Work-Life Balance or Balancing your Life?

This phrase work-life balance is used to explain the way an individual can and needs to bring a balance between their official work (employed or an entrepreneur) and personal life and thereby regulate the impact on one another. For me, the phrase seemed quite incomprehensible, yet I just could never explain exactly why it was so. When someone asked me that question, my response to it had the answer to the why. I always started my response with the phrase, “My work life and personal life…”. The blog that wrote about this in 2006 is also titled Balancing Work Life and Social Life as opposed to the phrase ‘Work-Life balance’.

Despite this stance, the aha moment for clarity dawned on me when recently I was having a conversation with my Spouse, and he spelled out pretty well what I was probably struggling to clearly state. 

Work is just one part of your life. 

Work is, but one component of our lives, among various other things that constitute our whole life. So how can you have a part of life in a balance with life itself? It logically/realistically can’t. Life is much larger, more like a superset (sometimes I think of it as a universal set) of work. 

With this explanation, for me, “work-life balance” loses its traditional value that work and life itself need to be given equal focus/weightage.

Once this is the perspective, priority, process, and the rest just follow, helping in the long run to practice the calm that's the first step for self-care. While the perception shift sounds easy when explained, really arriving at this mindset takes a lot of effort against generational conditioning and groupthink. 

Here are a few things that can help in reframing our thoughts to develop this healthy outlook. Once we do this, we have a hold on our well-being – mental and physical. 

Define your components of life

Explicitly defining what life means for you and maybe evening writing it down on a piece of paper or drawing a mind map of it. For some, it could just mean predominantly their work, ending up being workaholics and facing the consequences on health that workaholism can lead to. For some others, it could only mean being a part of a socially acceptable marriage institution, ending up losing their self-identity, and seeing them sacrificing their needs as a primary carer of their family.

Let go of Perfectionism

The thought that helps within assisting in this reframing our mindset to remove the focus from work and shift it to the larger image of life is the acceptance that, I am not perfect, nowhere close to being an expert. There's always a scope for us to learn from anyone and anywhere. This provides the grounding needed to accept and work with our failures (even to meet our own expectations from ourselves), in life and work. 

Guilt-free Mindset

Whichever part of the world we are from, human conditioning has a stronghold on self-driven guilt on a lot of things. Understanding the difference between necessary guilt, to ensure not repeating a mistake or a blunder and toxic guilt that cripples us from even functioning normally is a journey each of us needs to travel through self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Honing your Abilities

While the popular belief is that people are born with their abilities, I personally believe that these can be developed by anyone, at any age. An article by Pradeep Sahay on LinkedIn that highlights that the old nature vs nurture absolutist argument is probably ready to be shelved and in its place, a new approach of using context to understand the nature and nurture aspect of talent is a good place to start reading to expand our outlook. There is additional reading within the article that is helpful in adding to our knowledge and learning.

Accepting the Fluidness of Life

My favourite phrase ‘Life throws a curveball when you least expect it’ – repeating this every time in my head during the tough phases of life, helps me tackle them because there is hope that eventually when you practice tacking enough curveballs, the rude shock of the getting sucker-punched by a curveball can one day change to a pleasurable challenge of reeling in a tough situation and growing with the learning from the tackle. This also brings with it the skill of adapting/adopting to change, learning the skills to stay relevant, and growing & changing with the change that is a constant always.

Healthy Routines

When we are on the topic of change, the one thing that can keep us grounded is having healthy routines. Routines help in giving us a soft comfort that helps us deal with the rest of the chaos that is outside our power of control, as it comes. 

Setting boundaries 

Change and routine also bring us to the most important part of healthy regulation – setting healthy boundaries. Working on our conditioning, unconscious biases, understanding ourselves and working on accepting ourselves the way we are before we can start working on what changes we wish to see in ourselves would be a great place to start for setting healthy personal boundaries.

Believing in Relationships

Building relationships (in the workspace and in our personal lives) involves actively engaging in nurturing the relationship and ensuring that the basis of every relationship, trust, remains undeterred. Working on relationships also helps in creating a safety net for us to rely on when we are low on our personal strengths. While the phrase building and believing in a relationship seems simple enough, it is an emotional roller coaster ride and hence requires a lot of work on our personal emotional intelligence.

Social Life

While family and work colleagues are great, they are a given. Having a social life outside these two, building a social circle that includes, friends, causes that are close to our heart, like-minded groups sharing similar thoughts, passion, and interests, needs to be part of our social life for us to gain an enriching life experience.

We are all dispensable (replaceable) in the grand scheme of life, especially with the ‘Change being a constant’ tag line creeping up unannounced. A life well-lived (for me) means, when I am replaced (or dispensed), I have no regrets at all and am content with how I lived my life. 

While these are some of the mindful ways to have a fulfilling life as I see it, most would call these tips to have a great work-life balance. Whatever you would like to call it, these are some of the life hacks that I would stand by to make living life easier and enjoyable, considering that life always has a way to surprise us, when we least expect it. 

This blog is part of Blogchatter’s #CauseAChatter challenge, #MentalHealthTalks.