In Search of the Elusive Work-life Balance

Over the last year, I’ve been on a mission to work less. Not to achieve less, or to do less meaningful work. I just wanted to spend less time and energy working, or thinking about work, so I could find space for other things that matter.

I still wanted to work hard and achieve great things; to forge a career I’m sincerely proud of. I also wanted to spend quality time with loved ones, be there for my kids as they grow into amazing young humans, and focus a little on fun and self-care too. Some call this work-life balance - a mysterious, satisfying integration of paid work and life. Others, might call it unrealistic - "You can’t have it all! At least, not all at the same time."

I’m not sure I’d ever met anyone who felt truly satisfied with their balance between work and life. Achieving satisfaction in one area of your life so often seemed to mean sacrificing or compromising on something else important to you. And the only thing I knew for certain, was that no amount of hard work could buy me more hours in the day!

A tug-of-war between life and work

For 20 years, I'd prioritised my career, and achieved great things as a result. Then, clock ticking, I prioritised starting a family. As my kids grew, society (and my wallet) then suggested I’d better get back to work, so I tried desperately to prioritise them both.

It didn’t work!

I got my dream job, but my health, kids and relationships suffered. So I took a less intense job to allow more time for family, but my career and sense of self-worth suffered. I had also set precedents for how much I could do, at what quality and how quickly. Constantly trying to live up to those (pre-parenthood) expectations sent me into a spiral of perfectionism and self-criticism.?It felt selfish to even suggest I wanted strong relationships, great kids, good health?and?a promising career.

At work, despite all the supportive rhetoric, the odd look or seemingly innocent comment made me feel like I wasn't pulling my weight, or implied I wasn't really serious about my career if I chose to switch off and focus on myself or my kids for a bit before the endless work was done.

As a mum, relentless calls to volunteer and participate in school activities, along with all the extracurricular activities all the other kids were doing, made me feel like I must be failing my kids if I delegated their care, agreed to minimal extracurricular commitments, never got round to organising play days, or (heaven forbid!) occupied the kids with screens so I could focus on work for a few minutes.

I began to wonder if I slept too much or something?! Surely I should be able to fit it all in! Somehow? The best I could hope for, it seemed, was a compromise of mediocre satisfaction, eternal guilt, constant feelings of failure and persistent aspirations of having or doing more.

The elusive dream

And yet, the idea of work-life balance grows ever more prevalent in professional discourse. COVID and its accompanying lock downs, showed us how important quality time with family and self-care is, and their priority relative to work. We’ve also known about the developmental and protective benefits of being present with our kids for some time. But now we’ve had a taste of just how valuable it is for parents and communities too!

And our employers know it! Work-life balance is now a key employee value proposition , with most leading organisations investing in initiatives to support staff wellbeing and flexible working conditions.

Meanwhile, self-care - proactively managing our own physical and mental health - is no longer viewed as indulgence, but a citizenship responsibility.

So if we all see it as important, why is work-life balance still so elusive? Employees want it; employers support it - what's really stopping us from achieving work-life balance?

In spite of our collective intentions, we’re now working more than ever. We rush from the office to face-to-face meetings to online meetings, to school pickups and dinner routines, then back to our laptops and endless email-checking as we multitask with life, only to switch off long after the rest of the house is asleep (sometimes, not even then). And still, the work is never done. Now that we’ve discovered just how many workable hours there are in a day and cemented our capacity to work from anywhere, anytime, there seems so much pressure to do more.

The same goes for family life. New opportunities to extend our kids' social and academic development emerge every day. There are more forms to sign, apps to check, funds to raise and committees to support. And the rules of parenting are ever-evolving - you'd better keep up if you want to be a good mum! Parenting is a full-time job in itself!!

Perhaps there's simply too much to do now? Our lives have become so complicated that it's simply unrealistic to want it all? Or perhaps work-life balance only exists for the super-human - those awe-inspiring people we admire from afar who seem to have it all down-packed?

Am I really capable of achieving a truly satisfying balance in my life? Or should I quit trying?

Try as I might, I couldn't give up the dream. I was convinced there must be a way, and I was committed to finding it.

