Program Topics
Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.
– Dolly Parton
What can be more important in today’s mechanistic lifestyle than knowing how to balance between our professional and personal lives? The number one reason for stress in America is work. Workplace stress costs US industries approximately $500 billion annually in absenteeism, turnover, diminished productivity, and medical and legal insurance costs.
More importantly, workplace stress has been responsible for physical and mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, relationship problems, high blood pressure, diabetes and even some types of cancer. Workplace stress has reached epidemic proportions in recent times due to long working hours, heavy workload, deadline pressures, frequent changes, boredom and disconnection, and job insecurity.
The line that used to separate our work and personal lives is almost invisible now. There was a time when the divide between work and personal life was clear. We worked only at the designated place of our work and we didn’t have to think about work during other times. Technology has changed all this. With ready accessibility to information anywhere and at all times, work has entered our personal life as well.
Now, if one does not put conscious effort to make some important decisions about separating professional and personal, it is next to impossible to avoid work-related stress, anxiety, and other problems. The consequences of poor work-life balance can be a lot worse than just stress and anxiety.
Now, let’s look at our two biggest existential fears; fear of death and fear of the unknown. These two fears manifest themselves in our lives in a multitude of ways. Fear of sickness, aging, poverty, aggression and violence are all connected to the primary fear of death. Fear of death fuels the imagination of the mind to transform simple and seemingly harmless situations into fearful experiences.
If we don’t understand this hallucinatory nature of our minds, we will fall victim to its wild, fearful imaginations. This is also why we are afraid of the unknown. The mind has the choice to imagine anything it wants to about an unknown entity, but it frequently chooses a fearful response because it is constantly driven by the fear of death.
Fear is not totally irrelevant and useless. Instinctual fear has its uses; it helps us to make quick decisions which protect us from immediate danger. It is not this instinctual fear of heights, strange places or wild animals that we need to be worried about. The fear that is a result of our wild imaginations, driven by fear of death is what we need to address.
Franklin D Roosevelt put it perfectly when he said, “Only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. The majority of our fears are generated within us, and external circumstances have very little to do with it. We have to understand the inner-functioning mechanism of fear and deal with it effectively.
The mechanism of imagined fear is the very foundation of our mind. With no problem, we can say that “fear is the mind and the mind is fear”. In a way, the only way to go beyond all our fears is by learning how to stay away from our minds. This might sound crazy if you are just a mind. Because you are something more than the mind, it is possible.
The mind is a collection of thoughts, most of which are generated through fear. We have the choice to fully accept this fearful mind as a part of our reality and live in fear all the time, or we can make a conscious choice to put some distance between us and our minds.
The very fact that we can watch and use our minds should tell us that we are not our minds. We can pick up a stone and throw it, because we are not the stone. Similarly, we can watch a thought and get rid of it, because we are not the thought.
Work-life balance can easily be achieved if we are willing to make a few systematic changes in the way we approach our professional and personal lives. Let’s look at some important components of work-life balance, how they affect us and how to deal with them.
Getting Organized:
Many of our work-life balance-related problems can be attributed to our unorganized, haphazard and random way of life. An organized way of living doesn’t come naturally to us. We are naturally evolved to respond to situations relying on our memory. This is practically impossible in today’s time, considering the number of things we have to deal with on a daily basis.
Without a regular habit of writing down important and difficult-to-remember details like appointments, time tables, financials, future plans, goals etc., it is next to impossible to be organized. Being organized is not just about arranging things better; it is also about setting your priorities right and sticking to them. An organized way of living helps you to avoid the common mistakes of forgetfulness and repetition. It will also help you to create and execute a balanced plan to manage your personal and professional lives.
Improving Work Efficiency:
If your work is taking more time than is usually necessary, and if you are constantly finding it difficult to meet your deadlines, you need to re-look at your work efficiency levels. If you are not efficient enough to complete your tasks on time, naturally it eats into your personal time, upsetting your work-life balance.
Efficiency can be increased by working smarter instead of harder. Instead of getting into an unconscious routine of activities, if you are able to pay attention to the details of your daily work and devise methods and systems to make it easier, it will help you to finish your tasks in time, and will give you that little bit of extra time for your personal life.
Managing Time:
Time is a constant that is available in equal amounts to all of us. What we call managing time is actually managing ourselves in time. Time management is all about allocating specific amounts of time to each activity and being conscious of not exceeding this time limit. It only takes a few weeks of consistent practice to learn this practice.
We cannot live each and every moment of our lives looking at the clock, but with regular practice of timing specific activities we can develop a natural internal mechanism that keeps track of time for us. It is difficult to manage time because our perception of it varies according to different activities.
If we are doing something we like, time simply flies, and when doing something we don’t like, time crawls at a snail’s pace. This is why it’s necessary for us to establish a fixed time allotment for each activity, and practice it for a few weeks until it becomes natural.
Setting Realistic Goals:
Your goals have to match your abilities and your choice of lifestyle. Setting unreasonable and unattainable goals is the easiest way to lose your delicate work-life balance. Your goals can be big, but they need to be rooted in your own personal experience of life. You have to take into consideration your lifestyle choices and your priorities before setting audacious goals.
