I’m delighted to officially launch Season Two of ‘A Fine Balance – The Podcast’!
My first guest this Season is the musician and social media sensation Amanda Kaya.
If you’re not familiar with Amanda’s music and art, then you should join the millions of others that follow her pages on Instagram and TikTok.
In this episode, Amanda describes what it’s like to balance working as a musician with everything else in her life, especially her creative pursuits. She talks about the punishing self-discipline typical of musicians, and how she reconciles her inclination to spend her time construtively, with not being “career-oriented”.
Amanda touches on the deliberate approach that she and her husband, who one day wish to have children, have taken to set the foundations for the work-life balance they aspire to: one that is flexible and stable.
And she touches on how the career choices they’ve taken in the early years of their marriage have been influenced by their lived examples of growing up in homes with working parents. Which points to an issue I’ve explored previously on the blog: two key observations of parents’ role in shaping the work-life balance choices that their children make in adulthood.
Amanda was an absolute pleasure to interview. Her enthusastic and unapologetic take on including hedonism in her work:life ratio was refreshing, and I think she even went on to coin a brand new phrase live on the podcast: “life oriented” (as opposed to “career-oriented”). If you’ve ever heard that phrase before please do let me know – neither of us had!
I hope that as well as enjoying her music, you’ll enjoy listening to what Amanda has to say about work, life and the pursuit of balance, her overarching message being:
“Not everyone can be the best of the best. Just be the best you”.
What’s New in Season Two
‘A Fine Balance – The Podcast‘ seeks to showcase the diverse ways that people flex “work” around “life” and “life” around “work”, to learn from one another and celebrate our differences.
This Season, I’ve taken a slightly different approach. In Season One, most guests had already featured on the blog (and hopefully more of those already featured will make guest appearances in Season Two as well).
Previously, I would interview my guests at length in confidence, write up their stories on the blog and then invite them onto the podcast for a follow-up conversation.
This Season, most of the guests joining me on the podcast are brand new to ‘A Fine Balance’ , so you’ll hear their work-life balance stories unfold as they tell them.
As before, in each podcast episode, I’ll be inviting my guests to put a figure on their current work:life ratio. Of course, quantifying something this multi-faceted isn’t a science. But it’s a good place to start for getting to the heart of their story…
You can subscribe to the podcast in all the usual places so you don’t miss when a new episode drops.
And if you would like to be a guest, or know someone who has a work-life balance story to share, please feel free to get in touch with suggestions.