experience-balance

Work-Life Balance: It’s All about Choices

experience-balanceEach day you make choices that influence your pace and quality of life. Many of these choices are unconscious:

  • The news stories about people suing fast-food companies because the fast food meals made them fat.
  • The friend who hasn’t taken a vacation from work in years.
  • How you keep saying “I just don’t get enough sleep.”

Choices, my friend, it’s all about choices. It’s a good thing that most do not have to think about every little choice that is made. When it comes to creating harmony between your work-related activities and the rest-of-your-life activities, it is a good idea to wake up and smell the proverbial coffee.

Living with the Effect of Your Choices

Failure to acknowledge the choices being made will lead to living with unhealthy choices. Feeling overwhelmed. Feeling out of control. Feeling unhealthy. These effects are all symptoms of your life slowing down and eventually coming to a screeching halt. You can’t live a life accelerated if you are too busy focusing on the effort of balancing it all. That is exhausting to try to maintain or sustain for any length of time.

Straight Talk from the Experts

Research conducted on work-life balance shows a picture that’s probably not too surprising:

  • We work while we’re on vacation.
  • We call in with a fake sick day just to get a breather, reflect, or catch up on sleep.

In 1906 pioneering American psychologist and philosopher, William James, expressed in a letter to H.G. Wells that our “exclusive worship” of success and money was “our national disease.” Over a hundred years later, we seem to be suffering from the same illness. Little has changed.

This kind of a lifestyle can lead to physical and emotional illness. That’s not what employers want. That’s not what you want for your best self. It’s a lifestyle that becomes a sort of trance state. It is a lifestyle pattern that is hard to wake up from – if you are lucky enough to realize or believe you can. Being on the continuous gerbil wheel keeps you from finding harmony between the life you want and the life you are currently living.

Aim Higher, Strive for Better

Better work-life balance is high on the priority list for many workers. This is especially true for the generations following the Baby Boomers who see quality of life as a top priority, not monetary compensation. Companies are starting to realize the benefit of providing actual work-life balance training for their employees. Discussions of working towards better balance is an increasingly hot topic in board rooms.

But, the sovereign architect of the quality of our work-life balance is, and will always remain, you. It comes down to the choices you make. Each hour of every day.

To slow down …or to speed up.

To take time to smell the flowers …or not.

It’s not that one or the other is good or bad. It’s about making conscious, intentional choices with an awareness of what’s needed or wanted at the time. Purposefully choose to live in a way that allows you to be present to yourself, to your life, and to each other. Intentionally choose, to find total harmony between how you are currently living and how you want to live. Only when you find harmony can you start moving forward faster and faster – living a life accelerated.

If you would like to know where you are with your work-life balance , I invite you to take the FREE Achieve Work Life Balance Assessment,  then schedule a 1:1 consultation to discuss your results.

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