If you were born in the 80s like me, you were probably told that you could have it all. 

“Do what you want to do, be what you want to be, yea-eah!” (You definitely just sang that like I did, didn’t you!) You probably grew up with your mum telling you “You can be anything you want to be.”

But what we weren’t told was that the pursuit of “anything you want to be” was going to take a juggling act like the Moscow Circus has never seen. 

Yes we can have the career of our dreams, an incredible family, the nice house and the time for self care, but the part of the equation that we weren’t told was that we can’t have all of these things at the same time. 

We can “have it all”, just not all at once. 

In her book “You Can Have It All, Just Not at the Same Damn Time!” Romi Neustadt explains that setting strong boundaries and priorities in your own life is the key to having it all. 

Boundaries are especially hard for women trying to juggle it all. In each of the facets of our lives, we have a tendency to want to people please… and boundaries are the opposite of keeping everyone happy! 

Setting clear boundaries is about being true to yourself. It’s about prioritising the things in your world that matter to you, without worrying what people will think or the public perception of how things “should” be. 

Creating boundaries can’t happen until you prioritise what is important to you. 

Balance is not about spending an equal amount of time each hour with your work, your child, your home and your extended family or community commitments, but instead setting yourself a plan that gives you a good amount of all of these things every week, every month or every year. 

The word balance is deceiving because it implies that things are equal. A few years ago I started using the word blend instead of balance. 

Blend sits better with me because sometimes I blend everything together. A lot of the time I am wearing my mum hat and my business owner hat at the same time. 

So where should you start prioritising what’s important to you and getting I’ll your juggling act under control? 

I always recommend starting with a time tracking exercise to help you see where your time is actually being spent. 

Once we can see where our time is going, then we can begin to determine whether there’s better ways to “blend” the various responsibilities in our lives, and what boundaries we need to set in order to claim back some time for the things that really matter to us. 

Remember, saying YES to everything and everyone really means saying NO to the things that matter—to your goals, your dreams, and your true self.