#81 - Character, Charisma, Competence
I got a chance to speak to a couple of Korean Wharton MBA female students, who happens to be single. I simply wanted them to think about things that they will go through within next ten years assuming they want to have kids.
Hey gals, there is a clear dilemma. A driven and capable girl like you tend to marry a guy who is also well educated and very driven. What is hard is to find balanced roles and responsibilities between two successful and driven couple when it comes to taking care of kids. Generally in my experience, women tend to go through the dilemma between kids and career more than men.
Which one should you choose? Let’s say you chose to stay home and sacrifice career. You might continue to try to find a way to feel achieved in many ways. As an example, you might be putting too much energy toward kids success/visible achievement. You could become helicopter mom. At the same time, needless to say, you might be feeling your talent is wasted.
Let’s say you chose career. The first thing to think about is that you might be feeling guilty that you are not there with your kids as much as you’d like. That said, chances are you are likely to scale back from your work more than your husband. As a result, you might be feeling you have not reached your potential. Or you might be feeling your sacrifice is unfair.
Let’s say you did not scale back from work and actually is really doing well at work. Clearly, there will be a demand for more hours from work. More hours probably means less time with kids. Now you may feel even more guilty to your kids.
Of course there is a chance that you are a super women - Good at career and family both. Well I fully realize that I am omitting good side of having both career and kids. My previous SVP at Walmart used to say working women are a great role model for our kids. Also I am not mentioning the well educated moms could raise kids better since they study for it and put efforts.
My point is that women has some share of dilemma in the process, regardless of the outcome. You’d need to go though a process to put that dilemma in peace whatever that your choice might be.
Bottomline, well you are still single. Try to meet a guy willing to understand this dilemma in the process. Ideally, marry a guy with character on top of charisma and competence.