Work-Life Balance Profile #18: Katherine Brownstein
Introduction to Katherine’s Profile
There are so many ‘work, life, balance’ facets to Katherine’s story that my challenge in writing up my interview with her has been how to summarise them concisely: finding balance in a traditionally inflexible profession; sharing “work” equally in a marriage; the conflicting struggles of imposter syndrome; working to live, rather than living to work. Katherine’s story touches on all of these things and more.
After much deliberation, I’ve reached the conclusion that the common denominator that runs through Katherine’s work values and choices is the fact that she is not consumed by being a “people-pleaser”.
There is a sense of liberation in her decisions being driven not by the desire to meet the interests of others, but her own, and those of the people that she cares for. This seems to empower her with the freedom to make pragmatic choices and remain focussed on what she wants or needs to do, rather than what she should do.
As such, she has constructed a balance between her work and everything else in her life, which for her, is as good as it gets.
Work : Life Balance Ratio
50:50
Katherine’s Work-Life Balance Profile
An in-house lawyer in the public sector, Katherine works part-time in a four-day week working pattern. Married with four children, her non-working day is mostly spent tending to childcare and home-keeping tasks. Her husband works full-time in the social research sector, and between them, they take equal responsibility for child-caring duties, splitting the “jobs around the house” evenly between them too.
When not working or looking after her children or home, Katherine enjoys baking (especially sourdough bread), cooking, being with her friends and exercising. There’s rarely much “down time” to speak of, which suits Katherine, who says she “doesn’t like to be bored”.
An avid planner, Katherine describes herself as super-organised – both at home and at work. As such, she is exceptionally efficient with her time, and averse to procrastinating. Just as she plans out the family meals on a weekly basis, she assigns specific timeslots to her work tasks, so invariably manages to complete the undertakings she sets her mind to in the time allotted.
Katherine is mindful of the responsibilities that come with having the higher earning potential between her and her husband. Nevertheless, she is not willing to compromise her ambitions of having a family and a home in order to earn more.
“I’ve never been attracted to areas of law that require round-the clock working. As a lawyer there is pressure to work a certain number of hours a day and be fully available to your clients. But it doesn’t have to be that way”, she claims.
Determined to pursue her chosen profession while sustaining her desired home-life, Katherine has taken a different path to many of the contemporaries with whom she graduated from law school. This has required making less advancing career moves at times, and setting firm boundaries around her working hours and practices.
Katherine’s perspective is that there is more to her life than just her work. She enjoys her job, but it’s not something she considers her “passion”. It pays the bills, it’s something that she is capable of doing, and she doesn’t dread going in to work. So overall that amounts to enough contentment and job satisfaction. “I very much don’t live to work and would happily not do it if I won lottery. Though I’d probably be bored if I did”.
More than just a duty, home, however, is where Katherine’s heart is, and she readily admits that the hardest boundaries to set are those when it comes to her children. “I’m very happy being a mum, and being at the beck and call of my kids”. That said, she is not at all attracted to giving up her career to be at home full-time. Considering that her family relies on her income, according to Katherine, that wouldn’t be a pragmatic option anyway.
Of her balance, Katherine feels that she’s reached an even keel. “I don’t want to work ridiculously hard”, she admits, which she couches with self-deprecating rhetorical questions about whether that makes her sound “lazy” or “shallow”. “I’m really not lazy”, she explains. It’s just that in her view, there’s more to life than working all hours, earning “big bucks”, or massaging the ego of a boss that values “presentee-ism”.
Here is a woman who is does not feel compelled to please others; who values her time and is not afraid to demand justification for others’ demands of it. When it comes to work and pursuing a balance, she is in the driving seat. And she feels empowered to set boundaries, manage her time independently, and own her priorities. This is her version of “having it all”. And it is perfectly justifiable.
Work as a means to an end
The image of the teary-eyed reality-TV contestant talking about “following their dreams” is one that’s all-too familiar these days. Having passion for your vocation is often lauded as the ‘holy grail’ of life, and it certainly makes good TV. But is it necessary when it comes to finding a contented sense of work-life balance?
