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You are here: Home / Archives for Work and life

Work and life

October 1, 2013 by Christine

What If The Struggle For Worklife Balance Was Always Only Ever Inside Your Head?

Gear symbol in the head of a thinking silhouette woman conceptI suppose it’s why I ended up being so drawn to worklife writers and the whole worklife balance movement.

The quest to create a life that actually had some life in it, and wasn’t just all about work.

But I must admit that for me the whole thing has been a bit of a headfuck.

How as a professional person, with a deep sense of vocation, and a need to earn well, do you make life your number one priority?

Your well-being? Your happiness?

How do you dare, through one lens, let go of the grip that work has over us, create life on your terms and have faith you’ll be okay?

Or, through another lens, how can you dare be so selfish in a world where work is king?

Where the unwritten expectation is that you’re at your desk, virtual or not, and contactable 18 hours a day, 5 days a week, and sometimes at weekends too?

The Great Work Life Balance Hoax

Oh, I know there’s a ton of stuff out there about achieving that state. But as I’ve written before, I don’t really hold with the with the concept of balance – at least not in the way many of the worklife gurus talk about it. Bottom line: it’s a corporate idea that has adopted a new age word in the hope that it will be experienced as having holistic intentions. But its real objectives are to keep you in the system, whether that serves you or not.

And I’m not saying that employers can’t get a lot smarter at managing the pressure their people are under.

People are feeling stressed out.

But at the end of the day, I think the whole worklife thing goes a lot deeper than even the very best HR policies can ever cater for.

Because there is still such angst about it. For heaven’s sake, I experience it, and I’m self-employed.

WTF?!

The Challenge Of Making Work Fit Life

The dilemma for me goes like this:

If I throw myself entirely into my work, I can achieve loads, for sure. And, boy, because I love what I do, there’s a tendency in me to do just that.

But I then lose connection with the people in my life who matter to me.

My health suffers because things like my diet, exercise, rest and sleep all go tits up.

I end up resentful about just what work is doing to me and, paradoxically, my performance is not as strong overall as I like.

On the other hand, when I put life first, as I strive to do, I get caught in this place of tension.

That I’m somehow not being a proper “professional” because I’m making up my own work patterns.

That I’m phoney because I’m making client calls from one of my leisure travel destinations.

That any moment I’ll be exposed because I earn well in relation to the hours and time I put in.

Not that it stops me, but the whole time I have kind of felt like I’m running some kind of gauntlet. And I’ve assumed that that just came with the territory.

What If The Struggle Was Always Only Ever Inside Your Head?

But the other day I had this huge realisation.

All the feelings that I have of guilt, shame, feeling that I’m less-than?

What if I’d made them up?

What if I’d given something of myself over to some fantasy in my own head of how I imagined things were?

I don’t actually know if a corporate client calling me out of the blue at 10am on a Tuesday morning and finding me unavailable because I’m in the gym, or worse, still in pyjamas, would smile or frown.

The unexpected call is emotionally neutral. But I cringe at the thought of being judged for bunking off.

I don’t know whether my ducking out of a team dinner mid workshop because, as the coach, I feel the need for space and to rest is laughed at or not.

Again, the action is neutral. But I burn at the thought they think I’m a social wimp.

I don’t know whether the words I put out here impress you or not.

My posts are just me being me. But in the past at least, as I was writing last week, I have cared what you thought.

And people might frown, laugh at, or disregard me. Let’s face it, we all live in the same world view that puts more emphasis on what happens outside of us than on our own internal well-being.

But whether people do or don’t is not my business.

Only I can ever affect what I think and feel.

This challenge has been mine and mine alone. Because, no matter what else I make up, I’m actually pretty self-determining.

And thank you, God, that in our society, if we choose, we do have freedom to act. Much more freedom than I think we ever realise we have or give ourselves.

I cannot tell you how it has enhanced my sense of well-being since I had this revelation. Bizarrely, I’ve done less work in the last little while, but been more impactful and productive.

Less work, more productive

Take just writing this post. In the first instance, I sat down and the words wouldn’t come. Or rather, words came, but they weren’t forming in the way that reflected the knowing I was sitting with. For a while I persisted, all the time thinking, “I really must exercise today, but not until I get this post written. It has been over a week now since I wrote my last one, and I committed to turning up here more.”

Then I heard something deeper saying, “that’s bollocks. Nobody cares about any of this. And what if the best way to get the post written was to go exercise first?”

So I did. Beautiful autumn day here, so I eschewed the gym in favour of a walk. And it was just gorgeous to feel part of the whole countryside as its colours change, and the season makes its presence felt.

I got the first line for the post as I was walking. It just came. Once home the whole post wrote itself in about half an hour.

I’ve still really to get my head round the wider implications of all of this. But for now I just wanted to share it.

Does what I’m saying here resonate? What insights did it prompt in you as you read?

Posted with BlogsyPosted with Blogsy

Filed Under: Inner work, Self Development, Work and life Tagged With: work life balance

April 17, 2012 by Christine

How To Do The Work You Love – AND Pay The Bills

Did you see the article over on HBR the other day about choosing between making money and doing what you love?

