Work-life balance was always a mirage
I hear two things about work-life balance, again and again. The first is often expressed in a desperate plea, “I want work-life balance!” I picture people searching for water in an arid desert, their thirst so severe that they imagine a pool of water far off on the horizon. They remain committed to their quest only to arrive at the top of the next hill and have the water vanish. It was always a mirage.
The second thing I hear is one I’ve expressed myself many, many times—how work-life balance is a terrible, terrible term. It suggests a constant, unwavering equilibrium, but in reality it’s more like a tightrope walker, moving with constant attunement, attention, and adjustment.
When people chase work-life balance, they’re often looking for it “out there,” as if expecting their employer, their schedule, someone else to create it for them. Employers have a role, of course. But the term turns us into subjects, rather than architects of our lives.
The desire is real and it matters. The construct of work-life balance just can’t guide us to what we want. It doesn’t paint a picture or provide an approach to address what really plagues us—how to make choices about and direct where to spend our finite time and energy over the course of our lives to actually deliver what we want.
But what if a different concept could better guide us?
The words, frameworks, and tools we use shape what we believe is possible. So what happens when we swap “work-life balance” for something like “life+work sustainability”? Focus on sustainability vs. balance. Put life first. Replace the hyphen with a plus sign. What shifts?
A few weeks ago, I got the chance to see the transformation in real time.
I joined Doug Neil’s Verbal to Visual community where he teaches the skill of visual thinking. I was there to discuss my book, and we started with this exercise.
You can do it too. Before you read on, grab a pen and some paper.
Create two quick sketches: one of work-life balance and the second of life+work sustainability. Don’t worry about your drawing skills or doing it perfectly. That’s not the point. Have fun with it. See what comes to mind and play with the ideas.
After you’ve created your sketches, look at the two side by side. What do you notice?
Here’s what we found:
Work-life balance brought forth tension, heaviness, precarious juggling, scarcity, struggle, pressure, instability. This was a land of an uphill battle. This was a world of right and wrong.
Life+work sustainability, on the other hand, brought forth thriving, integration, flow state, abundance, cycles, release and recovery, ebbing and flowing. This was a land of seasons, going uphill and then downhill. This was a world of fluidity and being internally guided, moving from one stage to the next.
Work-life balance was mechanistic. Life+work sustainability was natural.
Where might you be waiting for the system to resolve tension across your life and work? Where might you architect a different choice?
I’m not saying this is easy. But a new construct can help us push back on the rules we’ve been operating under and envision a new way.
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Sustainable Ambition offers a strategic approach for pursuing our professional and personal goals in a way that is motivating, meaningful, and manageable from stage to stage, rather than be all consuming in a way that compromises other important aspects of our lives or sacrifices our well-being.