Work, Life, and Balance

You hear a lot about the need to maintain a good work/life balance. There’s much to recommend that discussion – we all need it. But there’s an implicit and easy fallacy which often takes over the dialogue, that is, that work and life are two discrete provinces of our lives. Seen this way, the struggle to maintain work/life balance becomes a nightmare of impossible “either/or” choices. We end up more stressed than when we began.

This “either/or” dichotomy arises when your work is “just a job”, the means by which you try to earn enough money to fuel your “real life”. It’s the boring part, but necessary to fund the happy part. When it expands to take up any more of your life than is absolutely necessary, stress arises. Frankly, the happy part of your life is jealous of the “gotta go to work” part of your life, and resents every second you’re away.

Ask anyone who is married to one person but loves another. Misery all around. But ask someone who happens to be married to somebody they love, and they’ll tell you that life is good. That, in a very real sense, is the clue to resolving the work/life balance conundrum. When you love your work but you also love the rest of your life, the jealousy between the spheres reduces exponentially.

If you think about all the people you know who seem to be free of any work/life balance stress, you’ll probably note that they think differently about their “jobs”. In fact, they don’t really have “jobs”, they have joy. What they really have is not just “work”, but their “life’s work”. What they do seems to be part of their identity, their sense of self-worth, their meaning in life.

When you have your “life’s work” instead of just “work”, you feel a sense of mission and purpose. As you actually achieve goals you feel energized and self-affirmed. In fact, when you’re absolutely in your place of Alignment and living in the center of your Giftings, you’re in a place of “flow” where you actually derive increased energy from your work.

Almost invariably, when you’re in the right place, living out your Giftings in Alignment with your ideal clients, you’ll be more than adequately compensated financially and emotionally. This means that your “other life” doesn’t need to be jealous, in fact, your “other life” will be grateful because your work more than supports your “outside life”, it enables you to enjoy it more deeply, without having to skimp and do things on the cheap. It also means that when Friday night arrives you’re not an exhausted, angry mess.

So, yes, we all need to think about “work/life balance”, not in an “either/or” sense but in a sense that life must be more than the sum of its parts. Life needn’t be a zero-sum game. If you elevate your “work” to your “life’s work”, you’ll find that you can actually have it all, and even more.