Leonard A Schlesinger, Charles F Kiefer, and Paul B Brown answered this great – and not so uncommon – question:

“If you’re passionate about what you do, but it’s not going to make you a lot of money, should you still do it?”

Their answer was a conditional yes. The condition being that the thing you’re passionate about keeps you financially viable. Because, if it doesn’t, you need to find yourself some other kind of income stream meantime.

Not because you’re a crazy person for dreaming that you could turn what you love into a job.

But because, if you can’t fund yourself today, you risk being unable to do any of what you love either today or tomorrow. As the guys across at HBR point out, it’s a Maslow hierarchy of needs thing. Get the basic requirements for food, shelter and personal safety under control, before you go off up the self-actualisation ladder.

Great stuff.

And the post got me thinking about how career attitudes can sometimes trip us up. Pertinent to this discussion is one about focusing on one thing at a time.

Focus on one thing only

Whether it’s said, or implied, a key belief, at least when you’re growing up, is that you should choose the thing to which you’ll dedicate your career. (All the better if it’s something that has kudos and earns money.)

Either this thing OR that thing. Drama or law. Music or accountancy. In my case it was either art or European languages (there’s a whole other story about how I ended up doing psychology, but that’s for another day).

A lucky few find that one thing that satisfies them ongoing.

For the rest of us, it means that we often put away some of the things that really, really gripped us in making the choice of one thing versus another.

Which can appear okay for a while, but it’s amazing how often I hear people in their thirties and forties regret that, in the process of becoming the kind of professional they thought they were expected to be, they gave up music, or writing, or art or that idea they had about running their own business, or whatever.

See, different things fulfill us in different ways and maybe it’s unreasonable to expect one thing to completely satisfy us. But that’s how we’re often hard-wired to think.

Tough at the Top

I used to run workshops called Tough at the Top for senior people who were experiencing their jobs as particularly challenging, and who wanted group coaching and peer support in breaking through where they were at.

One of the exercises I had folks do was to think about why they did what they did for a living; what they expected from it. There was a wide range of things that people were looking for their big jobs to deliver. For example:

  • Challenge
  • Feeling that they were leaving a legacy
  • Being involved with something bigger than themselves
  • The ability to connect with and to lead other people
  • Wanting to be part of a team of smart colleagues
  • Personal development
  • Financial reward

Hardly surprising that these people were often feeling frustrated in one or more of these areas.

What if, instead of putting the onus on their big job, they considered all their needs and how they could get them met across a number of different vocational and personal interests?

The romantic parallels

Which reminds me of a client I’ve worked with for a number of years, and a challenge he was having, not with his work, but with a relationship.

See, he’d been dating this one woman, with whom he was very happy and very much in love. They did lovely things together, he told me that their sex life was good, and he enjoyed being around her. However, he’s a pretty intellectual guy and he had become frustrated that this woman either couldn’t or wouldn’t have the big-brained type of smart conversation that he enjoyed having from time to time.

Did this mean that they were not compatible?

His dilemma led me to support him to get really clear about what he needs from other people, particularly from his key relationships. He listed out: companionship, a sense of belonging, sex, fun, intellectual challenge. I then got him to think about whether he needed to have all of these met by one person. This got him thinking of some good friends he had with whom he loved intellectual sparring, and how, if he spent a little more time with them, he’d feel fine.

Here’s the interesting bit: when he gave himself permission that he could have different needs met by different people, he enjoyed both sets of relationships even more.

The moral of the story

It’s the same with work.

If we expect something that we love to make us money when it won’t or it’s simply not yet at that stage, we’ll resent it.

Ditto, if we expect something that makes us money to give us a bigger sense of purpose, if in our heart of hearts it doesn’t.

What if we learned from my client’s story?

What if we reframed that stuff about having to choose one career stream over another and thought creatively about how we might meet all of our vocational needs?

What might we end up doing?

In a nutshell, some of the work you do you’ll love. Some of the work you do will earn you money. Different kinds of work serve different purposes. Get over it and get on with relishing all that you do.

Filed Under: Thriving @ work, Work and life Tagged With: prosperity

June 17, 2011 by Christine

How Taking Your Marriage For Granted Can Kill Your Career

Meet George.

He’s a fictitious client, but not that fictitious.

He’s a lawyer. At school he had the ambition of getting into a top university and doing a law degree. So, he got top A Level results, and is invited to do law at Oxbridge. He gets a first.

Along the way he meets Sophie who’s studying international business studies.

While still at university he sets his next goal: get hired by a top firm to do his professional exams. Being such a stellar candidate, the Magic Circle firms line up to offer him a place.

He accepts one of these and begins to see the next horizon of ambition opening up to him: get qualified so he can actually call himself a lawyer, become an associate of the firm, and then work his way up to be accepted into the hallowed sanctuary of the partnership.

While he’s grafting at the coal face, he asks Sophie to marry him. They have a big, expensive party. White dress. Beautiful photographs.

