Five Lessons I’ve learnt About Work/Life Balance And How To Achieve It.
I have been reflecting this week on what it means to have a healthy balanced life as I’ve been talking to a lot of women lately who feel they don’t have it, and who are wondering if the whole idea of a balanced working life is a myth.
I know that for a large chunk of my adult life, I never really felt I’d nailed it either and used to wonder the same thing.
My experience used to be the same as the women I’ve been talking to: A sense of frustration and resignation that I’d carved things up to make sure I had time for all the things but still I didn’t feel that I had good balance, so maybe it wasn’t an attainable thing.
And I believed this was because I just had too much to do, and not enough time.
Practically this looked like ticking off some of the outstanding things on the to-do list/to ‘just’ finish this or that piece of work before I officially started my non-work time so I could head into my non-work time with some sort of sense of achievement and closure on the previous week. But then my non-work time shrank. And I was tired, and bit resentful about the impact of work, so I couldn’t fully enjoy my non-work time anyway.
And when I wasn’t actively working my mind was often drifting to the never ending ‘to do’ list and worries about all the unfinished things and what I’d be walking into the following week (which was even worse when I started working part-time).
As for what Non-work time consisted of - it was filled with chores, life-admin, meeting up with friends, or spending time with my hubby looking after the cat - and maybe some exercise. And then when my son came along, being a parent and doing all the parenty things got added in too (and that’s when I started officially working part time).
On paper - it was balanced. I had time for work and time for non-work things. But I was always feeling like I was tackling everything badly and always feeling exhausted.
There was never enough time.
Lesson No. 1: It’s not about time
There was a point at which I realised that when I said I didn’t have enough time, that wasn’t strictly true (apart from one or two period in my life when it absolutely was true, and that lead to Stress and burnout- a topic for another time). I did have time. The problem was actually that I did not have the energy, mental headspace or emotional bandwidth to deal with all the things. My highly sensitive system was overloaded and I just didn’t have enough headspace, energy or emotional resilience in my tank to deal with ALL the things in the way I would best want to, and in a way that didn’t leave me feeling like a failure, guilty, gumpy and/or frazzled.
Dealing with too many things on a to-do list is actually quite easy on a practical level - just prioritise, negotiate if you need to, and do the urgent and important things first. And then be OK with knowing that you can only do what you can with the time you have (and say ‘no’ to some stuff).
But we all know it’s not that simple - because emotions get in the way. We feel guilty or that we’re not emotionally present even when we’re physically present, or that we’ve failed when we haven’t delivered when we said we would or we feel that we’re letting someone down because we promised we’d bake that cake and we just haven’t been able to squeeze it in (even though they totally understand, that’s the reason you offered in the first place, and a shop bought one will do just fine). All this emotional stuff drains our reserves and it’s THIS too that can leave us feeling that we have no balance.
Hmmmm. Interesting.
Whether or not I felt my working life was balanced actually had much less to do with how ‘much’ time was available to me (although clearly that is a factor) - it had much more to do with how well fuelled I felt to be able to function effectively in the time that I had. Not just physically showing up, but actually being present and actively attending to the things/people in front of me, in a way that felt easeful, enjoyable and rewarding, rather than stressful, draining and dissatisfying.
Lesson No. 2: Balance is an intentional and practiced art, not an exact science
And since then, I have come to realise that balance is not an exact science or achieved simply through the way we carve up time to allow us to fit in all the DOING.
It’s more of a skilled practice and art form that requires us to connect with what we need to feed our inner-selves so we can BE the calm, energised, productive and compassionate person we are in our essence AS WELL AS enabing us to DO all the things that we want and need to get done, so that we FEEL we are living with a healthy balance.
And this highlights one of the main issues with the way we often consider how we achieve balance.
We look at it only from an external perspective. We carve up and schedule our time to make sure we can fit all the things we need to DO into the time we have (which for practical purposes is 24 hours a day - we can talk about the concept of time, quantum things and bending time another time!!). So our time is more often than not scheduled with all of the work and life things. Our sense of balance becomes a finely tensioned fully loaded tight-rope that ‘as long as’ no one wobbles it or puts anything else too heavy on it things will be ‘just fine’.
There are two big issues with this.
There is no room for the unexpected and the unplanned.
