Build Life+Work Resilience
The Sustainable Ambition View—Why build life+work resilience?
We’ve all heard the call for “work-life balance,” but despite the barriers we all know exist, expecting our external world to magically produce balance is a false expectation. It is rare that we experience balance, and certainly not all of the time. It assumes we live in a static environment that allows us to always be in equilibrium. But that isn’t today’s modern, dynamic world. It also gives the impression that we have to “do it all.”
So we champion: don’t expect work-life balance—build life+work resilience instead.
At the beginning of the year, Arianna Huffington shared her agreement and how resilience+ is her word of the year and likely of the decade. She had this to say about resilience: “Resilience+ is about refueling and replenishing so we can meet whatever challenges 2022 holds with less stress, more joy and endlessly renewable stores of resilience.” Love it!
Why it matters:
Often people speak about work-life balance as if it should magically appear; that our external world should create that balance for us. But it’s a false expectation, because the outside world can’t shape that balance for us. Our world demands a lot of us. We often demand a lot of us.
Achieving life+work fulfillment requires making choices and creating a way to support ourselves in stretching and sustaining ourselves.
Think of this analogy—we’d never head out for a long-distance, multi-day hiking trek without doing some planning, thinking about the hard parts that will be demanding and thinking about our rest periods and how we will care for ourselves to be sustained and make it through the trek. We wouldn’t expect nature and the universe to magically make our trek smooth. Our lives+work are no different. We need to think about how we build our resilience to both stretch and sustain ourselves.
Behind the thinking:
Resilience is about doing those things that keep you operating at your best, that keep you sustained, and that allow you to manage demanding or challenging times or difficulties and bounce back.
That includes making time for sustaining activities guided by your values that fill up your resilience stores and taking pauses and breaks for recovery.
It includes putting you back in control, making choices on where to put your attention and where you will focus your time… making time, not finding time, for those things that are important to you. That’s why as part of building resilience, we encourage you to set boundaries—what will you say yes to and no to?
We also have you explore what you will give yourself grace around. Where will you allow yourself to be bad at things? You may have ambitions around certain areas of your life, but where are there areas you don’t need to strive? Where can you let yourself off the hook?
A final important component to building resilience is structures and support that will help you make it all a bit more sustainable, both at work and at home.
What’s next:
Listen to the 4-part podcast series, On Planning a More Sustainable+Ambitious Year and creating your Life+Work Resilience Rx, and consider getting the Sustainable Ambition 12-Month Workbook+Planner: Your Life+Work Resilience Rx, a workbook + planner to help you lead a fulfilling, sustainable, and ambitious life+work. Find more details here.
Write your Life+Work Resilience Rx. Find a template here.
Use it as a guide to aim, act, assess, and adapt over the year to sharpen your Rx.
Be sure to make time for sustaining activities, make choices, give yourself grace, and ask for support.
Know that your Rx (prescription) might change over time. I’ve had this experience. I enjoy music, but I'm not a music person like my husband who searches out new bands or my nephew who attends concerts all the time. But I do appreciate how music impacts me. I used to not be able to listen to music while I worked, finding it distracting. But I’ve since found Vitamin String Quartet, and their instrumental music helps me focus and lowers my anxiety in the moment. Alas, music and the band are now part of my Rx!
Finally, consider creating a circle of friends or a group at work to plan together and support each other throughout the year in finding more Sustainable Ambition. Doing this work as part of a community can support you in setting intentions, holding yourself accountable, providing encouragement, and learning together along the way. Get the guide that goes with the podcast series here.
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Sustainable Ambition™ is about crafting a fulfilling career to support your life from decade to decade.
It is centered around articulating your personal definition of success and achieving that without burnout while honoring your personal aspirations and ambitions as they ebb and flow over time. The end game—more fulfillment and ease in your professional and personal life, while still being ambitious.
We offer 1:1 Executive Coaching, Leadership Coaching, or Career Strategy Coaching, as well as VIP Leadership Brand Sessions and Workshops on a range of Sustainable Ambition topics. We also provide tips and inspiration, advice on career management over the decades, guides on key Sustainable Ambition topics of interest, and coverage of tools and inspiration.