Changing the image of work-life balance

What image comes to mind when you think about work-life balance? When I googled the term the most common pictures are 

... the Work-Life scales ...

... and the Work-Life seesaw ...

No question here that it's a Work versus Life trade-off. If this is your mental view of balance too, it's hard not to feel that going back to work will inevitably conflict with your family and personal life. 

In fact, as we've discussed before in this blog, work can be re-integrated into your life in a positive way, improving your life and family satisfaction. With this in mind, I'd like to suggest an alternative image. Think about your life as a jigsaw puzzle that you are in control of creating. The puzzle pieces are the different elements of your life: friends, parents, children, partner, community, hobbies, exercise, religion, voluntary work etc. It's up to you to select the pieces you most want to include at this stage of your life. To incorporate a new piece - 'paid work' - you need to consider how large a piece of the jigsaw you would like this to be right now. Which other pieces are you going to put aside or shrink in size, to make space to slot the work piece in? Bear in mind an image of choosing and fitting together the pieces in a way that works for you - and be flexible to adjust the shape and form as your circumstances change. 

I really like the jigsaw image, as it reflects the way I integrate work within my life. If you can suggest any other alternative images to replace the scales/seesaw, do let us know!  

Related posts
Creating your own work-life balance


Posted by Julianne

Why work needs to be energising as well as family-friendly: Nicola's story

We always advise women returners to target roles that will be energising and motivating for them and not to solely focus on finding a job that is part-time and flexible. If you find your 'family-friendly' work boring then you are unlikely to be happy with your work-life balance. Nicola's story illustrates this perfectly ...

Nicola's story: Back to insurance (via nursery teaching)

Before I had children I worked in insurance broking and risk management. When I had my first daughter I went back to work 4 days a week but when I had my second daughter I didn’t want to delegate to a nanny anymore and decided to become a full-time mum. By the time my youngest was 2½ and at nursery I needed something to fill my days to stop getting frustrated. So I took a job as a nursery assistant teacher and worked there for 5 mornings a week term-time for 5 years. I enjoyed meeting new people but there was no mental challenge. The death of a close relative led me to reassess my life and I realized I was drifting. I considered training to be a schoolteacher but didn’t have much enthusiasm for it. I kicked my heels for a while and then contacted my old boss who I had kept in touch with over the 10 years since I left insurance. I asked him to let me know if he heard of any job, provided it was flexible. I also told all my friends and old work contacts that I was looking.

By pure chance one of my husband’s friends was having lunch with another mutual friend and mentioned that I wanted to get back into insurance. This friend worked for a risk management consultancy which was recruiting and approached me about a role there. I asked for 3 days a week, flexible according to demand but not Fridays. This was agreed because I was clear about what I wanted and what could work for the business.

I now absolutely love my life – it was definitely the right decision to go back. Even though I am working longer hours, my life feels more my own and I have got back my self-respect. I thought I’d be exhausted but in fact I have more energy than when I was working a few hours a day in the nursery. I’d rather be busy than bored!

For other inspiring return-to-work stories see www.womenreturners.com/success

Posted by Julianne

Creating your own work-life balance: are you a separator or an integrator?

There seems to be a constant stream of articles dismissing work-life balance and saying that now we have to integrate our personal and professional lives:
"Forget work-life balance: It's time for work-life blend" 
"Work-life integration is the new norm"

This is a confusing about-turn from the more traditional advice that drawing a clear line between work and home will bring you greater balance. So which is right? Is work-life balance a thing of the past? Blurring the boundaries between work & personal life seems to work for the home-based journalists & entrepreneurs writing these articles ... but will it work for you? 

If you're thinking about returning to work and wanting to maintain your balance, do you need to focus on creating clear boundaries between job & home? Or do you need to be always contactable? Is it better to have fixed work & home time? Or to work from home when you can?

The answer from the psychology research, as so often in psychology (& life), is that it depends on you ...

What do we know about balance?
1. Balance is an internal state of feeling balanced and energised not an externally-set recipe. I see this all the time in my coaching. Some women who work full-time in demanding jobs still feel generally balanced - often if they have high control over their workload and keep weekends mainly clear. Other women work 3 days a week in unstimulating roles and feel drained and out of balance.

2. Balance is completely individual - your balance is not my balance. I enjoy the flexibility of having my own business but that may well not work for you if you prefer more standard hours and structure.

3. Balance changes day to day & through the lifespan. I don't need to tell you that what you need to feel balanced when you're 20 & single is not the same as when you're 35 with 2 children. Don't try to evaluate your balance at a point in time; think about whether you've felt more or less in balance over the last month or the last few months.

Are you a separator or an integrator?

Psychology research* has drawn out important differences between individuals in terms of the boundaries we want between home and work:

• Some people are naturally integrators. They will love the idea of work-life blend as they prefer blurred boundaries and changing roles through the day. You'll see the integrators switching effortlessly from watching a sports match or cooking dinner to taking a work call. Many energised entrepreneurs and home-workers fall in this camp.
• Other people are more naturally separators. They prefer a clear split between work & personal life, closing the door on their work life at the end of the day and focusing on their friends, family & leisure (& vice versa when they're at work). They may prefer to go into an office rather than to work at home and to finish their day's tasks at work rather than bringing them home to finish after the kids are in bed. One of my clients went back to full-time working as she found this was a better fit for her separator preference than blending the work/mum roles on her day off. 

What does that mean for finding your own balance?

What's important for balance is not whether you are more of a separator or an integrator, but whether you have a good match between the degree of separation you want and what you have. So ignore blanket advice about having to blend or to separate the personal and the professional and work out what suits you. You may not get to the ideal situation (often working mothers are integrators through necessity rather than desire) but you can consider what small actions you can take to bring your life more in line with your choices. Where you can, try different ways of working (eg. finishing work at home or in the office; working from home one day) and evaluate what works best for you. 

And whatever your preference, don't neglect setting some boundaries, such as not checking your emails at 11pm on Sunday evening ...we all need time to switch off and recharge our batteries!

Further Reading

* This is a simplified version of the 'flexstyle' research findings reported in CEO of Me (2008) by Professors and work-life balance experts, Ellen Kossek & Brenda Lautsch. They also identify a 3rd grouping of 'volleyers' who prefer to switch from integration to separation according to their priorities. An extract is available here

Posted by Julianne