Work Life Balance - A Series, Part Three
Thank you so much for being here and for investing your time in this blog series. We are in the home stretch! If you think I’m about to tell you that in one year I’ve become a guru on how to live the perfectly balanced life, I’m not. Allow me to shed some light on where I really am today. To recap, I became aware of my stress and emotional exhaustion, and I stepped away from my corporate career. I found personal alignment through self-care, and that experience lead me down a path with a new perspective on how to live and work mindfully with more balance. If you didn’t read part one and two of this series, pause here and go back because in order for you to truly appreciate this part in the journey, you need to understand the complicated process I went through to get here.
Many of us feel we are failing both in the office and at home, but according to who, and what standard? There are some weeks where I feel like I’m present in all areas of my life, and other weeks I feel completely pulled in one direction. Eventually, things level out before the cycle starts back up again. I do believe that the idea of work life balance is sometimes an unattainable standard that results in a constant feeling of failure. So rather than trying to balance all of the things all of the time, maybe it can be something that fluctuates.
I personally used to think that work life balance meant there was a magical way we could have a flawless even split between our work and home life. But if this is true, then why was no one giving up the goods on how to do it? I refuse to throw in the towel when it comes to achieving balance so in lieu of being handed a guidebook, I’ve taken matters into my own hands and I am now learning through trial and error what works best for me. Rather than beating myself up about striving to balance work and life, sometimes I find it’s better to embrace the imbalance (awareness). And instead of fixating on the hours in a day, I focus on a week, month or even season. There are periods of time where I will have less productive hours spent at my computer and I will have less time for social outings, and I’m okay with that. I dumb it down by dropping the words, ‘work’ and ‘life’ from the whole concept and I simply focus on the BALANCE part, allowing everything to become more fluid.
Here’s where I have to be really careful, just to keep it real. I thrive on busy, and I am a high-functioning individual. I’m an anal, turbo, multi-tasking, creative, process improving perfectionist (I’m fun I swear!). At some point I may have drank the kool-aid and come under the spell of the corporate way, but mostly my overwork has been and still is driven by passion. I don’t do things half-way and I cannot change that, it is a fundamental part of my being. I appreciate this about myself and I’m grateful to have the ability to work smart and multi-task to produce quality results.
I do have a tendency to slip back into my old ways by going too fast and doing too much or telling myself that I should be doing more. When I get too busy, I have less time for self-care, so I can lose my personal alignment. Today, I know when I need to reset, slow down and re-ground and I don’t brush that feeling off anymore. I will make small changes in my daily routine to re-incorporate my self-care package that I referenced in part two of this series. It’s not a science and I don’t always get it right, but you have to become aware, connect with your body and learn how to listen. Then do the work by focusing on lifestyle, rest, play and gratitude. Quality time helps us disconnect from the hustle and re-connect with our truest best self. What I can say about my life today is that I still don’t have everything I want. My life is not perfect, and neither am I (obviously). However, I hit the jackpot when I found gratitude, mindfulness and alignment, and when I re-discovered my joy. It is not a golden ticket though, I consider it my job to know myself better every day because when I am self-aware, I connect with my why and I have clarity on my purpose.
I consider it my job to know myself better every day.
When I was in the thick of my self-discovery journey, I was not in the business to re-invent myself, I was just looking for her. For years I had subscribed to believing that I had to be a certain way, talk a certain way and look a certain way in order to “make it” in a high-profile image focused industry. But glamour and a fancy pay cheque comes with a price. There are certain types of environments and people that no longer align with my true self, and ever since I started living authentically both my surroundings and my tribe have become more parallel. Today, I still work heavily in the industry that I know and love, but I choose my clients and they choose me, and I have boundaries that I hold myself accountable to. I don’t settle when something doesn’t feel right just to make money, and because I no longer say ‘yes’ when I mean ‘no’, I don’t overbook myself and I choose quality over quantity. I align with clients whose morals and culture represent what I believe in, so they are an extension of my own brand, and vice versa. I work alongside other professionals who share a mutual objective of collaboration as we work towards the same goals cohesively. What a concept!
Since launching my business and navigating through becoming an entrepreneur, I have struggled from time to time with guilt. I didn’t understand it at first but as I engaged with other business owners I know now that this is very common. It is the guilt of slowing down or taking a day or an hour off while the majority of the world is in the office during business hours. For some reason when we’re still online at 11pm or we take a meeting on Saturday, we don’t feel like we’re being gypped but going to the gym at 10am or sleeping in on a weekday is remorseful. The same could be relatable if you are in a position of management or leadership. The guilt is real, but we have to let it go.
Entrepreneur or employee, it is crucial to remember on the bad days that you are allowed to feel negative, so stop judging yourself. It will never be constant rainbows and butterflies no matter what you do for a living or in your personal life. Work is just work, regardless of how passionate you are, how high up you are on the org chart, or how stressful the environment can get. Your job is not your life unless you allow it to be. Seriously. Get in the habit of asking yourself, who are you when you take your 40-hour work week out of the picture? That’s what matters. If your role or the environment you work in no longer serves you, find something that does because despite what you may think, it is out there but you have to do the work. If you are an entrepreneur, it’s you against you when it comes to setting boundaries with your hours and client expectations. You’ve got to be able to shut it down and let go of the guilt. It can be more challenging to create specific boundaries when you work for someone else because you have less control, but what each of these scenarios have in common is that fact that you have to practice SELF-CARE.
Before now, when people would ask me what I like to do in my spare time I stumbled to answer. I hated that question. It was embarrassing, and I felt bad about myself that I couldn’t easily respond. The reason I couldn’t answer is because I identified so much with my career and somewhere along the way I stopped paying attention to who I am as a human. If you don’t know what you like to do in your spare time, you have some work to do.
Photography by, Wendy Alana