Work Life Balance or Creating Space for a Worthy Life?

Few years back my internet browser was filled with articles about “work life balance’. When my responsibilities started mounting as a daughter, wife along with my career as trainer, coach, consultant and public speaker, I felt it’s time to read about work life balance. But I could hardly find a breakthrough. More I attempted to balance, sooner I got exhausted as I sensed there is always a compromise.

The AHA Moment

The “aha” moment arrived when my precious little son came to my life. I had no time anymore to read about work life balance. But I asked myself with all those great responsibilities of a mother, sleepless nights, restless weekends how am I now managing everything? How I created so much space?

Then I realized that I am not balancing work and life anymore. But I am bearing a worthy life day by day. Need of a “balance” comes if you have life and then work. But if everything is one great worthy life? You don’t need to balance anymore.

My Discovery Mirrors Through My life With Agile Principles

With this inner discovery I kept improving my life by making it worthy day by day. My family, my career all are part of a one worthy life now. One of the prime achievement in this discovery is to embrace agile principles which I stand by as agile coach to my life. It helped me to mirror the truth I discovered through my life journey.

What does this agile principle mean to my life? In life you can never avoid multiple priorities. Sometimes you get lost which one to do first? Is it my son’s homework? Or taking mother to doctor or the project deadline that pop up in my outlook which I keep snoozing? As a Scrum master and now as enterprise agile coach I help product owners to manage multiple priorities based on business value and technical risks. So I keep asking myself what responsibilities, tasks give real value to my life. What risks I need to confront? This helped me to create so much space for worthy things while saying “NO” to what are not so important or urgent in my life. This also helps me to live my life at a sustainable pace than running a race of never ending work. 

I coach my teams to continuously refactor code and take good care of the solution so it will increase maintainability and scalability. Similarly though it’s easy to procrastinate certain to-do items like paying utility bills, keep track of monthly expenses, going for regular health checkups, I know repercussions of not performing them on time can be so painful & time consuming. A toothache or finding a missing file can waste my whole day which takes my happiness away. It reminds me the Agile Principle

 I am so thankful to my mother in-law who mentors me the agile principle 

She helps me with valuable tips to save time in kitchen and utilize that time to spend with my family. It’s like how we coach our teams to keep identifying and remove non value adding items in the product value stream. It’s also like how I coach my teams to automate builds, and test as much as possible and save that time for activities like GUI testing where human intervention is required.

One of the most beautiful yet challenging agile principle for me to adopt is 

Rather than enforcing rules, we attempt to be exemplary parents to our son and inspire him to take responsibilities at very young age. We teach him to be empathetic and realizing him that is he one of the strongest chain in our family circle.

No matter what, change is the only constant thing in this world. Meditation & mindfulness gives us the competitive advantage of not giving up in front of life changes.

Living with expectations helps me to welcome ups and downs in life with modesty. 

That’s the key to reach worthy goals in my life without worrying on minor tweaks which I consider as breeze. Smooth or rough, the breeze just touches us and blow away. That is indeed a great competitive advantage! This truth recalls me the agile principle..,

Just as succeeding in agile, life success is also a journey. That’s why “we need to

Creating Space for a Worthy Life

Agile” is a philosophy which acts as a guiding principle for a self-organizing behavior to continuously deliver value while realizing the goals of an individual or team.

In search of answers for work life balance the Agile principles conveyed me the valuable message that success of life is not to balance work and life. But continuously improve and optimize to bear a worthy life, to keep creating mental space for people and passions which are precious to your life.

By adopting agile principles, my world is becoming wider and worthy to create much space of my family and my passion which is agile coaching.