Do you wonder why work/life balance appears to be so diffi cult to attain? Despite goal-setting and time management, your goal of having rewarding work and enriching personal experiences, never becomes a reality. Somehow work demands too much of you or personal commitments leave you questioning your career satisfaction. Moving seamlessly between work and play appears increasingly beyond our reach. I suggest that this is because the equation of work/life balance is fundamentally flawed.
Work/life balance suggests a balancing act with constant juggling to attain equilibrium across the disparate areas of our lives. The split between work and life somehow suggests two discrete aspects of our experience in which we hold very different roles. This is further reinforced by comments like ‘You should not bring your personal life to work’ or ‘My work is encroaching on my home life’. Despite the language used to describe these two distinct aspects of our lives, the fact remains that we only have one life. Apportioning time between work and personal life forces us into separation and fragmentation. Why does this happen so readily and how might we change it so that we live more fulfilled lives?
As a psychologist and psychotherapist, I have seen hundreds of clients who stress how busy they are and how little time they have for the things they really want to do. Without generalising human suffering, I have come to the conclusion that our ‘busy-ness’ results from a fundamental splitting within ourselves, in the main between ‘being’ and ‘doing’. At the risk of criticism from psychoanalysts, I use the term ‘splitting’ in a more existential way as a tendency to focus more on one aspect of being than another. This results in attempts to alleviate the anxiety that inevitably results from living.
Imagine a child who experiences discomfort after being admonished for his behaviour. The resultant anxiety is uncomfortable but with adequate parenting, he develops suffi cient ego strength to survive. His actions are separated from his ‘being’ and he continues to feel loved despite his anxiety. However, for numerous reasons, he may be unable to suffi ciently tolerate his distress and may try to distract himself from his felt anxiety. In other words, he ‘does’ something rather than ‘experiencing’ his discomfort. If successful, distraction by ‘doing something else’ then becomes a valuable strategy but distances him further from understanding the language of his emotions. In later life, this sets the pattern for ‘doing’ or ‘overdoing’ to avoid the anxiety that results when he acknowledges that he responsible for creating his existence.
Whilst this might seem a simplistic interpretation of our societal tendency to ‘overdo it’, I believe it holds the key to why we fi nd it so hard to develop fulfi lled lives. Distraction and ‘doing’ things distances us from listening to ourselves and so we apply more logic and planning to achieve satisfaction. This leads to imbalance within ourselves with little experience of surviving the anxiety that results when we take responsibility for our own lives – especially if it involves choices contrary to the norm.
I suggest that the solution lies in shifting the paradigm from work/life balance to work/life integration. Work-life integration implies a synergy between the different aspects of your life with everything you do imbued with values refl ecting who you are as a person – not just a set of roles.
Clare Mann - © 2006
