us, spending as little time on them as is acceptable, and we end up stretched far too thinly. Instead, adopting Buckingham’s “catch-and-cradle” theory, we take ourselves seriously, and we focus on the areas that make us stronger women, women of purpose.
Though she would be hard-pressed not to, it’s not the book editor in me who begs you to read this when it comes out. It’s the woman in me.
Maura Oprisko
As a man I always feel guilty reading about the “double standard” or “Second Shift” that women face. And, I feel like it is even more difficult for Christian women as many are further ridiculed or otherwise made to feel guilty as if God has ordained such a double standard. Sometimes when I do marriage workshops now, I talk about my own double standard that I brought into my marriage 21 years ago. Thankfully, I have learned to better appreciate my wife as a purpose-centered women rather than the Energizer bunny.
That is wonderful Harold! Many Christian women would love a appreciate your comments. I’m sure many of our readers would. Something that I experienced myself.
Thanks so much!
Angelia