You are trying to achieve a work-life balance, but you’ve convinced yourself to split your work from the rest of your life. You create a kind of compartment thinking. Here are some of the symptoms of this thinking:
“I am a different person at work and then at home”
“At home I can decompress”
“At work I can ‘be somebody’”
“Home life is bad, work is good”
There is just one big problem with this divided way of thinking… there is only ONE YOU. Sooner or later your effort to manage the balance by splitting your time and energy to be two different people gets even more exhausting. It usually becomes a downward spiral.
So I want to be clear. (I had a reader accurately call me out on one of my posts last week – I really appreciate his feedback). The concept of work-life balance is not about creating two circles to live in. It is about blending the activities from very distinct segments of our 24 hours each day.
Nothing I talk about for work-life-faith balance is about building unique, unconnected spheres. It is about finding the right definitions of what your world demands of you each day. Then applying those definitions to a road map or a plan for creating a better balance.
With this thought, there is a whole lot of consideration to be given to routine versus unexpected challenges. We can usually predict a lot of what we believe we are going to face each day, but things can change one step out of the door.
Back to the point; taking your work and letting it become a world unto itself is not the goal of achieving work-life balance.
In coming segments I will explore the details. You may enjoy visiting some of my most recent posts:
Season one – the pilot – work-life balance
When work-life balance needs adjusting
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