“Would you talk to us about how we can achieve work/life balance?” she asked while looking at me with eyes desperate to understand the secrets of life.
I was sitting in a small conference room at the local university with a group of MBA student mentees and as I glanced around the room the other women were silently nodding their heads and leaning forward, anxious to hear my answer.
I looked out the large conference room windows at the snowflakes lightly falling from the sky and sighed. Instead of giving them an answer, I asked the following questions:
- Why do you believe you need to have work/life balance?
- Who is telling you that you need work/life balance or that you currently don’t have it?
- What is your definition of work/life balance? In other words, what does work/life balance look like?
The answers surprised the women because, unanimously, they each believed they needed better work/life balance because someone else had told them they needed it. In many cases, it was a co-worker who had judged them lacking in work/life balance. For a few of the women, it had been a family member. In all cases, the person judging them and proclaiming them to lack work/life balance was a female.
We hunted around the conference room for dry erase pens and then I asked the women to draw on the white board a diagram of what they thought a woman’s life looked like from birth to death. After some giggles and initial trepidation they began drawing. The end result looked like a curvy line (like a sine wave) across the white board; a line curving up and down, up and down.
At various peaks and valleys the women had written items such as birth, elementary school, high school, college, first real job, MBA/graduate school, fall in love, get married, achieve career goals, have children... anyway, you get the picture, all the way to death. In our discussion afterwards, what we found interesting is that none of the women could provide a clear definition of work/life balance because what worked as a definition for one woman didn’t work for another. Every person in the room defined work/life balance in a different way; and, each person was looking at the others in amazement. “Let me ask a different question,” I said. “What’s your definition of success?”
There were many superb philosophical answers given and then one woman said thoughtfully, “Happiness. Being happy is my definition of success.”
The room got quiet and everyone turned to look at her. “Well it’s true. If I do my best on a test and I’m happy with how hard I tried, then I was successful, regardless of my grade. If I do my best in a job interview and am happy about it, then I was successful.”
Everyone in the room smiled. My mother and grandmothers were right; with age does come wisdom, and what I’ve learned during my life is that, like snowflakes, everyone is unique and everyone’s life evolves in a sort of sine wave form rhythm. Nothing is a straight line with all aspects of life in perfect balance at all times.
There will be times in our lives when we are single, college graduates with time on our hands to dedicate 50+ hours a week to work – because we can and we want to. There will be times, such as when we have children, that we’ll have less time for our careers because we want to put more time and effort into our families.
As the circle of life continues (or the sine wave form in this case) we may find we have more time, once again, for career and personal pursuits once our children are grown and on their own. Instead of providing a perfunctory answer to their question about how to achieve work/life balance, I decided to leave them with these four thoughts instead:
- The next time someone tells you that you need work/life balance; ask them why they would make those comments. The reality might be they are actually projecting their own emotions and desires onto you.
- The only person we should judge is the person staring back at us in the mirror. If we ever feel the urge to tell someone else they need better work/life balance, we should keep our mouths shut and then look in the mirror and analyze our own lives.
- Life is filled with peaks and valleys where we will spend more time in certain pursuits at different times in our lives. Instead of worrying that we’re not in perfect balance, we should celebrate the times when we’re off balance – as these are usually the times when we learn the most.
- Instead of desiring work/life balance, we should seek inner happiness. It is through happiness that we will achieve success. Before going to bed each night, try thinking of at least two things that made you happy that day.
What do you think? Do you believe people can really achieve work/life balance throughout their lives or is the better path to seek harmony and happiness? Share your thoughts in the “Comments” section below and weigh in on this topic.
~ Lisa Quast Speak up! Join me on Twitter and Facebook Photo credit: Microsoft Clip Art
