Is Work/Life Balance About Multi-Tasking?
A Balanced Life Builds on a Fundamental Foundation of Life Purpose
Jul 7, 2008
The terms work/life balance and balanced-life are commonly used to describe various aspects of life satisfaction. Symptomatically, among the life maladies attributed to lack of balance are feeling overwhelmed by responsibilities, feeling guilt at shirking family in favor of work or vice-versa, lacking control over one's life, and feeling unfulfilled by life's responsibilities and roles.
Work/Life Separation
At the heart of the work/life balance issue is the assumption (often true) that one's job and personal life are separate and distinct. The inference is that work is not a desirable aspect of life and that life's satisfactions come from activities after one completes the work day. Again, all too often this it true.
Many of the corrective suggestions one finds center around changes employers can make, such as flex time, reduced mandatory overtime, and stress-reduction counseling. Employees are counseled to manage their time, seek equitable sharing of family responsibilities, and learn to moderate the effects of stress with meditation, yoga, and exercise.
All of the above are useful and helpful tools for better living. However, these tools have limited curative power as they moderate the effects of symptoms rather than impacting the fundamentals that generate dissatisfaction.
The Fundamentals of Well Being
The core issue for many people dissatisfied with life is poor alignment of their roles and responsibilities with their fundamental building blocks of well-being. Each person arrives pre-loaded with the components required for a happy, successful life. This can be seen by observing children at play. Given the appropriate supportive environment, young children naturally gravitate to activities they enjoy. They're pre-programmed to enjoy life, and have little trouble aligning themselves with fulfilling activities until adults superimpose restrictions and "must-do" structure on their lives.
Building Blocks of a Balanced Life
There are five fundamental building blocks of a satisfying, well balanced life. These begin with Life Purpose, the most important and influential of the five. While honoring life purpose, life feels meaningful and appropriate, providing a basis for life satisfaction. The remaining well being building blocks are one's Passions, Strengths, Principles, and Beliefs. Re-casting the words somewhat makes remembering them much easier, as Purpose, Passions, Powers, Principles, and Perspectives: the five Ps.
Life is most satisfying, balanced, and fulfilling when one's roles and responsibilities are well aligned with these five Ps, the building blocks of well being. The best alignment, and perhaps the most difficult for many, is to consciously align one's roles and responsibilities, including work, with the five Ps. This requires that one have the ability to pick and choose from among paying opportunities, selecting from those that best fit.
Realistically though, most young people simply find a job, accepting the first employment opportunity they're offered. Unless by chance they have hit upon an excellent match, this choice is unlikely to provide a strong match to purpose, passions, and powers (strengths). Must a person abandon job and family to find better life balance? Not necessarily.
Faced with an inability to make major changes, a person may still find ways to incorporate the five Ps into existing work and life responsibilities. This can often be accomplished a little at a time, finding opportunities to negotiate changes over time.
A Balanced Life
Bringing better balance to life starts with the fundamentals and builds out from there. Though it will take work and involve digging deeply into all aspects of living, achieving better balance in life brings benefits worth the effort.
For more resources see the author's profile or this balanced life site.
Related Articles: Fundamentals of a Balanced Life, Five Steps to a Balanced Life, Find Balance in Life
