Work Life Balance Expert Chrysula Winegar Advocates for “Laying Claim to Your Own Life”

Like all women, Chrysula Winegar wears more than a few hats. She’s a wife. A mother. A business woman. A writer. An advocate. A coach. And she advocates a deep look at work-life balance to understand how our roles come together to live a life of rich meaning and contribution. As the Daily Thrive Balance Expert, she believes:

“Balance has become synonymous with something much richer and deeper than two sides of a see-sawing scale. We are searching for a sense of peace, a sense of purpose. Not just searching, but hungering. We want our down time to actually feel restful. We want to dust off those dreams and live them. To do that, we have to start living consciously; to make active choices instead of year after year, job after job, day after day, of reactionary living.”

Winegar advocates an all-hands-on-deck approach. Companies have a huge role to play, as do governments, but she says, “they can’t do much without individuals stepping up to lay claim to their own lives.” She calls it the “holy trinity of individual responsibility, corporate culture and policy and careful baseline legislation.” Winegar believes we can each influence and guide the latter two elements.

The one piece where we have real control is ourselves, our choices, our responses.

After living all over the world, working in giant multi-national corporations and one-(wo)man bands, Winegar has become a life-long student of culture.

“Culture is everything—in our homes, communities and workplaces. Defining and then crafting our own personal cultures that we leverage into our families, communities and workplaces is key to creating our own sense of balance.”

In the Daily Thrive sessions on balance, Winegar walks women through the key elements of vision, passion and purpose.

“Anchoring the details of your life in a truly personal declaration of who you are and why you are here, you will learn to harness and implement your vision into the reality of your everyday life.”

A work-life flexibility advocate, Winegar weaves her convictions, past corporate experience with giants like Ernst & Young, Estee Lauder, NatWest UK, and 20 years as a marketer and communicator into all her projects–most recently advising the UN Foundation and the ABC Million Moms Challenge. She has presented for the last two years at the UN Foundation/Mashable Social Good Summit held annually during UN Week, and she is a regular speaker both domestically and abroad. She is working on two books, Work Life Stories: The Revolution is Here and When You Wake Up A Mother, You Wake Up The World.

Winegar blogs at Work.Life.Balance., while agitating for work policy reform at the Huffington Post, Moms Rising, and other media venues. She also champions global development issues for mothers and children at her mother activism blog, When You Wake Up A Mother.