“A lot of parents, especially women, are told that we need to think about work-life balance when actually, if we focus too much on that, we consistently live in a state of guilt,” said the Loose Women presenter and mother of two. “I don’t think about work-life balance. I just do the best I can, every day.”
“You need to make trade-offs when the different parts of your life require more attention at different times,” added Grussing, who has worked in corporate finance at Morgan Stanley and as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and JP Morgan. Louise Oliver, the UK president of the British Association of Women Entrepreneurs, said she had never met a parent who felt their work-life balance was in order – until they reached a position of sufficient seniority to build a team around them, both at home and at work.
But, Oliver, asked, what is “having it all”? “In the long term, you want to be self-fulfilled at work, you want your children to be healthy and happy, and you want to be in a happy marriage,” she said. “But you can’t do that all at the same time.”Emma Sinclair: ‘The whole concept of work-life balance is counterintuitive’