If your goals are simply based on emulating other people and their lifestyles, then for sure you will find it difficult to reach them. Spending some time self-introspecting on the kind of life you want to have will help you to keep your goals within reach.
Big and long-term goals can be broken down into smaller actionable and attainable goals. This will help you to move toward your goals one step at a time without compromising too much on your personal happiness and well-being.
The trouble tree
The carpenter I hired to help me restore an old farmhouse had just finished a rough first day on the job. A flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric saw quit and now his ancient pickup truck refused to start.
While I drove him home, he sat in stony silence. On arriving he invited me in to meet his family. As we walked toward the front door, he paused briefly at a small tree, touching the tips of the branches with both hands. Upon opening the door he underwent an amazing transformation. His tan face was wreathed in smiles and he hugged his two small children and gave his wife a kiss.
Dealing with Procrastination:
We constantly procrastinate because of the way we understand time. When we look at time in terms of days, weeks or months, it is very natural to keep putting things off into the future. The way to effectively go beyond our habit of procrastination is to look at time as simply a single moment available to us.
Anything and everything we need to accomplish can be accomplished only in this moment. What you can do this moment is all that matters. The future exists only as a part of our plans; it does not exist in reality.
The moment we stop planning and start doing something, we should forget all about the future. Every moment we should reflect on our actions and constantly align them toward our goals. What we can do in the present moment is the only thing we can get done.
Taking Meaningful Breaks:
In today’s workaholic lifestyle, it is very easy to burn out. It is important to take meaningful breaks that can help you to relax, refresh and rejuvenate. Breaks are needed both for the body and the mind. It is a totally wrong idea that a break can upset your rhythm of work. On the contrary, not taking necessary breaks can upset your work and personal life.
A simple way to stop working yourself to death is by reminding yourself that your first priority is always your mind and body. Absolutely nothing is more important than your physical and mental well-being. If you are not taking the necessary breaks to keep your mind and body in the right condition, then all your hard work is in vain. A break will also help your thoughts and ideas to settle down, helping you to gain a new understanding of situations. A meaningful break can also help to increase your creativity.
Managing Relationships at Work:
It is much easier to forget our work than to forget the people we work with. If we cannot handle our relationships at work, both our personal and professional lives will be upset.
Anger, resentment, jealousy, fear and other negative emotions that we develop with people at work will spill over into our personal life as well. This is why one of our favorite pastimes is talking about our work problems, especially those that are related to people.
It is important that we maintain a slightly detached and professional relationship with people at work. Detachment will help us to look at a difference of opinions in a professional way instead of taking things personally. Learning to forgive and move on is probably the most important quality we can develop to handle our relationship problems at work.
Work and Home Separation:
You have to make a conscious choice to keep your professional and personal lives separate. Compartmentalization of your work and personal lives into two completely different categories will help you to give equal importance to both.
Your work life and personal life demand different skills and emotions, and by keeping them separate, you can handle them more efficiently. The emotions that are needed at home are mostly useless at work, and your work skills are mostly useless at home. Making a conscious choice to not discuss work at home and not discuss home at work is the foundation to accomplish this.
Connection to Work:
As much as we have been talking about separation of personal and professional life, we should also understand that our profession is also a part of our personal life. We cannot work like machines and wait for the end of the day to spring back to life.
The only way to truly balance our work and life is to enjoy what we are doing. Developing a deeper connection with what we are doing and understanding it as much as possible will help us to enjoy our work. Work need not always be serious and boring; we can lighten up the mood and keep it engaging.
The most important thing to remember is that even while we are working, we are still living. If we can bring life to work and make it lively, it can become a part of us. Then, balancing a personal and professional life will only be a matter of arranging and organizing two things we love equally.
The workaholics have done immense harm to the world. And the greatest harm they have done is that they have deprived life of its moments of celebration and festivity. It is because of them that there is so little festivity in the world, and every day it is becoming more and more dull and dreary and miserable.
Methods & Techniques
Work and life do overlap, but they definitely need to be as separate as possible. For the next few days, make a conscious effort to make a note of when you think of personal life while at work OR when you think of work while you are not at work. Just make a mark on a sheet of paper (be honest, now) each time this happens.
Study your notes after a few days to see just how much time overlaps from one into the other. If separating work and personal is a big problem, the following steps will be useful in making the separation:
- Explain to your supervisor what your intentions are (to keep work and personal separate) and to only contact you after hours in a dire emergency.
- Ask your family members to contact you at work only when absolutely necessary, and not to discuss personal problems with you while you are at work.
Don’t bring personal problems to work and don’t take work problems home.
At all times practice mindfulness. Being mindful (in the moment) keeps you focused on the task at hand.
Stay organized. Keep important things written down so you won’t spend unnecessary time and energy trying to remember or worrying that you might forget something.
Form relationships with people outside of your work.
Take breaks-stretch, get outside every day. Nature is a wonderful mediator.
If you work from home, have a specific place to work and at the end of your work time, close the door!
Questions For Reflection
Question 1: What are the basic components of a healthy work-life balance?
Question 2: What are some ways you can keep “work at work” and “home at home”?
Question 3: When would it be okay for work/personal to overlap? Ever?
Question 4: How can mindfulness help in creating a successful work-life balance?