Marie Claire
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28th February 2022
Drop The Ball - Feature Article for Marie Claire
What happens when a stressed-out working mother of three, with control freak tendencies and a habit for taking on too much, tries a new way to become a balanced, rested, and fulfilled person—in a month? Emily Dempster finds out.
“Mummy, why do only boys get to go to the office?”, my five year old daughter asks as she watches her dad run through the rain to work. I’m about to pull back out in to traffic after dropping my husband off, but I need to take a moment. Wow, that one hurt.
I used to go to the office. I used to go to the office big time. But five years and three kids later, I’ve gone from negotiating multi million dollar contracts to negotiating with my children to get in their carseats.
It hit me like a ton of wet nappy pants: I had to go back to work. Full time. Go to bed one night a stay at home mum, wake up the next morning as Sheryl Sandberg. What could go wrong?
Fast forward a few weeks to one Sunday afternoon, as I stood staring at the mounds of washing, the unpaid bills and the counter space where the prepped meals for the week should have been sitting—except the baby had woken from her nap early—and I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking. And then I burst in to tears.
So when I spotted Tiffany Dufu’s new book, Drop the Ball, I clutched at it like a lifeline. “Achieve more by doing less,” it promised. That’s what Dufu, a driven, ambitious professional and women’s leadership expert, did. Instead of encouraging women to lean in, reach higher and pack more in, she offers a refreshing perspective: stop. Dufu, like most of us, had a daily to-do list a mile long. But she decided to cross off all the jobs that didn't contribute towards the things that matter most to her, whittle down to the essentials (groceries, laundry, boring stuff), and make an almost-formal arrangement to split tasks with her husband.
The key? She resisted the urge to remind her husband to do things, to micromanage and take over. When she ‘dropped the ball’, Dufu says, her husband picked it up, and she flourished at work and life.
I just wanted basic survival. But flourish? Oh man. Sign me up.