Don’t fall for wrong ideas about work/life balance
In many ways, the most important principle of Slow Leadership is building a balanced life between work, housekeeping, and leisure. It isn’t an easy task, especially in the present climate. But it isn’t being helped by the advice that’s given to look for answers in al the wrong places.
To find balance, you need first to know what it looks like. This is especially true of work/life balance—a topic that consistently produces more confusion than enlightenment.
It’s easy to say what balance is not:
- It’s not a fixed state. Life circumstances and work and career expectations continually change. What seemed desirable only a few months ago may now be unacceptable.
- It’s not some mathematical ratio between hours spent working and leisure or family time—let alone a 50:50 split.
- It’s not a way for organizations to try to turn reasonable and civilized working patterns into supposed “benefits†and pass them off as part of remuneration.
- It’s not an excuse for trying to get more paid vacations or better maternity (or paternity) leave arrangements.
- It’s not even a matter of time management or day-to-day decisions about when, how, and whether to spend time on all of life’s various aspects.
The real demands of creating balance
The real demands of creating a balanced life are all about choice, responsibility, and being alert to the consequences of all your actions—on yourself as well as on others.
How you spend your time is a consequence of your thoughts and intentions. What do you value most? What do you want to achieve? How do you wish others to see you and estimate your worth?
These are all key work/life balance choices—and you are responsible for them all the time, whatever external pressures are placed on you.
Suppose your organization demands extra working hours. Can you refuse? Yes, so long as you are willing to accept the consequences. Of course, if you want most to be seen as a hight flier and a model of corporate loyalty, a choice against extra working is not going to be a good one. But it’s still a choice you can make—and for which you are responsible.
Suppose you decide to start a family. That choice comes wtih a great many consequences—not least those that may cause you to wish to limit time away from home and cut lengthy working hours. Should organizations make the implications less negative in career terms? There are good arguments that it’s in their interests to do so, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was your choice to start a family and you must be aware that there are consequences. You can’t duck out of your responsibility for that choice.
Choices and consequences
Decisions about how to spend our lives are tough and the outcomes often uncertain. It’s tempting to try to shift responsibility onto others and claim that we had no choice. It’s also tempting to duck such choices altogether by demanding a “right†to have it all: a rich family life, with time off whenever it’s needed,and unaffected promotion opportunities. There is no such right and never has been. It may be an ideal we could work towards, but it’s not a right anyone can demand, any more than we have a right to good health or a right to be prosperous, or loved, or happy.
It won’t wash. Finding balance can neither be handed over to others, nor avoided by claiming a non-existent right to “have it all.†It’s down to you to make the best choices you can, based on the best information available to you at the time.
In life, incompatible desires and clashing priorities are constant. There are no ways to avoid them. Nor can you avoid the consequences of whatever choices you make. Even failure or refusal to make a choice consciously won’t help. It’s still a choice after all.
Building a balanced life requires waking up to your responsibility to do the best you can and accept that it’s never going to be perfect. It’s making choices consciously and carefully that others maybe try to avoid or pass off onto circumstances or fate. It’s accepting that whatever balance—or imbalance—characterizes your life, it’s there because that’s what you chose. And it’s finding ways to meet work and non-work situations with intelligence and wide-open eyes for the likely results.
You are what you choose and what you fail to choose. Save in conditions of slavery or actual imprisonment, there are always other options.
It’s just that we usually don’t like them very much and prefer to believe our mistakes are forced on us.
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