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If you find yourself constantly griping about having too much to do and never enough hours in the day to do it all, you may be the cause of the problem. As working mothers we are used to taking charge and getting things done. For many of us, time is limited for decision-making and negotiation and it doesnt take long to get to the point where we think, Its just easier to do everything myself. But is it? At home and at work, we need to consider how much control is necessary and how much is unnecessary.

Even though you may complain about shouldering most of the responsibility, and want others to do more, do you have difficulty sharing tasks with your colleagues? Do you seek ultimate authority over everything that happens at the office? If you answered yes, you just might be a workplace control addict.

It often seems like the more control women demand over their careers, co-workers and workloads, the more insane their life feels. Trying to be in charge of everything often leads to bedlam. To gain balance in your life, you must be prepared to relinquish total control. (Theres a big difference, of course, between totally relinquishing control, and relinquishing total control!)

You may be in a situation where you are working long hours, juggling endless family responsibilities and finishing the night off with extra work youve brought home from the office. And on weekends, between soccer practice and ballet lessons, you might even find yourself back at the office catching up on the work that you were unable to complete during the week. Inevitably, the need to be in control at work will leave you on the edge of burnout. Oftentimes, this type of burnout stems form a defeating belief that tells you that you are the only person who can do the job right and there is no point in delegating it to anyone else because youll just have to re-do it yourself anyway. In this situation, total control is on the way to total chaos. By being over-worked and over-stressed, mistakes happen and business can be lostnot to mention your sense of work-life balance.

Trying to control all aspects of your work may have the opposite effect. It may be time to figure out how to let go and lighten up. Making an inventory of the clients and projects you have on the go, and determining which tasks you absolutely love to do, and which tasks you would be prepared to let go, is a great starting point. It may be difficult at first to ask for support from your colleagues for fear that you may appear vulnerable or needy. Asking for help will also demand that you show a considerable amount of trust in others. But doing so will create a sense of teamwork, responsibility, and involvement, and by learning to lighten up, you may realize that it is not as necessary to take everything as seriously as you may have in the past.

With more support on the work front, you can choose to gradually shed those weekend office hours and put more balance into your life. Ironically, by letting go of total control at the office you can gain more choice and ultimately more control in your life.

© Copyright 2006. Lisa Martin. All rights reserved.

Lisa Martin is a certified coach who inspires working mothers to achieve success thats balanced.

Im not sure why, maybe because its summer, Im getting a lot of questions and stories about kids and energy. Ill put them all under that broad category but there have been several different subcategories discussed: kids and ADHD, kids and anger management, and kids and computers.

Kids and ADHD

Lets start with kids and ADHD. There seems to be a big trend here in the US of drugging our children so they can control their behavior in school. I am NOT in favor of this practice.

Why is there such an epidemic of ADHD diagnoses in our children? I dont want to oversimplify but I believe one reason is that our children dont have the opportunities they had in previous generations to run around and expend their energy.

In years past, kids got to play in the parks, in the streets and in their own yards. Today, that happens less and less. Parents are too afraid to allow their children to be outside unsupervised, and rightly so! There are predators out there who would do your children harm. However, kids still need to expend their energy, somehow.

So, many times the activities available to them at home are sedentary, such as playing video games, watching television, talking on their cell phones or using the home computer. None of this provides opportunity to release energy, unless your children are like my niece who paces vigorously while talking on the phone.

Then we send them to school and expect them to sit down and be quiet. In addition, many schools are reducing the amount of physical education time for our kids and Ive even seen recently that some schools forbid children to run at recess or use certain playground equipment because they fear of physical injury lawsuit. Is it any wonder our children are having difficulty?

Now I know there are parents and teachers out there who have stories of children who have been helped immensely by the addition of Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta or Dexedrine to their daily diet. If you know a child who is being helped by his or her medication, Im not saying to discontinue it but for every child who is being helped, I believe there are at least three others who are still exhibiting all the ADHD behavior the medication was designed to reduce.

There have been studies done on placebo medications that show that in double blind studies, when neither the patient nor the doctor knew whether the patient was getting the actual drug or the placebo, the ones getting the placebo actually did better. Is it possible there is a placebo effect with some children?

If your child displays what you or the teachers believe is an excessive amount of energy, do your best to create situations where that child can expend energy. I have two boys who could both have been diagnosed with ADHD as children. They were very physical. Luckily, I lived in the country during a time when parents sent their kids out the door to simply play. I also spent a lot of my spare time running them around to different athletic eventsYMCA soccer, wrestling, flag football, T-ball, basketball, you get the idea. This definitely helps.

Kids and Anger Management

I spoke with a woman over the weekend whose son is 10 years-old and she says has anger management issues. We didnt really get into his specific behaviors but it caused me to reflect on some inherent differences between males and females.

I think that from very early on, boys and girls deal with their anger differently. As a general rule, girls need to talk about it to feel better, while boys need to work it out physically.

So if you have daughters, you want to teach them verbal skills to be able to work out their frustrations but with boys, you will need to provide opportunities for them to work out their anger physicallymaybe with a punching bag, racquetball, running, or martial arts. The list of possibilities is truly endless but dont expect your boys to talk about it, at least not until theyve had the opportunity to release the anger in a safe physical manner.

Kids and Computers

This week, a mother contacted me about her child disobeying her limits with the home computer and sneaking time beyond her allowed limit.

In this situation, the mother had a need to protect and nurture her child. She wants to be able to loosely supervise her daughters time on the computer to possibly prevent her from falling prey to adults who victimize children by finding their victims on the Internet. She also wants to support her childs need for physical activity so she restricts her computer usage and encourage outside physical activities instead. Is this mother wrong? Absolutely not.

Her daughter, on the other hand, has a desire to be on the computer. All her friends are on there and want to know why she isnt. They dont have limits while this girl does. This girl is quite accomplished on the computer and can build website pages for her friends. She also has a high need for freedom and doesnt like being restricted and the computer is plain fun to her. She gets her love & belonging, power, freedom and fun needs met with the computer. Is she wrong? Absolutely not.

How does it get resolved? I think the way to resolve this issue is for the mother and daughter to sit down and talk about what each other needs and wants in the situation. If the child can convince her mother that she has the skills and knowledge necessary to protect herself from predators and she agrees to engage in other healthy activities each day, then her mother could relax her restriction on the amount of time she has on the computer.

In this case, and many others like it, the daughter wouldnt be able to meet her freedom need with the computer if there wasnt a rule to break. Sometimes we create the very behavior we are trying to stop with the rules we make. When a person has a high need for freedom, they will inevitably break the rules, particularly the ones they dont like or that dont make sense.

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs youll ever do and the stakes are incredibly high. We all do the best we can and hope for good results. Fortunately, when we have good intentions are kids generally survive in even thrive.

Kim Olver has a graduate degree in counseling and works with parents and children helping them with their communication skills ultimately leading to an improvement in their relationships. Sign up for her free teleclass Empowerment Parenting at http://www.therelationshipcenter.biz/EmpowerParenting.htm.