WORK-LIFE BALANCE CONTINUES
One of the greatest challenges women face, according to Turner-Graham, is choosing to make the time to focus on their emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual health. She said too often women are more comfortable serving others and feel selfish when they focus on themselves.
Taking a weekend to kick back, turning childcare over to someone else, scheduling time to work out or have lunch with friends, spending time shopping or going to the spa is “really OK, it’s a loving thing.”
Assessing one’s self, prioritizing and reprioritizing what’s important are constants.
“It’s dynamic but ever-changing,” Turner-Graham said, adding that along the way women should be “making choices toward a more deeply meaningful existence.”
Turner-Graham’s insight into the challenges women face come as much from the knowledge she’s gained from her practice and a lifetime working in health care as from personal experience.
A graduate of the University of Kansas School of Medicine who completed her psychiatric residency at Vanderbilt University, Turner-Graham married while she was in medi- cal school. She’s the mother of three adult children and now the grandmother of seven.
“It’s been a journey,” she shared.
She recalled a time when her children were young and she held an “amazing” position as a vice president in health care yet she was miserable. In addition to ethical challenges the job presented, Turner-Graham character- ized herself as “exhausted beyond what I ever should have allowed.”
In time she walked away from that position, but not be- fore she established a physician wellness program to aid other doctors who were under incredible stress.
At that time in her life, Turner-Graham didn’t work pro- fessionally for a year and a half but focused her attention on her daughter who was a senior in high school.
“‘I don’t know if I can survive your undivided attention,’” Turner-Graham recalls her teenage daughter telling her.
8 WOMENOFCOLOR | SPRING 2013
She said her children became accustomed to her busy schedule and understood that mom would always make it to their big events.
In hindsight, Turner-Graham said she realizes that due to her professional commitments she “did not spend as much face-to-face time with them as I wish I could have. That’s one regret I have. They were very well loved and attended to. But I was not as present as I needed to have been.”
Now 59, Turner-Graham said she’s paying it forward—ed- ucating others about the steps they can take to “unleash the power of a sound mind.”
Turner-Graham offers the following suggestions for not just for surviving but thriving: • Take the time to be healthy • Connect to a higher power • Cultivate relationships • Invest wisely in priorities • Give voice to feelings • Act purposefully • Listen, love and laugh often
“My calling in life includes motivating others to invest in creating the lives they want,” Turner-Graham states on her website
ForSoundMind.com. “If healthy lifestyle principles can be successfully woven into our daily lives, what a difference it would make. After all, our families and communities work best when empowered, healthy individuals inhabit them.”
by Gale Horton Gay,
ghorton@ccgmag.com
“If we do not take time to invest in our- selves, we cannot really love others and be fully loving and fully present. In that way it’s a gift to those you love. ” —Cynthia Turner-Graham
www.womenofcolor.net
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