Peak Performance: Mastering Work-Life Balance for Optimal Results

The increasingly challenging Higher Education environment, and associated stretched international student recruitment targets and cost pressures, is ratcheting up workloads for professionals in international education in the sector. The 2024 EAIE Barometer showed 30% of respondents were unsatisfied with their work-life balance. This article therefore has the aim of sharing some practical tips and advice to help colleagues to manage their workload, reduce their stress levels and gain a better work-life balance, whilst achieving their goals and succeeding in their role.?

What keeps international education professionals awake at night in these challenging times?

We asked our community members a few weeks ago in an IC Café “In a few words, what is the key pressure that keeps you awake at night?” and they responded with a range of concerns including juggling priorities, insufficient staff, team redundancies, perfectionism, and family responsibility (see image1).

These words are testimony to the difficult environment many staff are working in at the moment, as well as the perennial problems of holding key roles and caregiving. The HE sector is used to working in a volatile, uncertain, changing, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, but the significant drop in the real value of the undergraduate home fee over the last decade, major rises in the cost of living and recent falling international recruitment resulting from visa changes are creating exceptional pressures for UK universities when resources are increasingly constrained.?

We have also observed that these pressures can often sit alongside a metric-driven high performance culture that can unwittingly promote perfectionism and shun what is perceived failure, even though failing fast can lead to the best solutions. When resources are limited and goals are ambitious, chasing the perfect answer can prevent us from feeling comfortable enough to suggest ideas or take action. This often results in missed opportunities because, by the time we think we’ve found the perfect solution, the market has moved on and we’re left scrabbling for a new one. There is also a tendency to stick to what we know works, which can hold back creativity and innovation.

At a time when creativity and innovation are crucial to identify novel solutions and the pressure is on to deliver, how can staff in international education make the time to think creatively, balance their work and non-work lives, and best engage in self-care to sustain them through this period?

Staff work-life balance under pressure

The definition of work-life balance has long been debated and contested, including for its historic assumptions that the “life” component is talking about the demands of care responsibilities, and particularly children, and that the individual has equal agency in the work-life sphere when structural and occupational factors are often significant. However, for now, we are taking work-life balance to be the extent to which individuals can achieve and be satisfied with the balance between their work and non-work lives.?

The issue we are seeing increasingly (and particularly during and after COVID) is the perceived imbalance between work and non-work and the unwanted dominance of paid work and its pressures in people’s lives. Terms like exhausted, overwhelmed, stressed and burned out are common descriptors of how staff can feel. Mental Health UK’s January 2024 Burnout Report found that more than one third (35%) of adults in the UK experienced high or extreme levels of pressure and stress always or often in the past year. Overworking can lead to a range of negative impacts for the individual and the people they care for, as the list below drawn from Linda Babcock et al’s book The No Club,Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work, shows:

• Firstly, negative impacts on family: you may be missing family events you wanted to go to, and you may be feeling guilt over how much time you spend at work. You may? notice that family members start to mention how much you are working.
• Secondly you may find yourself more socially isolated: there may be cancelled or postponed engagements with friends or family, more lunches eaten at your desk, and you may feel you are out of touch with the people who matter
• Then there may be mental and physical problems including stress, poor sleep and negative health outcomes like raised blood pressure. Are you regularly staying up late to finish your work? Do you have trouble sleeping because you are worrying about the amount of work you have to do? Are you taking medication for stress-related conditions? Has your health declined?
• Finally, overwork can perversely lead to Career Stagnation: you might see more mistakes at work,? missed work deadlines and less time spent on the work that counts towards promotion.

Imbalance of this sort can be a long-term problem which may be connected to an individual’s values such as service to others, perfectionism and unrealistic standard setting, or imposter syndrome, where a new role or extended responsibilities, for example, have driven you to work harder than ever to prove yourself. If this is your normal way of working, exacerbated perhaps by more stretching international student recruitment targets or other additional work pressures, then working with a coach to unpick these various underlying issues can be invaluable.?

The sorts of work you might do includes exploring:

• Your values, and whether you are leading your life in line with them
• How you validate your self-worth, internally or externally
• What you can control and influence in your situation to improve your working life, what you need to accept
• Whether you have limiting beliefs, for example, that as a leader, you must lead all projects that come to your team, that you are not good enough for your role or that you have to have all the answers to work problems.

However, there are tools available to help address a ratcheting up of pressure whether? adding to an existing pattern of long hours working and imbalance in work-life or not.

Ways to maintain peak performance and ease work pressure

Breathing and Stretching

One way of managing stress that we find incredibly powerful, and which we practice as a team at The IC, involves simple breathing and stretching exercises. These exercises help calm our minds and relax our bodies, which in turn allows us to gain clarity and calmness to manage our daily agendas and work.

We know that our brain is designed to protect us. It is an incredibly ancient organ, coded with instincts from all the generations before us to recognize danger and ensure our safety. When we are stressed a whole range of brain structures are engaged, including our amygdala in the forebrain which signals that we are in danger. While a short, stressful event which we are able to cope with has a beneficial effect on the brain if stress levels rise to such a level or is sustained so we can no longer cope, our capacity to make decisions and to remember can diminish, leading to even more stress. One of the simplest things we can do in the short-term to deal with stress is to engage in basic breathing exercises. The best thing about breathing is that it is natural; the body does it automatically, and we don't even have to think about it. However, by focusing on our breathing and taking intentional breaths, we can calm ourselves as these activate the rest and restore processes in the body. James Nestor’s Breath: the new science of a lost art, gives some simple research-evidenced breathing tips.

