Karin Carter: Making priorities is the first step

Karin Carter describes her situation.

“I love my job and I love to work,” says the 40-year-old Spokane Valley school administrator. “I could easily work 16-hour days, seven days a week and love it.”

The problem?

“I love my family and could easily fill my days with kids’ art classes, play practices, homework, dentist and doctor appointments, dinner parties, dates with my husband….”

That’s not full. That’s overflowing.

“I’ve become a hamster running endlessly in a wheel that goes nowhere,” she says.

And she wants to take better control of how she spends her time.

That’s how she winds up in the office of personal coach Deanna Davis.

In a stream of unflinching self-analysis, Carter presents a picture of a stressed life-juggler who fears dropping something/everything.

Bright, funny, and full of praise for loved ones and co-workers, she blames no one but herself for her discontent.

“I’m looking at the way I’m living and thinking I don’t want to do this anymore,” she tells Davis.

After that first meeting, Davis praises Carter’s self-awareness.

“What’s great is that she sees the situation globally – that her time pressures come from and affect all areas of her life,” says Davis. “So she’s not seeking a ‘magic bullet’ solution for her current challenges.”

Carter, though, worries about how she came across.

“Describing my life felt awful, as though I was letting her in on my dirty little secret,” she says, partly tongue-in-cheek. “The secret is that I am a bad mother, a shell of a wife, and I am letting down the children and families who depend on me to do my job well…. Hearing myself describe my frazzled days and hectic weeks, I realized how out of control I have allowed my life to become.”

Maybe you’ve heard that tune: Wanting to do everything well but worrying that it’s all getting short shrift.

But what Davis sees is a likable workaholic who desperately needs to start getting home from the office at a reasonable hour.

So the two women talk at length about new approaches to planning and prioritizing Carter’s work day.

With these scheduling strategies soon in place, she finds herself having dinner with her family on a semiregular basis – previously a rarity.

“It has made my home life more enjoyable,” says Carter, a South Hill resident.

But that one seemingly simple change requires more of an adjustment than just modifying her time-sucking open-door policy at work.

“I have not felt fondly toward people who left at 5 o’clock every day regardless of what was going on,” says Carter. “That seemed like lack of commitment to me. I resented it.”

In any event, leaving work on time isn’t to be viewed as a quick-fix that would solve everything.

“This is an ongoing process,” says Davis.

In their weekly sessions at Davis’ office, the two women talk about ways to address what the coach has perceived to be Carter’s perpetual state of imbalance.

By the time they get up and hug at the last meeting, it seems clear the hamster has learned some new tricks.