Just For Results

Do you ever feel your work life balance is off? The key to living well is finding this balance. You may find one part of your life is going great, but another area is awful. You may even feel like you have it all, but feel confused by the fact you still do not feel happy.

You probably feel like you are juggling a dozen balls, with your job, kids, spouse, health, etc. It feels as if at any moment you will start to drop some of these balls. While our society emphasizes success in some areas, it neglects many others. Your identity can become the work you do. What good is it to be financially successful if you still feel unhappy. You may find yourself turning to medication, therapy, and rehab to simply survive in this world.

Work life balance tends to be the most obvious area in need of improvement. The work you do requires a huge chunk of your time and energy. It can feel like it really takes over your whole life. You cannot allow it to keep you from attending to other critical areas of your life. Work really only provides two things:

–The financial means to give you what you really want (time with family, ability to travel, retirement, etc.),

–It can provide a sense of purpose, especially if you are doing something you feel makes an impact.

You have to keep work in its proper place. It is not your whole life, unless you are married to the church. You can easily fall into the habit of focusing on work and putting life on hold until you have reached some career goal. The problem with this is there is always another goal to achieve.

As you are sitting here now, you must commit to start really living. This will require a major shift in self awareness. This doesn’t come easily in our culture. We drink, eat, shop and work in excess to keep ourselves from any kind of contemplation. You may be frightened of what you might find when you take a look inside yourself.

But being aware of your inner needs is critical to developing life balance. You must begin to use your internal compass to tell you when to play barbies with your child, take a nap, or pay attention to your spouse. It is easy for you to stay disconnected–isolation and independence are pillars of our society. Connecting requires a certain amount of vulnerability and openness. But bonding with others is a fundamental key to happiness.

The connection with yourself may be the most important of all. You are probably very disconnected to yourself even if most of the time you are alone. It is common for you to want to do one thing, but have your brain telling you that you ‘should’ do something more productive. If you don’t do what you ‘should’ do, you will find yourself miserable with guilt.

When you take away all of the ‘shoulds’, you begin to see how effective your internal compass really is. You have to stop ‘shoulding’ all over yourself if you hope to ever really find work life balance.