Work-Life Balance Left Me Bored
Work-life balance is a made up concept and a conversation we buy into because we think it's what we should be striving for. But to strive for balance, we first must believe we're out of balance, and I think that's where we set ourselves up for failure.
Trying to juggle living the life I wanted, while also ticking society's boxes and keeping everyone else around me happy, left me exhausted, unfulfilled and going around in circles.
Eventually I discovered that no matter how much I tried to please and fulfil others' expectations, whatever I did wasn't ever going to be enough.
HAVE YOU RECEIVED YOUR CALL?
Most of us wait for a wake up call before we wake up to the realisation that if we continue trying to live up to some external ideal, there is a predictable future ahead that doesn't look so healthy.
For me, it took about five wake up calls to listen to the message.
Up until the final call, I kept trying to feel better on the inside by changing my world on the outside. The usual stuff like changing jobs, leaving relationships, moving country or state, radicalising my nutrition and militarising my exercise regime. But wherever I went and whatever I tried, there I was.
NEED A HOLIDAY?
Corporate burnout was my wake up call number two but still wasn't enough to completely shake me awake. I just channelled my stress into other things. Finally, when my health deteriorated to a point that I could no longer sustain the pace, I went on a deeper search for wellness and meaning.
One of the things I courted was work-life balance. A concerned friend offered me a government role that seemed like a holiday compared to how I'd been pushing myself for the last, well forever.
At first it was a novelty to work 7.25 hours a day with days off and a range of other perks. I thought that if I could just be satisfied with living a smaller life than my imagination desired, think smaller, dream smaller and enjoy a very well paid, secure job, surely I'd be the Work-Life Balance Master and feel happy and satisfied.
It was important work that I was privileged to undertake and supports what I do today, however I did not achieve a feeling of work-life balance.
From the outside looking in, the circumstances of my life seemed balanced, but I was restless, bored and unfulfilled.
UTOPIA OR SET-UP?
Thinking we can be equally balanced in all areas of life at all times is just another way we get to beat up on ourselves.
I came to understand that the made up concept of work-life balance, while it seemed some utopia we should all be striving for, was a setup for potential life-long dissatisfaction, frustration and failure to actually create the things we deeply desire that require complete focus.
If you're a parent, think about when you had your first baby. In those first few weeks and months, life is not balanced, you are fully and utterly consumed with caring for your newborn. Right or wrong, there is no balance.
It's the same when we begin an important intimate relationship, it consumes our hearts and our souls and life becomes very imbalanced while we learn about each other and enjoy the early days of growing together.
When we start a business or take an important step in our career, balance is not an option, it's an all-in situation. The same as launching a creative process or training to run a marathon, balance is not the quest. Focus, consistency, commitment and reaching further are what's required if we want to fulfil our goal.
IMBALANCE ISN'T FAILURE
With each significant milestone in our lives, there is complete imbalance. If we attempt to sustain balance through life's adventures, endeavours, challenges and aspirations because we think that's success, we can become resentful as we continue to fall short of what we truly want.
CONSCIOUS LIVING
Rather than work-life balance (which even bores me as I write the words!), I'm an advocate for self-responsibility and conscious living. Choosing with awareness, courage, compassion and inspiration, where we want to invest our energy at any time in our lives, without the need to justify, defend or explain it.
When we seek balance, we can easily default to blaming our external circumstances (like workload or our partner not being there when we need them, or our own inability to do or have it all) for why we don't feel the prized feeling of being balanced in our lives.
But when we're committed to conscious living and being 100% responsible for how our life goes, our choices are ours and we must learn how to lean in and have honest conversations. It requires us to acknowledge what we need and be open and vulnerable in communicating our needs, and allowing others to have their own.
BOUNDARIES OVER BALANCE
It took me many years to find a pathway to holistic wellbeing and it continues to remain a daily practice. One of my life mantras now is boundaries over balance. It reminds me that I am in control of my life and I get to choose where I invest my focus and energy.
When I'm coaching women in leadership who have full lives and doing their best to keep all the spinning plates in the air, but exhausted and unable to see a light at the end of that tiring tunnel, a sense of relief washes over them when they let go of the external ideal of balance. A made-up ideal they had come to believe was the new measure of success.
SWEET RELIEF
In seeking balance, I believe we're seeking a feeling of relief, centredness, fulfilment, love and freedom but while we seek these feelings outside of ourselves we remain stuck in a state of chase. From this context, no matter how many goals we achieve, we'll never feel truly at home in ourselves and the feeling of balance will continue to elude us.
When we learn how to listen to what we truly want, what's in our hearts and what our body is trying to tell us, we connect with a deep sense of peace, one we've been chasing but has been within us all along.