Introducing Katherine, who decidedly answers that question with a resounding “no”:
“I’m in my current job because I enjoy it, and I like the people I work with”, she told me. A qualified lawyer working in the public sector, Katherine describes her job as “busy”, “full-on”, “challenging”, and “flexible enough”; not as her passion or hobby. And she is fine with that. “I can’t think of anything I love so much that I would be wedded to the job”, she reflects.
She did once try her hand at turning her passion into a business. A talented and enthusiastic cook, she started a small catering business, preparing ‘Indian take-away’ style food from her home kitchen. It drew a lot of local custom, so much so that she could hardly keep up with the demand. Was she tempted to leave her job to “follow her passion”…? Not for a second, she says.
“It was physically demanding work”, she said, and it lacked the intellectual stimulation she enjoys: “Cooking didn’t do enough for me”. And she is pragmatic about the earning potential not matching her current income.
“We’d be homeless if I didn’t work”, she told me, adding modestly that she thinks demonstrating that to her children is “not a bad thing”.
Yet moreover, Katherine’s rationale for remaining content with her profession, albeit not “being wedded to it”, is that she doesn’t feel the need to bundle all her joy into her working hours. It’s enough for her to be in a job that doesn’t cause what she terms “the Sunday night blues”.
There is more that she wants out of life than a career; mostly to be a mother, wife and run a warm family home. It makes no sense to her to go to the trouble of having a family only to then spend all hours at work. “What’s the point…?” she questions resolutely. And I doubt anyone could convince her otherwise.
The Confident Imposter
There was one thing that Katherine did get a taste for when toying with her kitchen-table catering business. And that was being her own boss:
“I do feel a bit jealous of people that are self-employed. I imagine as your own boss you’d feel like less of an imposter”.
Such an expression of self-doubt took me by surprise for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, here is a woman who obtained a law degree from Oxford University. You don’t get much more high-achieving than that. Anywhere. Globally. Right?
Secondly, Katherine is, by her own admission, “opinionated about everything”. She knows her mind, has an incredibly strong sense of justice, and is not afraid to fight her corner to dispute things that she disagrees with, or that she thinks aren’t thought through properly. “Wishy washiness doesn’t cut the mustard”, she said, and I can imagine that she wouldn’t back down from an argument without good reason.
“People don’t stand up for themselves; they defer a lot. Maybe because it’s easier. That grates on me. I always have an opinion about everything”.
Her husband, she tells me, is the opposite. She appreciates their differences, and has toned down her confrontational stance in latter years, but she still doesn’t understand it.
“I’ve always been like this”, she reflects when I asked whether this character trait was borne out of becoming a lawyer. “I’m not interested in being liked. I would never do something that was not me just to be liked”. It stands to reason that she observes that “some people think I’m scary”.
So, you can see why Katherine might seem an unlikely candidate for imposter syndrome. But that’s not the case.
Talking me through the sequence of her career, Katherine explained the rationale for her imposter syndrome, mentally totting up how much time out of practising law four maternity leaves amount to. She explains that her career and family ambitions developed in tandem: she became engaged while still at law school and was married at the age of 22, the same year that she was working as a trainee solicitor. She fell pregnant with her first child towards the end of her training contract. So by the time she was a fully qualified lawyer, she was also a fully-fledged wife and mother.
Much as she wouldn’t have wanted to be wedded to her career and training, she was by far a minority among trainee solicitors. She lacked confidence in those early years, something that was not helped by having an unsupportive boss:
“I doubted myself constantly. Did I train properly? Am I really a lawyer? I felt like I would better suit working as a supermarket check-out girl than a lawyer in a law firm. Even now, I’m still learning to battle it or hide it.
It’s got worse over time too, which I know is illogical. The more we work the more we become specialist and expert; we should feel confident the more senior we get. But I still ask myself, ‘am I up to this?’”