There is no room for YOU.
So when life ‘happens’ (which it will, because the only certaintly in life is that it is full of uncertaintly, curve-balls, tales of the unexpected and delightful or disastrous surprises) your tanks of mental and emotional resilience are likely running on low to empty. So you find yourself feeling off-balance to some degree, most of the time. (Be honest, you know that to be true, because you surprise yourselves when you have that “Oh! Actually, today was a really GOOD day!” feeling - most of the time you are grappling with the wobbly, unstable tight-rope that feels like it’s going to give way or tip us off at any moment - no?!)
And it’s exhausting.
Lesson no.3: Balance includes work, life and YOU
And that’s the biggest realisation of all.
It doesn’t matter how ‘right’ your balance looks on paper and in the land of reason and logic, if it doesn’t FEEL balanced to you, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you - it’s probably just that you’ve forgotten about you. Healthy balance requires some spaciousness to give you time for your self-care too (to do things you love, to rest, recharge and re-energise, for a nourished mind, body and soul) and to allow some contingency, some slack, for those unexpected life bombs.
Lesson no.4: Balance is a moving flow not a static once and done thing
Balance is a shape-shifter - what we think of and experience as ‘balance’ changes over time, from week to week from day to day: I know from my own experience that what worked for me in my twenties, didn’t work in my thirties, and certainly wouldn’t work for me now. What worked for me last year doesn’t work for me this year. Sometimes what worked last week, isn’t fitting so well this week!
It’s less like a set of scales and more like the life flow of yin and yang.
So to achieve balance, we need to stay connected with what it means for us in the here and now and be very intentional about cultivating the right conditions so we can achieve that feeling, adjusting in response to our inner as well as our outer worlds.
Asking yourself: What are the things I need to do, who do I need to be available for and what do I personally need to ensure that I am nourished and refuelled, so I can show up as the best version of me, enabling me to stay calm, be present, be productive, supportive etc etc. - and
Because this is what true, healthy balance feels like. Easeful, flowing, in-control and dare I say, joyful (sounds like fantasy, right?!).
Lesson no 5. Achieving healthy balance happens on purpose
It’s like a well managed project - we need to know what the main DOING things are that we need to cover off, and we need to make the time in our schedule for those things. And that includes not just the work and life things, but the things YOU need to ensure your emotional, energetic and mental batteries are charged up. You and your needs need to be a priority on the to do list too.
In addition, like a good project, you need to make sure that there is inbuilt contingency time for those occasions when things don’t go to plan, when you or someone in your family is unwell, when you have a slower period of ‘wintering’.
This is ESPECIALLY important to understand for those of us who are introvert and/or highly sensitive, who need even more time for emptying our emotional buckets, giving our busy brains a rest and calming and re-energising our nervous systems.
In short…
When we feel balanced, things FEEL easy. They FEEL in flow. We FEEL centred, light and spacious. And that is the result of our needs being met on an emotional, energetic and pscyhological level - as well as practically.
Your personal eco-system
I like to think of it as cultivating a personal ‘ecosystem’ where all the things in our life (work, family, community, friends, hobbies, our self-care and fulfilment) co-exist in a sustainable way, in whatever proportions work for you, and in way that allows some adjustment, tweaking and responsiveness to changing external conditions - just like nature’s eco-system responds to environmental changes*
*Taking this one stage further - the reason we are facing the climate crisis is largely because we are not co-existing with the rest of the natural world in a sustainable way - and that’s what can happen with balance in our own lives too - when we take from ourselves more than we have to give - things feel out of balance.
How balanced does your life feel -do these lessons resonate with you?
I invite you to pick one small thing you could do to create more space for your emotional, mental and energetic recharging, and make the time in your schedule to make sure it happens…
This is the first of what will likely be a series of blogs on the topics of Balance, Boundaries and BS stories that get in the way of our self-care and fulfilment - so if you liked this you might also like to join my band of merry women by signing-up for my newsletter where I share many often nature inspired psychological and emotional wellbeing tips, tools and thoughts to help and support you as you navigate this life of yours! Plus you’ll be the first to hear about the latest blog-landings, offers and other new things. (You can also grab a copy of my little guide of nature inspired prompts for reconnecting with ‘you’ while you’re at it to see if it helps you to see your balance differently)