Reconceptualising balance and success

The more I thought about it, the more I started to reconsider my idea of "balance".

When I really examined what I was searching for, balance didn't mean having it all. It meant having enough in each bucket to satisfy my needs. Work-life balance was also not (necessarily) about filling each bucket equally (i.e. spending equal energy or time on each facet of my life). And the amount needed in each bucket to create balance was entirely subjective.

I realised that work-life balance looks different to each of us. Our own expectations - beliefs about what should or could be done, and by whom, and the goals we set for ourselves - what we expect and seek to accomplish, and how we know we've accomplished it, impact how we conceptualise work-life balance, and, therefore, how feasible it is to achieve.

These expectations and goals are highly subjective. And yet we tend to measure success in objective ways. Others' expectations might influence my aspirations, but ultimately, I must decide whether or not I've really achieved success.

Some measures of success also sit outside our control. All the preparation in the world might not land you that job interview, or ensure you're the best applicant. You can be the picture of good health and still get struck down by illness. Yet I was measuring my success by these somewhat arbitrary outcomes.

I realised that success was something I needed to determine for myself, according to my own intentions and efforts.

Achieving work-life balance, then, meant setting and working towards my own subjective goals, and evaluating my progress according to what I felt was realistically within my realm of influence. I needed to identify what I was seeking to achieve in each facet of my life, to scrutinise what was reasonable and within my control, and to consider my life as a whole, so that I could define what balance really looked like for me, and to determine what might enable me to achieve it.

My idea of success

I began to explore my goals, leveraging the many great career development tools and services out there, and I soon discovered how complex it was to define success in other aspects of my life. I struggled to find clear answers for what a successful parent looks like. And how would I know if I am one? What about success in health or relationships? Once I removed aspects outside my control, defining success wasn't so straightforward. It was unsurprising, therefore, to find my more personal aspirations had been falling by the wayside in place of those well-defined, ambitious and externally-validated career goals.

With this realisation, I decided to take a good hard look at my life and what I really wanted. I discovered that my own expectations, goals and measures of success, were poorly conceived. They were based largely on subjective and ill-informed comparisons - assumptions of what others in my situation would do. And I measured my success against what others had achieved, rather than what I wanted.

I expected myself to be a gun at work; aspiring to do my job better than anyone else. I wanted to be the best mum in the world, the perfect housewife, and to turn my middle-aged 'mum bod' into a 25-year-old. These goals were unreasonable and unrealistic. Not to mention, I didn't exactly enjoy doing the things that supported those goals, like working long hours, doing housework, and exercising! I also expected to be just like everyone else (or better), but I didn't walk in their shoes - I didn't know what they did or did not struggle with. I didn’t know if?they?felt balanced. I didn't even know if I wanted to do whatever it was they did. I just assumed I should.

Resolving this internal conflict, and putting myself on the path to work-life balance, meant setting more achievable and informed goals for myself. It meant a lot of soul searching to figure out what was really important to me, and what success would actually look like when I got there. And it meant testing my assumptions of what others expected of me.

I spoke to friends, family, colleagues and mentors about their own goals, experiences and challenges. I worked through my concerns and values with a coach. I thought hard about what it was that made me feel satisfied. I even did a few online questionnaires to discover my key strengths in the hope of discovering my 'true calling'. Through all these conversations, research and reflections, I started to get to the core of what work-life balance might mean for me. And the answers I came to weren't so much about what, or how much I did or didn't do, but about how it made me feel and seeing the impact of my efforts.

I re-evaluated my idea of career success - ultimately it didn’t matter so much to me what my job title was or how highly I was paid (assuming it’s still enough to get by). I redefined my career success as doing something I felt was valued and made a meaningful difference. This measure of success didn’t depend upon spending a certain amount of time at work, or rely on others recognising my accomplishments. It was far more within my control, and I had flexibility in how I could achieve it.