Being aware of her capabilities doesn’t seem to have been enough to thwart Katherine’s self-doubt and her desire for validation in holding the esteemed title of “lawyer”. That said, she wouldn’t allow herself to be taken advantage of at work.
As a young trainee, there was often the expectation that she should be available to serve her bosses in their time, which included staying late in the office. She described the job she took in a law firm soon after the birth of her first child. Part-time working was not an option and the expectations that she would be available all hours to service her boss and clients irritated Katherine from the start. She wanted to get home to her daughter and didn’t feel it was necessary for work to spill into the evening hours, especially when left to her own devices she could manage her workload efficiently.
Incensed and frustrated by the injustice, Katherine walked out, without having another job to go to:
“My boss wasn’t unkind; he just wasn’t open to finding a way to make it work. I wanted to get home to be with my baby and his answer was to “get a babysitter”. If I had my time again, I probably wouldn’t walk out without another job to go to. I was young and naïve. But I was clear on my values and I knew it wasn’t right for me”.
A lawyer-mother’s pursuit for justice and inner-peace
One advantage that Katherine describes of perceiving a job to be a means to end rather than the ‘be all and end all’ of life, is that, for her, it reduces the potential for it to cause stress in her life. Despite her nagging sense of imposter syndrome, she can rationalise the task at hand:
“I don’t want to do badly at work; I’m capable and I want to do well. But work never keeps me up at night”.
There is an element of being in control at work, which for Katherine also reduces any anxiety. Her approach is to be very clear about her boundaries. As one might expect from a lawyer, she is mindful of setting undesirable precedents, and she is resolute – both to herself and colleagues – that fundamentally her children are her priority. Asked what she would do if she found herself in a situation where work duties clashed with childcare ones, she says that she would be more inclined not to find a replacement childcare solution, but to tend to her children and then return to work later if possible.
“Of course, I need to be adaptable when the need arises, but my general sense is that my career won’t be jeopardised by prioritising my children”.
This career lifestyle is by design; not all legal professions would enable it. But, Katherine argues, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing as a lawyer. There is another way.
She realises that there is always more that can be done at work – in any job. But she is only committed to doing “what needs to be done”. Superbly organised, she will do what is needed as the need arises; “I can’t leave things hanging, and I don’t ever procrastinate”, she says, talking me through the list of reminders that continually ‘ping up’ on her phone to prompt her activity. There is certainly no guilt, she says, and no doubt of her capability. It is a means to an end. And she delivers.
Katherine admires leaders that are honest and forthright about prioritising things outside of work. She remember one previous boss who didn’t value people and expected them to be slaves to the job; “everyone felt dreadful”, she remembers.
Conversely, the current General Counsel is one that Katherine admires, citing a recent example of her openly leaving the office early to attend her child’s parents’ evening. “I liked that she did that”, Katherine reflects:
“She’s a strong role model of a woman in a really senior job, who is really nice and good at what she does, making it clear that her child is important to her, effortlessly and with a smile on her face”.
The things more likely than work to keep Katherine up at night are those over which she has no control, and she worries a lot about harm coming to her loved ones. In keeping with her approach to other aspects of life, she manages this anxiety pragmatically, identifying it for what it is, and seeking professional help where needed to establish coping mechanisms to keep her mind calm.
Equality in marriage and the heavy burden of sharing the breadwinning load
Katherine’s strong work ethic is belied by a rebellious streak that came to the fore in her teenage years. She recounted to me some of her misdemeanours as a school girl with a tinge of regret, admitting that she was “problematic” up until sixth form.
“I’m a bit ashamed of how mean I was to teachers”, she told me, as she described how “difficult, rude and naughty” she was.
The tricky thing is that despite the grief she gave teachers and the meagre efforts she put in to the subjects she didn’t like, she still excelled (“I hated maths, but I still got an A”); and she was a model pupil in the subjects that she loved. So teachers didn’t quite know whether, or how, to praise or punish her!
