In my practice, I see clients making changes – reaching milestones, achieving goals, and moving forward in their life with impact.
Sometimes they bring up work-life balance.
I don’t think work-life balance is the goal we should be trying for.
Alignment, Not Balance
We’ve all been talking about wanting work-life balance for a while. When I was trying to achieve work-life balance, I never, ever, felt balanced. I was always taking from one “side” to give to “the other side.” That isn’t balance. It’s operating in a state of constant lack.
We don’t need to balance sides, always taking from one or another. We need to recognize that we have one life, not a “work life” and a “personal life’ (or a spiritual life, or a health life, or …). Just like one gem stone may have many facets, there may be different facets of our one life. We don’t need to balance them against each other – they’re all part of the whole. We need to align them so they’re working together to support our goals.
How To Approach Alignment? – The Value of Values
The first step is figuring out what’s important to you. After all, you can’t align around your priorities if you don’t figure out what they are. Go beyond just naming a value and explore its foundation.
Let’s take one common value – family. People may say “family” is their main value, but what does that mean? It could mean that you make it a priority to be home for dinner every night. Or it could also mean that you prioritize creating certain opportunities for your family, like your kids going to the college of their choice debt-free. Two very different values, both falling under “family.” Those two different family values need different resources and offer different opportunities.
Identifying your specific values creates a center to align the facets of your life around.
Values Clarification Is A Powerful Tool
Knowing your specific values provides concrete benefits. The knowledge provides a structure that:
- Opens your eyes to opportunities. For example, if you realize education and growth is a value, you can prioritize taking advantage of your organization’s professional development benefits.
- Provides a structure for decision making. Values awareness creates a ready-made framework to turn to when you need to weigh choices.
- Alerts you to be active when you may need to step out of alignment. Take a situation where being present at dinner is a family value because I want my kids to feel my commitment to being present in their life. I’m normally home for dinner, but there may be emergencies where I’ll get home late. Being aware of that value gives me an opportunity to create ways to enforce my commitment to being present in my kids life when those emergencies occur. I can creating a structure where I plan a special breakfast or extended bedtime story when I have to miss dinner.
Other Components of Alignment
Of course, knowing your values isn’t the only step towards alignment. Identifying and using your strengths, knowing your resources (and resources that you need to acquire), setting goals, and looking for opportunities to grow and develop all come into play. We’ll be discussing those in future issues.
How Do We Get Started?
Let’s start with one beginning exercise I use with clients that’s designed to clarify specific values:
- Write down your top 5 values. For example, “I value family.”
- Write down your specific definition of that value. Lawyers ask people to define their terms for a reason. One word can mean many different things and using a broad term can cloud meaning. “By family I mean my children and partner.”
- After each value, write down why it’s important to you. “I value family. It’s important that my family feels my support. I want my kids and partner to feel that I’m there for them if they need me, that they are important to me, and that they are loved, respected and cared for.”
Of course, that’s just an example, but try it for yourself.
When you do, drop a comment. Does specifically naming your values and why they matter to you make a difference? Do you see any additional opportunities to support that value or ways to use your current resources to align around it in your life?
Takeaways
- “Balance” involves taking resources away from one “life” to take care of responsibilities in another “life.”
- Since we actually only have one life, trying for “balance” results in operating from lack – always depriving one facet of our life to give to another.
- Alignment centers all the facets of your life around what’s important to you to support your one life and your goals.
- The starting place for alignment is to identify, with specificity, your core values – what’s foundationally important and motivating for you.