I shaped goals for the impact I wanted to have on those around me. I defined parenting and family success as helping my kids grow into caring, fun, loving members of society, and maintaining my strong partnership and close friendship with my husband. My idea of success wasn’t seeing my kids win awards, being the best in their class, reaching that developmental milestone first, or being the best behaved kid in the supermarket. The success of my marriage wasn't measured by how many lovey-dovey insta posts we share, or expensive anniversary gifts. It was about how I felt, and what my husband and kids shared when we spent quality moments together. Recognising this took the pressure off having to organise and pay for those extra academic supports, and remembering that when I was with my family, it’s the connections, the conversations, the cuddles and the smiles that were most important.

More personally, I framed my idea of success as actively managing my mental and physical health. Success was not an arbitrary state of good health, which is so often outside our control. Nor was it a goal weight or dress size. Achieving my idea of success meant prioritising medical appointments, being active and remembering to relax.

My idea of balance

Having (re)defined my ideas of success, I was able to test these against what was truly feasible. Would my idea of career success be compatible with my concept of life success, and vice versa? What would overall success look like? And was that realistic? I needed to figure out what I was willing to give up and what I couldn't live without, and fine-tune my aspirations and measures of success accordingly.

It became clear that my family is most important to me. Everything else is to that end. And it is the quality of my interactions with my family, our relationships, that I value most of all. What really matters to me is being there when my kids or husband really need me, and knowing that they feel valued and loved. It's about quality time together, being present, listening to their needs, sharing my ups and downs, and showing them I care. To achieve this, I needed to create space and ensure I was truly present for those moments that enable our relationships to flourish.

I recognised the importance of my own wellbeing in enabling me to give my all to these relationships. Valuing myself, a healthy lifestyle and having the mental space to be present is essential for me to engage openly and fully with my family. Acknowledging the benefits of these personal goals on my family relationships gave me the permission I needed to prioritise exercise, healthcare and relaxation. Giving myself space for little 'me-things' will enable me to focus on my family when it matters most.

With family my highest priority, and personal wellbeing essential for that, I needed to adjust my career aspirations. Achieving success at home meant my expectations for what I could achieve at work needed to change. This meant reconsidering the career choices ahead of me through the lens of my values, rather than through a subjective assessment of perceived prestige or job descriptions. I refined my aspirations to prioritise the need for flexibility to choose when and how much work I take on. My career success means having the opportunity to take on challenges I see as adding value, and having the autonomy to give it my best, without sacrificing family or wellbeing.

Of course, such job hunting is not so straightforward - there's no drop-down box on Seek.com.au for 'make a difference' or 'autonomy'. Instead, I leant on my network to sort through all the rhetoric and uncover what it's really like to work in different fields, for different organisations, or for particular managers. The hunt for my next career move may have felt more vague, and perhaps the risk of making a mistake was higher, but I now knew which questions to ask, and who to ask them of.

Measuring career success also required me to evaluate my work in new ways. I needed to check my assumptions of what good looked like and consider my outcomes through the lens of my values - Did my work make a difference? Did I feel challenged? Am I proud of the work I did? Regardless of my career pathway, I have now set more achievable goals to guide me, embedded an openness to learn and adjust as I go, and a willingness to forgive myself if something doesn't work out.

Real work-life balance

I've done it! One year into my journey to work-life balance, I couldn't be happier!

Thinking about balance and success in these new ways allowed me to set achievable expectations and aspirations for myself, and to reconsider what successful balance might look like for me. I now feel free to change jobs, explore new careers, even work part-time, if it gets me closer to my idea of a more meaningful career and allows me to prioritise family and myself. I don’t have to spend my life curating activities for my kids, I just have to be with them and share my own enjoyment in life. And I can give myself permission to prioritise myself too, whether it’s taking time out to rest, exercise or attend appointments.

With a clearer sense of what I want in all aspects of my life, and how I'll recognise success, I have achieved a more satisfying work-life balance. Work no longer rules my life, but it is still meaningful. I have freed myself to prioritise what's most important to me, and I feel hopeful, excited even, that I can achieve my dream of work-life balance after all!

It really is possible!

I hope that sharing my own story might inspire others to also re-evaluate their ideas of success, and that my experiences might help you find your own way toward that elusive work-life balance.

And if you need a hand, or it seems impossible, I'm always happy to chat, or can point you to some amazing people who helped me.