How Much Is Enough?

Even before September 11, more and more of us were expressing dissatisfaction with the widening imbalance between our personal and professional lives--and our numbers have doubtlessly increased since that day. Pamela York Klainer, an executive coach and workplace consultant, had been watching this feeling grow among her clients, and How Much Is Enough? offers her well-considered strategy for bringing career and home life into better harmony. Klainer's underlying premise is that we all have a "money story," a lifelong ingrained perspective on capital and the possessions it can buy that establishes our directions in life and work, and eventually whether we are happy with the results. Utilizing tools like a "money autobiography," she offers a method to help us understand the way we truly feel about money and the amount of it we think we need to meet our own definition of success. More importantly, she then shows how knowledge of where such thinking originates, and how it evolves, can be used for adjusting actions to reach goals that prove more satisfying. "How much is enough" may indeed be the underlying question we all need to answer for ourselves before a desirable equilibrium can be attained. --Howard Rothman