Wendy Smith

Heather, thanks for having us.

We are excited to be here in conversation with you and with your listeners.

We wrote this book because we both faced ongoing competing demands in our lives, just the same as everyone else does.

And those demands bubbled up for us in how we thought about our careers, where we wanted to take them, how we thought about our lives, our partners, our parenting, how we thought about our leadership.

and how we thought about our research.

And part of how we got to this idea was that as we were exploring these kinds of competing demands.

So in our lives, it was work and life.

In our careers, it was thinking about being a researcher, but also thinking about being a teacher or institution builder or leader.

And the research that I was doing and that Marianne was doing, it was about thinking about companies navigating for today and tomorrow.

We realize that what often happens in these cases is that people look at these as an either or competing demand, seeing the opposition between them.

But what we don't see is we don't see the ways in which these opposing forces are also interdependent.

And by seeing them as interdependent opposites, as ways in which these things are both contradictory, but also synergistic and mutually reinforcing, it invites us to think about dealing with them in a totally different way, in a both and way.

And so underlying so many of the dilemmas that we face are these paradoxes, these contradictory oppositional intention dualities that are also defining and intertwining interdependent with one another.

Absolutely.

So this shows up for us, for example, in navigating work and life.

When I was a new mom, there was always this frustration, this tension about how to spend my time, even now with my teenage kids, how to spend my time, how to think of my identity.

Am I thinking about myself in terms of my identity?

parental identity?

Am I thinking about myself in terms of my work identity?

Am I spending time right now, right here doing work?