What’s Wrong with Work-Life Balance?
Part 2 - Creating a Better (Whole) Life Balance
In Part 1 I explained why I am not a big fan of the term “Work-Life Balance” and why I prefer something like “Whole Life Balance” or just “Life Balance”. The distinction between work and personal life makes sense and of course there needs to be a healthy balance and harmony between them. However, when we’re trying to create a balanced life, I think the aim should be to make work a valued part of life, without letting it take over, and that means examining exactly what that ‘balance’ should look like.
Here is the type of image I often see when work-life balance is being discussed:
Work and Life appear to be in balance. But as I’ve mentioned in Part 1, looking at it this way implies that it takes all of life to balance out work, or that it is okay for work to take up as much time and effort as all of the rest of life combined. If you transfer this ‘balance’ to a coaching tool like the Wheel of Life it becomes clear that this is actually quite imbalanced:
So what what would a good, healthy balance in life look like?
A better balance for life would allow a good amount of time and attention to be dedicated to several aspects of life. This is important for a couple of reasons:
If we rely on just one or two areas too much we not only have an unhealthy life balance – we also run the risk to be very badly affected if one of them happens to break away (imagine a workaholic who loses his job, or a passionate football player who suffers a serious knee injury and his to give it up).
The various areas of life are strongly interconnected and affect each other: if you make changes to one area it will impact on and cause changes in other areas. For example, if you improve your nutrition and fitness you will have more energy, better focus and more concentration and might therefore also see benefits in other areas such as work, your social life, or your personal growth.
There are many versions of the Wheel of Life, with different numbers of segments or life areas, so this is just an example and you can adjust it to suit your priorities:
In this example, there is more attention and energy allowed for several areas of life. Work is part of this but it doesn’t dominate and push everything else aside. Work might feel more integrated, or it may still feel very separate from everything else and as thought you’re a different person. It might take some work to truly integrate it as a valued part of life. How to do that is a topic for another blog post, though.
What does your Wheel of Life look like? Are there some areas that are under-represented while others take up a huge amount of space? Which areas are you happy with and where do you think changes are needed? Use this as a starting point to decide where changes are needed and what your first steps might look like, and you will have made the first steps towards a better Whole Life Balance.