Stretching also helps our bodies relax. Like many people, we spend most of our day in front of a computer. By incorporating a few stretching exercises at our desks, we bring the benefits directly to our workspace. This helps our bodies perform better and prevents the aches and pains that bad posture and lack of exercise can cause. Research shows that in this relaxed state, our body produces the serotonin hormone which ensures that we can think clearly, we are calm and even our organs replenish themselves.?

Reducing energy loss:?

With long working hours and stress, there is a need to find ways to replenish energy. This might include carrying out an energy audit and reviewing what your days look like: do your meetings have gaps between them (even just 5 minutes) to move around/engage in breathing or a short meditation? Are you seeing particularly demanding people in back-to-back meetings and not allowing recovery between them? Can you delegate any of your meetings where your role is not crucial or have shared meetings? Remember the mantra: “if not you, who?”. Are you engaging in prolonged focused working while actually not able to think effectively any more?? Taking time out is vital to help think creatively; the brain has two different neural networks one for focussed decision making and planning (called the Cognitive Control Network) and the other (the Default Mode Network) which allows for divergent thinking. The two don’t run at the same time so you really do need time to think to be more creative! This is why we often get good ideas when walking the dog, gardening or in the shower.

Checking your diet

Ensure you are eating a nutritious diet and not skipping meals or eating food that just gives short sugar bursts and not sustained energy.

Reducing distractions

Another area that can reduce stress quickly is to reduce distractions: start with your phone! Useful tips include: i) getting familiar with your digital habits and making a list of them (e.g. are you picking up your phone as soon as you wake up - a real stressor from the start, are you using it while talking to people, and how long are you spending on social media daily etc.? ii) deciding what habits you want to keep and whether they need some rules around them e.g. limiting notifications and keeping bedtime and mealtimes phone free. iii) starting by changing the least difficult behaviour first!

Saying no to taking on more work

Whole books have been written on this? and we recommend colleagues who feel they take on too much on a regular basis and find it difficult to push back to? read: The No Club, Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work by Linda Babcock et al and mentioned above.? Although this book is particularly about “non promotable work”, it has a lot of really good tips for evaluating what might be promotable and what might not be, and advice on how to say “no”.? Our top tip is to always give yourself time to think when asked to take on more work. This will give you time to gather information to evaluate the task and will let you think about what you really want without the pressure of an immediate decision. If you don’t say “no” straight away, then you might say “I’ll get back to you”. If it is your line-manager asking you to take on extra work when you are already very busy, then you might like to say “This sounds like a great project. I’m at full capacity at the moment; if this is a priority, I can have a think about what I could stop doing or have reallocated, and get back to you”. Sometimes more university resource, such as a project manager, can be drawn on for support with a new priority area, thereby reducing the pressure on you and your team.

Work prioritisation techniques?

There are many techniques out there like using short ”most important to do” lists, tackling the hardest problems when you are most alert in the day and so on, but the method we like the most is the Eisenhower Matrix (see image 2) which requires you to prioritise work against a grid with important and unimportant up one axis and urgent and not urgent up the other. Anything not urgent and unimportant can be deleted straight away. Anything that is urgent and important needs to be done by you. Anything important but not urgent is often strategic and/or requires planning using your expertise. Anything urgent and not important typically does not require your skills and can be delegated.

Sharing your problems

A problem shared is genuinely a problem halved. Sharing your concerns and worries with colleagues, friends and family can bring considerable relief and help manage strong emotions. However, it is important to recognise that whilst they may want to help, they may not understand your work context or environment so solutions might not always be workable. Here again, working with a coach can be invaluable in giving you the space to think through problems which may feel intractable.

Join The IC Global Community

Be part of the IC Global to engage with a global community of international education professionals encountering similar challenges at this time. We regularly meet for free-of-charge topical international education conversations in our two-weekly IC Cafés and offer a range of services including coaching and mentoring.

What is coaching?

"I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities." Bob Nardelli, former Chairman and CEO of Chrysler.?

The role of a Coach is in the power of creating a confidential non-judgmental space where you are being truly listened to and understood. Through careful and thoughtful coaching questions, you can reframe your thinking, re-think a situation and create transformative solutions, whilst always being in the driving seat. A Coach will help to improve self-awareness, identify blind spots, develop skills, aid transition, act as a sounding board and facilitate the process of personal and professional development and fulfilment. Specifically, The IC Global’s International Higher Education Leadership Coaching and Mentoring Programme is designed to support leaders working in international higher education. IC Global Coaches and Mentors understand your issues, having worked in senior roles in universities ourselves. The IC Global can also provide you with bespoke individual coaching and mentoring as well as group coaching to support your professional and personal areas of development.??

Authors: Professor Abigail Gregory MBE, IC Fellow, HE Consultant and Executive Coach and Mentor and Sirin Myles, Co-Founder The IC Global, IC Fellow and Executive Coach and Mentor

Abigail and Sirin have extensive professional coaching training and over 50 years of experience in international education between them, Abigail as a senior academic leader and Sirin as a senior leader in professional services. They understand the requirements, challenges and opportunities that Clients face.?They use a solution-driven and results-orientated style, with the aim of empowering and assisting Clients to build on positive past experiences to manage current issues. Abigail has researched and published in the area of gender, work and organisation and work-life balance for over twenty years with Prof. Susan Milner at the University of Bath.