The Pernicious Myth of Work/Life Balance

If we had a quarter for every time we heard the words “work/life balance” we would all be wealthy people. I’m not sure where the phrase comes from, but I carefully chose the adjective “pernicious” to describe it. To me, it employs a false dichotomy: something we hate (work) must be balanced with something we love (life). Wow, what a sad life that would be.

So before I suggest a replacement for “work/life balance,” allow me to ramble a bit. One definition of balance is “equipoise between contrasting, opposing, or interacting elements.” So we might say that balance, then, is a modicum of all things. In the set of “balance” there is a little bit of everything. If this is true, then the set that is “balance” must also contain “imbalance” because balance is a modicum of all things and imbalance is a thing. Balance contains imbalance. This is counter-intuitive but true. If we did not have imbalance, we would never recognize balance—in fact, it is because of imbalance that we strive for balance. With me? Without imbalance, we would not know to strive for balance or even know when we were in it.

Whew, I know that is a lot, take a minute and reread it, think about it, then come back to me.

Okay, so if imbalance is both necessary and unavoidable, why do we fight to eliminate it? That seems like setting ourselves for disappointment—kind of like fighting gravity or something. Yet we all know that feeling of frustration that comes in when our life seems out of whack. What to do?

I suggest that looking for work/life balance is looking for the wrong thing. Imbalance is both unavoidable and necessary so why look to eradicate it? Instead, I suggest we strive for peace—peace that comes when we accept that occasionally our lives are going to be out of balance (and if they aren’t, we are probably not accomplishing much anyway) but that they are out of balance temporarily and for a purpose. We should strive for a peace that comes by looking from a higher perspective—not the whacked-out day, week, or month that we are struggling to manage, but from a higher plane that understands the occasional flurry as necessary to equipoise and peace.

So how do we achieve that peace between work and life? Here is the key: choose what to do based upon your core principles and values and keep your head where your feet are. If you decide, based upon your core values, that this evening you choose to go to your kid’s baseball game instead of working late, get your head in the game (where your feet are) and forget about work. If you choose to go to the evening meeting and leave your friends or loved ones for a while, rest your worries about them and give 100% to the meeting. If you are bleary eyed in the Starbucks line after working round the clock to meet a deadline, pat yourself on the back for getting it done and resolve to see how more QII time might beat this next time rather than wallow in your exhaustion and grump about the pace of the last few days. Peace. This is better than striving for something that doesn’t exist and far better than berating yourself for inevitable choices. When we recognize that imbalance is necessary and inevitable, we simply try to lessen it rather than beat ourselves for experiencing it. If we do, the result is peace.

So where does this core-centered peace come from? The title of this chapter is “Purpose and the Pernicious Myth.” Purpose is the key. I’ll write more about this next time (I don’t want to knock your day out of balance with an unexpected and long email), but I’ll preface it with this:

When I was in college, I was having friends over and bought a cheap tablecloth from the local Kmart. When I got it home and unwrapped it, there, on the cardboard the cloth was wrapped around, I found a message. In huge letters, in orange crayon was written, “LIFE IS SO ROUGH.” I am sure it was true for the writer—I cannot imagine the mind-numbing repetition of wrapping tablecloths around cardboard for Kmart. It was a powerful lesson for me. Having worked at a General Motors plant in a repetitive-task job, I was quite certain I understood that perspective. I am also quite certain that this further motivated me to find more purposeful career opportunities. Work without purpose leads to stress, distress, yearning, burnout, and a host of other major problems to say nothing of what it does for the employer.

Getting clear about our purpose—both for ourselves and the organizations we lead, makes it possible for us to achieve many great things including a peace uncommon in our times.

I wish you peace.

‘til then,

Mark