Achieving Work Life Balance
Saturday, August 15th, 2009Do you ever feel your work life balance is off? The key to living well is finding this balance. You may find one part of your life is going great, but another area is awful. You may even feel like you have it all, but feel confused by the fact you still do not feel happy.
You probably feel like you are juggling a dozen balls, with your job, kids, spouse, health, etc. It feels as if at any moment you will start to drop some of these balls. While our society emphasizes success in some areas, it neglects many others. Your identity can become the work you do. What good is it to be financially successful if you still feel unhappy. You may find yourself turning to medication, therapy, and rehab to simply survive in this world.
The most obvious need for improvement for most people is the work life balance. Your career makes up a huge portion of your life. Sometimes you may find you allow it to really take over. It can begin to prevent you from giving other parts of your life proper attention. In reality, as important as you may feel your work is, it really provides two things:
–Money to fund the life you really want (live well, be with your family, vacation, etc.),
–It can provide a sense of purpose, especially if you are doing something you feel makes an impact.
Work must stay in perspective. You cannot allow it to take over your entire life, unless you are a nun. It is easy to get into the mindset of constantly working, with the promise to really start living once you reach a certain goal. Unfortunately, you will always find another goal to reach.
The time to start living is now, in this very moment. Being present in the moment requires a high level of self awareness. Our culture is not good at this on a whole. You eat, drink, shop, work, etc. all to really avoid anything remotely close to introspection. You don’t want to look in there–it is really dark and scary.
You will have to have some awareness of your inner needs in order to develop life balance. Use your internal compass to tell you when to bond with your spouse, kids, or yourself. It is easy in our society to be disconnected. It is critical, but often uncomfortable, to connect with others. This connection is a fundamental part of happiness.
The connection with yourself may be the most important of all. You are probably very disconnected to yourself even if most of the time you are alone. It is common for you to want to do one thing, but have your brain telling you that you ’should’ do something more productive. If you don’t do what you ’should’ do, you will find yourself miserable with guilt.
When you take away all of the ’shoulds’, you begin to see how effective your internal compass really is. You have to stop ’shoulding’ all over yourself if you hope to ever really find work life balance.