Balance Your Life or Integrate It?

Living a balanced life is almost impossible when the demands of work and family create continual stress and frustration. There are never enough hours in the day or long enough weekends to recover. But integrating our lives, finding a way to create that place of our own where we get paid for doing what we love and what we’re good at is not an impossible dream. It’s something that people less talented than you and with fewer resources are doing every day. You don’t have to settle for less.

One of the great challenges of working in the 21st century is having some balance in our lives. The pressures of work, the needs of our families, and our own need for some personal space all seem to conflict, leaving us wondering if it is all worth it as we hit the alarm clock in the morning and get ready for another day. It’s an exhausting process that sometimes seems relentless, sometimes punctuated, if we’re lucky, by occasional vacations where we might have enough time to unwind, and after a few days finally feel that we are our old selves again.

There must be a way out of this trap; but the only way to find it is to understand how we got there in the first place.

According to the Conference Board, a job is just a place to get a paycheck for over 50% of the American workforce. Most people are dissatisfied with their work, not really interested in what they do other than for financial reasons. They do what they have to do rather than what they want to do. This dissatisfaction and sense of alienation during the largest part of the day inevitably builds stress, a stress that can’t be relieved in the few short hours before bed or in a weekend, particularly when the needs of family are continually calling.

The stress builds cumulatively over months and years, and as any therapist will tell you, it has to be released. With little time for leisure or recreation, too often it results in acting out our frustration with those who are closest to us. Spouses fight, and children are yelled at, adding guilt and frustration to the mix. There is no way to balance this type of equation. If some form of serenity or life satisfaction is your goal, you just can’t get there from here. Something radically different is necessary.

Popular culture doesn’t provide any satisfactory solutions. We’ve seen stories of the harried chief executive chucking it all and starting a new life working in an ashram (Damages) or living a simple life as a cab driver (The Razor’s Edge) but you have to ask yourself whether this just isn’t walking away from the problem rather than solving it.

There is a great deal of research (Seligman, Ben-Shahar, Bennis, Csikszentmihalyi, Collins, and others) that indicates pretty clearly that people who work in an area that really interests them, using their talents to the fullest extent, and aligning their personal goals with their professional goals, have the greatest job satisfaction, least stress, and better relationships with their families and the people they work with.

It’s not rocket science. If you’re doing what you love and what you’re good at, it’s not what people call “work”. It’s more being who you really are all day. It’s recapturing your identity and not being one person at work and another every place else. The self is no longer divided with two pieces pulling at each other. The tension dissipates. You go home a lot more relaxed. You can share your day with your spouse and kids because you’re giving them a piece of what you are rather than the frustration that comes from being someone else. You don’t have to act out because you were your authentic self all day. You can share your plans and dreams rather than frustrations. Of course there will be difficult times, but you’re living in a whole different context.

A few people can find that kind of working environment in an established company, but for most of us it involves entrepreneurship, creating our own enterprise. This sounds like a daunting task to some, but what is it really other than finding what we love, using our talents to pursue that, and doing it in a way that creates something that people will pay for.

In the final analysis, it’s just integrating your life and making it all one piece. All it takes is some creativity, a lot of faith, and a lot of courage. It isn’t easy, but as so many people less talented than you prove every day, it can be done. For most, the dreadful alternative is doing what you don’t like, doing things that you have to do and that you’re not that good at, at living a life of mounting frustration.

Creating an enterprise is not some impossible dream to fantasize about. It’s something that hundreds of thousands of people do every day. If you think it’s impossible, think about the tens of thousands of micro enterprises that are springing up in that half of the world where the average income is less than two dollars a day, and where there’s almost no infrastructure like the roads, electricity, and internet connections that we take for granted. Maybe there are so many new ventures in those places, so many that succeed, because the people there realize that they have no choice if they really want to live.

When you realize that you really have no choice if you really want to live, you will begin and you will succeed as well.

Keep the faith.
Live your life.
Take care of each other.

Leonardo