The work-life balance conundrum
I LOVE the following quote. It resonated within me again recently. Like all insightful wisdom quotes, it oozes truth and speaks to all of our lives. The only sad thing to me is that some just don’t get it. Here it goes:
“Forget about trying to achieve the mythical work/life balance. Identify your priorities and make sure they align with those of other people in your life who are important. Once that’s done, the stress and frustration of trying to achieve balance work/life will disappear. disappear.”
-David Deane-Spread
The first thing I notice about this piece of truth is that it assumes that most people these days find it particularly difficult to balance life’s priorities. I mean, it’s hard work attending to all the important areas of life; dedicating the appropriate time and energy to all the activities that we consider important, right? The quote challenges this. Is it really that hard to balance our lives? If you’re like me, you might be seriously tempted to throw out the whole concept of ‘burnout’ forever. But it is never like that. that simple is it?
The second thing the quote mentions is that ‘work/life balance’ is a myth, the achievement of it. That is why it is an enigma. Most people tend to chase their tails to achieve the magical utopia of balance in life. The struggle is often due to the many things that need to be balanced, not to mention the many relationships we try to maintain. Most of these relationships have some kind of dysfunction or another: after all, we are human; Added to this are the almost unattainable goals that we seek to achieve in life. No wonder it’s difficult.
For many it’s too hard to even bother, so they give up on achieving any grim goals they might have had, or shelve plans for the thing or situation that might stretch them. The sadness of a life never lived! Of course, we all do this to a greater or lesser extent; giving up dreams of how big that apparently ‘bigger than us’ is. The example I give, however, is about the person’s life being out of control, perhaps with too many superficial relationships and too much ‘noise’, too much, too little real progress, too many interruptions in the flow of life. It’s a messy life from the outside looking in.
The very positive side of this quote, of course, is that it is incredibly powerful about hope. He claims that ‘frustration and stress will go away’, not maybe, but Will. That alone is reason enough to give it a try.
You might be saying “give what go?”
Implicit in the appointment is the commitment to an exercise in aligning roles and objectives, and their priorities and values within the scope of family, business and key friendship relationships. There is a lot of material now What to actually do this. How could you not do this with such a powerful end in mind?
This is a challenge for all of us and a maintenance challenge. We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that once we’ve “fixed” it, it won’t be a challenge anymore. The nature of life is that we tend to learn and relearn things; we are presented with many of the same ‘life’ problems along the way. They’re just packaged differently, coming at a different time, and reaching (or hitting) us on a different level, sometimes involving different people: the common thread is ‘you’ or ‘me’.
But once we finally get our life in balance, the things that threw it out of balance in the first place are likely to subdue for a while, before they rear their ugly heads again, and then again, and again during our lives. lives. in different and mysterious ways. This is the nature of life.
So is there any excuse? If we have a complaint about life’s problem regarding balance, why not take some advice from this quote and challenge yourself?
What can you lose?
©2007 Steve Wickham