She’s working for an investment bank and they handcuff themselves to a mortgage for a bigger house that they can’t really currently afford, in a good part of town, knowing that their income can only grow.

The early years of married life are full. They’re both caught up in parallel achieving and, although they see little of one another Monday through Friday, it’s exciting and they share their sense of themselves as a successful, young career couple.

Then Sophie becomes pregnant. It was in the plan, and they’re both delighted. For a while she slow tracks her career to spend more time with the baby.

Meantime, George is working away. He has specialised in International Capital Markets and, if not pulling all nighters to meet the deadlines on deals, he’s travelling across Europe and The Middle East.

Baby number two comes along. And Sophie starts to have a different take on life. She enjoys motherhood and wants to be successful in work without having to follow investment banking career rule protocol. She wants to make work fit life for a change.

She hires a coach, quits the bank (they’re doing another cull so that she walks away with some cash), and sets up a niche business doing organic baby foods that she markets to her network of professional mothers.

Part of the life she now seeks is about spending more time with George and her children.

At which point, it starts to become apparent to her that George is not around much to spend more time with.

She tries talking to him about it.

“We can’t all run flaky businesses,” he says, “and one of us needs a secure income.”

Months and years pass. Nothing changes. George is missing his children’s first words, their first steps, their bath times, their funny little sayings, their first days at school, their first report cards.

Sophie tries talking again. She’s sad that he’s missing out and that his children are too. It would be great if he’d at least come to parent-teacher evenings with her.

But by now he’s been appointed as an equity partner and really does feel that he has something to prove.

“I need your support,” he says. “Not your criticism.”

Things continue as is. Or so it seems.

The first thing I know about any of this story is, in fact, a call from George’s HRD.

“He’s top talent,” she says. “But his performance appears to have hit a wall. His associates and peers are complaining about him, and his Managing Partner is concerned. We’ve all been very understanding, but there’s a finite period of time that our support for him can continue. I think he has some work life issues…”

Then, George himself is sitting in front of me.

“My wife, Sophie, left me,” he says and begins to unravel.

He has never questioned her or their marriage at all. They’ve been together forever, so he has assumed they always will be. Sure, he knew she was pissed at his hours, and his travel, and the dedication he puts into his job, but she’d known that this was his thing when they married. It had been hers too early on. It was unfair that she’d changed the game on him.

Now he’s embroiled in a different kind of legal battle. They’ve, of course, engaged their separate top divorce lawyers and are going through the painful minutiae of their lives. The children, money, property. Who gets what.

Yes, he’s aggrieved that she has up and left him.

But it’s only now that he confronts how important she and his children have been to him. He has hired a cleaner and the firm has a laundry service he can use. But it’s hardly the same as walking into an orderly home day after day. And he wonders whether he can offload his Waitrose online shopping to his PA or how else he’s going to ever return to the phenomenon of the abundantly full fridge.

And he’s seeing more of his children than ever now.

Because that’s the agreement the divorce lawyers struck in court. Which is as odd as it is sweet. Seeing them there, all by himself, in what has been the family home. Forming new relationships with them. Finding the words to say he loves them.

And with that he has lost the ability to oversleep at weekends to catch up on his energy. At least every other weekend, when he has them. Though, in any case, sleep is shot. There’s no such thing in his life as rest.

He has spent the first months since Sophie left in continued denial. Imagining she’d come back; that this was just some big protest to capture his attention. She has it, so why isn’t she returning?

Imagining too that he could wall off his broken heart when he went to work. But he can’t. His emotional upset spills over. Being exhausted, he can’t focus. His fuse is short and he snaps at the least little thing.

And the longer she’s away, the more reality is hitting him. Still, he struggles to understand just what’s happening to him.

He can’t believe that she says she no longer loves him.

He can’t believe the words that are being conveyed to him about his behaviour via his legal council.

Neglectful. Abandoning. Emotionally abusive.

He can’t believe that the courts are on her side.

“Of course my numbers are down,” he says. “How could they not be?”

His heart is no longer in the game and his head is scrambled.

“What’s the point?” he’s asking himself. “What has ever been the point?”

Good questions. Questions that I wish on his behalf he was not having to ask in retrospect.

And I suspect there’s going to be more pain yet for George before there will be answers. But even George himself, with the benefit of hindsight, can offer some reflections on how it could have been different.

Top of his list is that he didn’t listen.

“I just avoided what was going wrong. I imagined it was a phase and that it would go away.”

The moral of this tale? Don’t take your marriage or core relationship for granted. It should never be a finite thing. It needs to adapt and grow with one, other or both of you, and if it doesn’t you’re setting it up for failure. If you find communication difficult, confront that as early on as possible. Even seek out a relationship coach or counsellor to help you have the tough conversations that you might not otherwise have.

While you build your career and are learning the intricate skills that will allow you to advance and propel it, learn too what it takes to have a good relationship, and allow yourself to grow as a person and not just as a professional.

What about you? What other advice would you offer George? What lessons might you learn from him?

Creative Commons License photo credit: HikingArtist.com

Filed Under: Corporate jobs, Work and life

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