She Taught Balance While Having None

 

The first time Kim Dooley was asked to speak about work-life balance, she felt like a fraud. Her own life was the cautionary tale.

That small, funny admission sits at the heart of one of the most useful chapters in her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience. Here was a woman with a doctorate, a packed calendar, and a career that had carried her to fifty countries, asked to explain balance while privately knowing she had run her own life ragged for years. Rather than fake it, she did what she does best. She reflected, and she came back with something honest.

She calls it the 4 Ps.

The first is passion. Kim's rule is simple. The work you do should give you energy, not drain it. If you feel emptied out at the end of every day, the problem may not be the number of hours. It may be that the work itself has stopped meaning anything to you.

The second is priorities. She suggests an exercise that sounds easy and is not. Name the five most important things in your life. Then look honestly at how you actually spend your time. Most of us find an uncomfortable gap between the two. The things we say matter and the things that fill our days are rarely the same list.

The third is play. This is the one driven people skip first, and Kim refuses to let it go. What are your hobbies? What do you do purely because you love it? Hers are music and travel, and she has built a whole life around protecting them. Play is not a reward you earn after the real work is done. It is part of the work of being a whole person.

The fourth is partner. Not necessarily romantic, she is careful to say. Just someone to share your life with, someone who lifts you up and holds you accountable. The point is that balance is not something you white-knuckle alone. You need a person in your corner who notices when you start slipping back into old habits, and who loves you enough to say so.

What makes this land is that Kim is not preaching from a mountaintop. She is the recovering workaholic still working it out, handing you the map she wishes she had been given sooner. The 4 Ps are not a productivity trick. They are a gentle audit of whether your days actually match your life.

So here is the question she would leave you with. Passion, priorities, play, partner. Pick the one you have been neglecting, and start there.

When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience by Kim E. Dooley is available now on Amazon, for anyone ready to stop running long enough to live a little more on purpose.



Live link: https://booksbykimedooley.com/

Name: Kim Dooley

Email: k-dooley@techtraininggroup.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Life Misses a Note: Finding Meaning in the Moments We Never Planned

Image
  A Life That Doesn’t Follow the Script What if the moments you wish you could erase—your failures, embarrassments, and unexpected detours—were actually the most important parts of your story? In When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , author Kim E. Dooley invites readers into a deeply personal, often hilarious, and profoundly honest journey through a life that refuses to stay perfectly in tune—and is all the better for it. This isn’t a polished, picture-perfect memoir. It’s real. It’s messy. And it’s exactly what makes it unforgettable. From Bayous to the World Stage Kim Dooley’s story begins in a small Texas town but quickly expands into a global adventure. From water skiing in murky rivers filled with alligators to navigating cultural surprises in Mexico, Costa Rica, Greece, and beyond, her life unfolds as a series of bold steps into the unknown. Each destination brings more than just scenery—it brings transformation. Through her travels,...
Read more

What If the Wrong Turn Was the Right One All Along?

Image
  Most of us spend our lives trying to avoid getting it wrong. Wrong job, wrong decision, wrong turn. We plan, we prepare, we follow the map. And then life folds the map in half, tosses it out the window, and says good luck. Dr. Kim E. Dooley , PhD , has been there more times than she can count. And somewhere between a funeral, a cruise ship that lost power in the middle of the ocean, and an accidental engagement in Trinidad, she figured something out that most people spend a lifetime missing. The wrong turns were never wrong. They were just the scenic route to wisdom. In When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , Kim takes you places most people only see in documentaries. She's a professor, a global traveler, and a water-skiing East Texas girl who figured out pretty early that the best lessons don't come from classrooms. This isn't your typical leadership book. It's the one your typical leadership book wishes it could be. Kim has worked ...
Read more

The Book That Tells You the Truth About Starting Over

Image
  There is a moment most people recognize but rarely talk about. The moment when the life you spent decades building suddenly stops fitting. The job where you gave everything; the identity you wore so long it felt like skin. And then, without much warning, it's gone. When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience by Kim E. Dooley, PhD, is the book that sits with you in that moment and says, quietly, same. It Opens With Alligators and Only Gets Better Before there is any wisdom, there is a childhood in Orange, Texas, a brown alligator-filled river, and a little girl who absolutely refused to be left out of anything her older brother got to do. The book earns your trust early, not through credentials or grand statements, but through stories so specific and alive that you forget you are reading a memoir at all. By the time a shoe flies off mid-song at a funeral and someone tumbles down the altar stairs in front of a full congregation, you are completely inv...
Read more