Rethinking work-life balance
If you think of balance, one thing is equally opposed to another, like the scales of justice. Work-life balance seems like it would work the same way. Except you cannot actually balance life against work—they’re not in opposition.
The false dichotomy
Your life includes work, and work includes life. Saying you’re seeking work-life balance means your brain has to set one against the other. Even if you get more precise, and make the conflict between time spent at work, and time spent on hobbies or with family, you’re no better off. To maintain an expectation of balance requires making up boundaries and barriers that will be breached, so you may think you’re failing somehow at life. And the more you try to keep the balance, the more elusive it will seem. It’s like trying to remember someone’s name. The more you try, the more elusive the name becomes!
There is a way to make life less complicated: drop the work vs life balance and make work a wholehearted expression of your life.
Integrating life and work
Think about when you are most passionately and actively engaged in something. Likely, you are working—tackling a challenge at home, or with a project. When you make your work passionate, satisfying, energizing, enthusiastic, then wouldn’t you agree it is a wholehearted expression of you and your curiosity and desire?
But you can also suppress yourself through your work. If you make work into an unwanted obligation, and a situation in which you’re bossed around and dominated, you’ll likely get angry. If you’re like most people then you will get scared of this anger, suppress it, and produce feelings of frustration or resentment until you’re exhausted.
No wonder work-life balance can seem attractive as a concept if it offers an escape from those feelings!
But there is no escape from your own mind. True balance is to be found not in opposing work to life, but in addressing the conflicted thoughts and feelings you have about work—and more broadly about your various roles in life (you could equally use work as an escape from other aspects of life).
Address your inner conflict—in particular, what you feel angry about—and you can come to inner balance and equanimity. You can stop trying to be in two or three places at once. You can come to be at peace with who you are, and what you truly want in life. Perhaps you want to dedicate yourself to a project in ways you’re not acknowledging because of some societal expectation. Perhaps you want to dedicate yourself to raising kids or to a particular hobby.
The more you examine the beliefs you hold about work and life to see if they’re authentic to you, the more you can be the fulcrum of balance in your life. You won’t need to set expectations or rules to govern your time, because you’ll be grounded in knowing yourself, no matter what you’re doing or where you are.
If this sounds attractive to you, then set up an introductory meeting with us.
To equanimity,
Tom