“I’m not a people-pleaser”, she admits, and it wasn’t until she set her sights on studying at Oxford to pursue her chosen vocation, that she developed true drive, self-motivation and a willingness to really succeed.
“I always took my studies seriously; but I messed around a lot when I was bored. When I found what I liked, I studied hard and pushed myself a lot. I knew I could achieve and didn’t want to get anything less”.
Failure did not deter Katherine once her ambition was fixed on getting to Oxford. So much so that she retook one AS level to get an A. She attributes her success partly to hard work, “but genetics and good luck played their parts too. I knew I could do it, and I didn’t want to let the chance pass me by”.
Her parents also played a significant part in enabling her success, by creating a secure and loving environment where she was encouraged to reach her potential.
Katherine’s dad was the sole breadwinner in her family when she was growing up. Her mother gave up work after having children so for most of Katherine’s childhood, she was available full-time for the family. “My mum does everything for everyone”, Katherine beamed as she told me about her parents, who together she described as “amazing”.
She recognises the value of having her mum “at home” while she was growing up. This instilled in Katherine a strong sense of the importance of a mother being present and dependable, something that she has sought to emulate with her own family, alongside having a career.
The power of parents to influence work-life choices has been covered on this blog before, and Katherine’s is an example of a positive and nurturing influence. Sheara described a similar driving force at home, with a mother encouraging her daughter to boundlessly pursue her ambitions. In contrast to Sheara’s experience, however, Katherine reflects that “feminism didn’t come into it”.
“My parents were just adamant that I shouldn’t waste my potential. They saw that academically I was bright and pushed me to skip ahead a year in order to progress”
Katherine is under no illusion that not working is an easier choice for mothers. “On my non-work day I’m hardly chilling with my feet up”, she tells me. “It’s work; just a different kind”.
She doesn’t want to be a stay-at-home-mum, but it would be a relief not to have to sort childcare, which is especially stressful over the holidays.
“I feel guilty making my kids go to summer camps, when really I know they just want to be at home”. Pragmatism strikes again though, as she rationalises “I can’t feel too bad as at the end of the day I can’t not work because we need the money”.
That is the only reference Katherine made to feeling guilty as a mother, which indicates that she harbours a milder sense of guilt than some of the previous working mothers that I’ve featured on this blog, such as Sarah and Jhilmil.
Having an equitable split with her husband when it comes to caring for the children seems to dilute that sense of guilt. Much as they split the work 50:50, however, Katherine still notes that she probably carries more of the “mental load”, and experiences a bit of guilt on the weeks that her husband does the lion’s share of the childcare. “He’s working exclusively from home at the moment, so he does a lot of the school runs. I do feel a bit bad about that”.
It wouldn’t occur to Katherine not to have such equality in marriage. “We’re different to other couples we know”, she reflects, partly she thinks because they both have flexible jobs. She is adamant that she wouldn’t tolerate any less than the equality she and her husband share, as though it would be illogical given that they both opted for the family life they have jointly created. She argues that she is not physically more capable of doing the laundry than he is, for example; why any married woman would put up with doing all the household and childcare chores is unfathomable to her.
Katherine is sceptical about the notion of women “having it all”: “I don’t think anyone has it all”, she told me, adding “but I think I’m pretty close”.
Ultimately, the missing piece holding her back from feeling that she “has it all” is having enough money to render financial considerations irrelevant. For as long as her family relies on her income, the balance that she is able to construct between work and everything else in her life, will be influenced by that responsibility.
These days, the chances of winning the lottery are around 1 in 45 million. Which is just as well, really, as that reduces the chances of Katherine facing the ultimate choice of giving up work and potentially facing perpetual boredom.
Whilst a lottery windfall may well be the solution to Katherine “having it all”, I can’t help but think that if that were ever to happen, the legal profession would be robbed of a valuable role model and asset. That’s a risk that I think Katherine would be willing to take; after all, pleasing others is not a priority in her personal pursuit of balance.