Guest Blog from Helen Calvert

The truth about work-life balance

Work-life balance. A familiar phrase, but an odd thought. The idea that we have work and then we have life… what does that even mean?

For most of us, work is an important part of life, it is not separate to life, and we have a heck of a lot to fit in to the ‘life’ side that is not work, and it does not function as a 50:50 split. So let’s talk about our kind of work-life balance and what we are actually trying to balance.

·         We have our paid work, if we do some, which usually takes up a good chunk of most people’s week.

·         We might have some voluntary or community work, commitments at our children’s school, additional unpaid obligations of some description.

·         Then there is parenting for a lot of us, which is not something that you switch on and off: it is 24/7 even though the children may not always be with us.

·         Whether or not we have children, we may have other family members for whom we are caring, or other people we have to fit into our week, in some fashion.

·         Then we might have a romantic intimate relationship we are trying to spend some time on because those relationships don’t just run themselves – they do need a little time spent on them.

·         We have our friendships, which should not be hard work but we do need to spend a little time on them and indeed we like spending time on them!

Are you feeling exhausted at that list?

Enjoying a moment of tranquillity with a warm cup of coffee, wrapped in comfort and surrounded by blossoms.

We have not yet even got to the bit that everyone dreams about and plans, which are the things we actually enjoy. I may have already mentioned some of them, a lot of the things we mentioned above you may enjoy, which is good! Yet there are also the things we enjoy just for ourselves, and by ourselves. Hobbies, classes, exercise, things we do in our free time, things we do with our ‘me’ time. Ways we relax, including staring at the TV not speaking whilst watching back-to-back trash. Sleep – a very important thing we have to fit in every day! – and other forms of rest.

As you can see, there is no way that it is a set of scales with one thing on one side and one thing on the other. That is nonsense. It can feel like a juggling act; it can feel like spinning plates. What it is, is deciding. It is not about balancing the scales, it is about deciding, and those decisions will be different for all of us. The questions to ask yourself are:

* What do you want more of?

* What do you want less of?

I cannot answer these questions for you. These decisions are different for everybody, but I would urge you to realise that it is for you to decide.

The time to do the things that you actually enjoy and that bring you happiness, that time is not going to be given to you by anybody else. If you are spending every week or every month or every year waiting for little bits of time to crop up where you can sneak in a walk or a nap or a shopping trip or whatever you might want to enjoy, it is not going to be very well balanced.

If we go back to the idea of scales, in truth, one side is everything you feel obligated to do, and one side is everything you want to do. I suspect the obligations side is currently heavily weighed down. Obligations vs desires is a more appropriate balance to consider.

The real balance is not between work and life. The real balance is between the negatives and the positives.

Everything that we do: paid work, parenting, volunteering, relationships, everything has its positives and negatives. We want to balance out the frustration, the exhaustion, the anxiety and the busy ness with enjoyment, joy, contentment and peace.

It is not about how many things we have going on. It is about which of them are obligations and which of them are things we desire.

Thinking points:

·         We are all juggling an exhausting list of obligations – it is not about balancing two things on a set of scales.

·         What do you want more of? What do you want less of? Those are the crucial questions.

·         The real balance is between obligations and desires.

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Helen Calvert

The No Bullsh*t Coach

www.happier-life.co.uk

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