Editor’s Note: During the months of July and August, your weekly Pause Blog posts will feature the ‘Best of Pause’. These are readers’ favorite messages from the earlier years of the Pause e-zine. Featuring these Pause Gems will give me a bit of a breather, and also introduce our newer subscribers to some of those early editions.

Whether you are a long time subscriber, or new to our list, I sincerely hope you enjoy these messages. Come September, your Pause messages will once again feature all new info and resources.

PS – The Summer Reading Bookshelf shares the titles of some of the books I’ll be dipping into over the next couple of months.

Reflection & Action: From time to time, I have worked with colleagues who sparred for brownie points by quizzing each other about issues like these: How late did your meeting run last night? How many weekends will you be on the road? How many holidays are you carrying over? How many miles have you clocked on the company car? What’s the points total on your frequent flyer plan? How many emails stacked up while you were on vacation?

More recently, I listened to a panel of work-life balance experts talk about their successes and failures in balancing their own busy lives. They admitted they were challenged to live up to the goals they set for themselves. That’s true for all of us. Still, something in the tone of their responses seemed to suggest that it was okay for their lives to be out of whack because they were doing such important work.

It took me back to other conversations where professional or personal success were measured in terms of load, distance, sacrifice, and ‘face time’. The scale paid little attention to results and none at all to balance.

Eavesdrop on the tone of your own conversations with friends and colleagues when you talk about work-life balance. Is there genuine concern? Do you find and offer support for creative choices, thoughtful boundaries and sanity preserving limits? Or is there plenty of lip service given to issues of load accompanied by a subtle wink-wink-nudge-nudge understanding that really important people don’t have time for balance, and that we ought to all just get back to work?

Stars on the epaulettes. Stripes on the shoulders. Pins on the lapels. What badges of honor really matter to you? What gets honored gets attention. Let’s make sure we’re tending to the right things.

Quote Of The Week: “If we want our world to be different, our first act needs to be reclaiming time to think. Nothing will change for the better until we do that.” – Margaret Wheatley

Summer Reading Bookshelf: I’m looking forward to dipping into what appears to be an easy reading gem – a parable style book about a ‘go-getter’ who discovers the power of giving: “The Go-Giver – A Little Story About A Powerful Business Idea” by Bob Burg & John David Mann. 2007. Penguin Group.