Everyone wants to live a healthy and fulfilled life with a satisfying career, time for relationships and room for personal growth. Yet how do you achieve this when you feel torn between the demands of each of the roles you hold? How do you find time for work, personal relationships and time for reflection?
At every turn, there are answers to how you can balance your life perfectly and seamlessly move between your various responsibilities. Life coaches, therapists, workshops and self-help books offer ways to achieve work-life balance. Organisations too have responded to the challenge and many now offer family-friendly policies to assist us in this balancing act.
However, is improved work-life balance the answer? I suggest it isn’t. Firstly, you only have one life, despite dividing your time between work and non-work activities, and apportioning time between work and personal life forces you into separation and fragmentation. Secondly, it implies that greater time management will result in expending effort productively across the different parts of your life. Lack of time, however, is a red herring in the work-life balance debate – it results in you relinquishing responsibility for the real choices facing you in creating the life you want to live. The solution lies in discovering what is really important, meaningful and significant to you. It requires a reconsideration of the quality of your life – not your work life, home life or family life but the quality of this one thing, which we call Life.
Shifting the Paradigm
The word ‘balance’ implies some sort of seesaw with work on one side and family and personal life on the other. Like scales of justice, it suggests that both sides are equal. It implies constant juggling to maintain balance with sudden or increased demand on one side throwing the other side precariously out of balance. One problem is that ‘work-life balance’ is deeply embedded in our language and every time we see the word balance it reinforces the balancing act.
Changing your paradigm starts through changing your language. I want to encourage you, in considering your own balancing act to change the concept to work-life integration. Here you move away from the seesaw to see that it is not the only option in the playground. Work-life integration implies a synergy between the different aspects of your life whereby energy is expended more productively. Thus, attaining fulfilment is not so much about work-life balance but more about making conscious choices about your values and how you want to live your life.
So let’s examine the concept of work-life balance in the context of your life. By following some practical exercises, you can identify the barriers that stand in the way of you developing a rich and satisfying life. You can then choose from a wider range of options, explore the implications of taking different paths and accommodate the anxiety that results from choosing.
Barriers to change
A number of barriers stand in the way of us making the necessary changes for personal fulfilment. Try the following exercise:
- Consider your own personal work-life balance. Outline the roles you hold under the headings of work and non-work, remembering that your place of work might be at home bringing up your children and not away from the home.
- Write down as much detail as possible about how you feel in these different roles and the changes you would like to make.
- What are the personal barriers that stand in the way of you creating a more integrated life?
You may have found this exercise challenging, particularly if you consider that your options to change are limited. However, many of the barriers that stand in the way of us changing are underpinned by Myths or unquestioned assumptions about how we should and ought to live our lives. Once identified, we can choose to continue with them or change more in line with our personal values. Let’s consider some of the barriers that inhibit us changing. You may recognise some of these from your own list.
1) We deny that we have the freedom to change.
Anticipating change can become so overwhelming that to reduce the anxiety of choosing we deny that we have any choice at all. The crux of freedom is realising that you are the captain of your mind and are free to think in whatever way you want. To avoid the anxiety inherent in choosing is to lead a life dictated by others of which you are only a passive observer.
2) We lose sight of what inspires us to reach for the impossible.
Our everyday commitments at both work and at home often become so onerous that we might believe that our vision of a rich and fulfilling life is mere fantasy. This is only the case if we allow it and redefining a clear vision of how work and personal life can be truly integrated can become a reality if only we believe it.
3) We believe we have no right to mastery over our own live.
Often, social pressures influence us to believe that we have to do certain things because someone else decrees it. However, we don’t have to do anything because someone else dictates it. If we do these things, it is because we choose to do them. Even if they feel like obligations, they are still choices and we must take responsibility for them.
4) We lack the energy to make changes and learn new things.
It is all too easy to become stifled and weighed down with duty and routine. To consider changing our life situation then becomes too threatening. We ask ‘Who would I be without my job?’, ‘My current relationship?’, ‘My status?’ What would happen if I no longer earned the income I have worked so hard to secure?’ Instead of feeling safe and strong, we feel stifled, resentful or just plain bored. Change begins with daring to address the issues that underpin our current and future choices and living with the anxiety that meaningful living entails.
5) We continue with earlier choices out of a sense of duty and obligation.
Sometimes, our roles and responsibilities appear to weigh us down and we forget that we too have a responsibility to ourselves. By regaining mastery over the way in which we live our lives, we can integrate our responsibilities to others with respect for ourselves. In turn, we become role models to our children and peers of the importance of taking responsibilities for the choices we make.
6) We resist the anxiety that results from relinquishing alternative choices.
In choosing to change our lives, we are inevitably are faced with the dilemma of turning down alternative courses of action. Although the anxiety of our freedom accompanies all new decisions, we must accept that this is a part of a well-lived life. Embracing anxiety allows us to apply caution where necessary and avoid stagnation and resentment inherent in not choosing.
7) We fear the judgment of others whose lives may be affected by our decisions.
Often, changing our lives can be threatening to others, some of whom are affected by our decisions and some of who are unsettled by how we are changing. Often, the anticipation of others’ judgments is greater than the manifestation of them and to not choose is to court anger and resentment in ourselves and others.
