Why Work Life Balance Is A Myth

How often do you find yourself making choices between your job and time with your family? I don't just mean not missing birthdays and anniversaries. But having quality and quantity time with the people that are most important to you.

How often do you find yourself making choices between your job and your wellbeing? Like staying at your desk for just one more hour rather than going to the gym or having some time outside.

How often do you find that your work stops you from pursuing interests outside of your job? When was the last time you acted spontanously and took the rest of the day off to do something fun?

There's a lot of value in deferring current gratification in return for future benefit and this leads to the choices like the ones I've just outlined.

But if you're not careful, you lose sight of the bigger picture. Why are you doing all this in the first place? Sure you want the financial resources to live your life the way you want to in the future. But what about living your life in a better way now?

It's easy to get caught up in the Work Life Balance Myth. A ‘deferred life’ plan where your suffer the work until it’s finished then the life you want can start.

The flaw - the Myth - is the assumption that working is not living and that living is not working. Somehow the only way to have more life is to have less work.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Because work and life are two sides of the same thing.

Work is what you do while you are living.

You cannot not work. The Work Life Balance Myth is when you confuse work with ‘having a job’.

OK, I hear you saying ‘But I need a job to earn money!’ Yes, money is important and has a role to play but in a supporting role to the main act of living a bigger life.

To move towards a bigger life – one that is happy and fulfilling – you need to focus on the bigger picture. It’s about taking care of all the things that are important to you, not just money.

So what does happy and fulfilling actually mean to you?

I see so many successful leaders stuck with this. You might have financial prosperity, a healthy family and ‘good prospects’. And yet you lack a deep sense of fulfilment that maybe you can't quite put your fingers on.

I experienced this too back when I was in a C-level role. I knew if I won the lottery I wouldn’t need my job anymore and the life I was ‘deferring’ could begin. But beyond spending money on a few ‘lifestyle’ changes I couldn’t really explain properly what was important for a happy and fulfilling life.

There's a ton of research about what makes for a satisfying and fulfilling life. In the end it seems to all come down to understanding what really matters to us and taking care of those things. What matters can be our health, our family, our sense of fulfilment and much, much more.

In my work with clients we do a deep dive that helps them design their bigger future. We use my ‘What Matters' guide to figure out what they need to address if they are going to have a truly happy and fulfilling life. The guide covers the four main areas of life we need to pay attention to: Self, Others, Work and Space.

In my What Matters guide we dig really deep into each of these areas but I'm going to give you an overview here so you get greater clarity about what matters to you.

Have fun with these self-coaching questions as you design what your life could be. A life which is about AND not OR: work that you love, living in a way that meshes with the other aspects of your life: your family, your health, your fulfilment and so on.

SELF

The first of the four areas of life is Self. Your bigger future begins with you.

• What would you like your health and energy to be?
• Where would you like to feel more alive rather than drained?
• What silent conversations are you running in your head about who you are?
• How could these be limiting you from living a bigger future?
• In what do you find meaning?
• What part of the world that is bigger than yourself would you like to be part of?
• Are you willing to change? Are you willing to be a learner?

OTHERS

The second of the areas of life is Others. As humans, we almost certainly cannot exist independently of others.

• What does your ideal life look like when you take into account your family?
• What really matters to your family members? How do you know?
• What sort of people will you choose to work with?
• Are you a member of groups that are not helpful to you given who you really are?
• What formal and informal groups or networks would you like to have in your life?
• What matters to you in the larger geographic, ecological, social, cultural, economic, historic and political contexts of the world?

WORK

We cannot not work. Work is what we do in life. Katharine Whitehorn’s career advice was: ‘Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it’. Why would you want to retire from that!

• Are you trapped in a version of what work meant to you when you were 28 years old?
• What does the authentic, wholehearted and trustworthy version of you want to be doing?
• How can you create and align a career with what you care about?
• What are the skills, experience and relationships you already have that you can deploy in the career that you have ahead of you?
• What do you sacrifice for money? What does it cost you to get money?
• When was the last time you experienced play?
• Where am I naturally playful? Where could I do more of this?

SPACE

The ‘Where’ and ‘When’ you are going to live are vital roles that support the ‘What’ are you going to do in your life. Space includes the place in which you are living but it also includes time and your emotional space. We can’t avoid being in a place and the powerful impact of place is often neglected.

• What impact does place have on the quality of your life?
• What aspects of place contribute most to a fulfilling life for you?
• Are you too inflexible in your relationship with time?
• Are you living a deferred life?
• What are your moods about what is possible and not possible for you in your life?
• Would you like to live a courageous life?

I’ve been just scratching the surface here. My full What Matters guide goes deeper. You may find your inner critic - I call it your internal risk manager - challenging what's possible. When I work with my clients I bring this internal risk manager into the conversation of what could be possible to help stretch my clients' horizons.

The biggest futures are about having all of what really matters to you.

Doing work that you are passionate about.

Getting paid well enough to take care of your family.

Having the space in your life to take care of everything that matters. It’s the opposite of where your life is completely skewed towards (or skewered by) just your job.

It’s about AND not OR.

At this point you might be getting worried about how to make this happen. But your ‘What’ must always come before your ‘How’. As you design a bigger future (your ‘What’), it’s normal to question whether what you want is possible (the ‘How’). But the ‘How’ is only relevant once you are clear about the ‘What’ that really matters to you. For now we are focused on the ‘What’. The ‘How’ comes later.

Designing a satisfying and fulfilling life involves taking responsibility for our own goals, standards, and progress towards these.

Use the above self-coaching questions to begin to reconnect with what matters to you. You are starting to define what needs to be present for your bigger life.

As you navigate beyond the Work Life Balance Myth, you are designing the life where you, your relationships, your work and your space are all in alignment.

[This framework is derived from work by engineer, entrepreneur and business consultant Fernando Flores integrated with the deep insights of David Whyte, a poet. It is shaped by my own interpretations drawing on my experience from applying this in my own life, and from working with clients over the last ten years. It also sits in the context of my learning from Alan Sieler, the world's leading authority on ontological coaching.]