8) We relinquish responsibility for our own lives, instead blaming others for our predicament.
If we choose not to choose, events will transpire to bring about changes to our lives. When this happens, it is all too easy to blame others for our predicament, believing that we would have acted differently had the circumstances been different. However, we cannot relinquish responsibility for our own lives, even if we allow others to choose for us.
9) We hold steadfastly to a sense of safety that results from maintaining the status quo.
As we make decisions, a sense of safety or duty inhibits our willingness to embrace new possibilities. Although it is seductive to continue on a path we believed would bring us happiness, it is important to re-evaluate our lives now to assess the extent to which our choices are delivering the rewards we expect from an integrated life.
10) We become prey to the Identity Myth.
The Identity Myth is the belief that you should be someone other than the person you want to be or, fitting with others’ expectations and desires will bring you happiness. This belief is so pervasive that it requires fuller explanation of the way in which it influences our lives and the potential for an integrated life.
The Identity Myth
This Myth relates to all aspects of our existence and implies that we are unduly influenced by others’ expectations and demands and somehow out of touch with the myriad of choices and options available to us. Those influences come from personal, social and cultural expectations and are often subtle, resulting in us believing we don’t have any choice at all. In relation to work-life integration, it implies that these influences are so strong that we allow fashion, consensus, culture and social expectations to choose for us. We might thus believe that work as we experience it now – the linear career of 9 to 5 and beyond, five days a week in a physical location, is the only option. It also implies that the balancing act inherent in work-life balance holds its own solution. For instance, one has to focus on one or the other and life-shifters, down-shifters, and sea-changers choose one side, and those committed to career and corporate success choose the other.
This limited perspective inhibits the possibility of real change for both individuals and organisations. If the Identity Myth influences you to such an extent that you have very fixed views of how you should be in both work and non-work roles, you need to broaden your perspective to capture all the elements you want. This will enable you to develop the life you truly want to live, not one dictated to you by unquestioned stereotypes, culture, socialization and your own limiting beliefs. It is a Myth that you must forego your health and wellbeing to achieve success in the corporate environment. It is also untrue that you must forego a successful career if you want to commit to a fulfilling family and personal life. What is required is a paradigm shift from seeing yourself as a collection of disparate roles and commitments to a holistic, integrated person.
The third option – creating a truly integrated life
At this stage, you may ask, ‘How can I change when I have so many responsibilities?’ Change begins by questioning the myths underpinning your behavior and embracing the anxiety that inevitably accompanies adjustment. Change also causes anxiety, so it is valuable to develop a strategy to identify what is important to you and a vision for the integrated life you so desire. The following exercise will help you determine what is really right for you and envision how to attain the life you really desire.
- Imagine you are free to create an integrated life in whatever form you want. Write down exactly what this would look like.
- Be as creative as you want in choosing what you would do. Remember that this is your ideal. Don’t be put off by thinking that it would be impossible to achieve. At this stage you can live your dream on paper. Remember that you can’t change others but you can imagine what it would be like to have people in your life that you spend time with because you really want to. Of course you may include people and things in your ideal life that you already have.
- Don’t include anything or anyone only because you can’t imagine what it would be like without them.
- Write down as much detail as possible, and when you have finished, close your eyes and imagine yourself living that life.
Carry this image around with you for the next few weeks and at regular times reflect on it. After a while a core image will probably emerge. It will represent the focus around which your ideal life is centered. Make a note of this – it will help you with the next step.
Consider what will be entailed in achieving your dream and note this in detail, e.g.
Requirements:
Time:
Resources:
Knowledge:
Money:
Personal costs:
Emotional support:
It is very tempting to modify your dream because it seems impossible, given your present circumstances. Try to avoid this, since you will never be happy unless you have a clear picture of what you want.
- What would it take to achieve your dream?
- What is the shortfall between your dream and your current lifestyle?
Completing these exercises enables you to gain clarity about the integrated life you want. Through this process, you will also have highlighted ways in which your beliefs might inhibit or facilitate you changing your current lifestyle. By identifying the beliefs you might have to change and with a new vision for the future, you are equipped to appraise the options available to you to achieve it.
To improve the quality of your life and gain satisfaction from both work and non-work activities, it is essential to uncover the myths or unquestioned assumptions that fuel your current behavior. This requires a paradigm shift from the juggling act of work-life balance to the satisfying and fulfilling option of work-life integration. This requires re-evaluating your options, challenging limiting beliefs and myths and creating a lifestyle that is sustainable. Fortunately, there’s good news for organisations too. When organisations transform their operations to create work-life integration, it reflects positively in the bottom line, employees feel better about their lives and the role that work plays in them and organisations become satisfying communities in which to work.
To assist you in deciding the relative merits of these choices, it is valuable to assess the extent to which your own beliefs and desires about an integrated lifestyle are aligned with that of your existing or desired workplace. This can be done by completing a short on-line questionnaire to ascertain both your organisation’s and your commitment to work-life integration. This questionnaire can be found at www.MythOfWorkLifeBalance.com and will assist you in choosing the next best course of action.
Clare Mann - © 2006
