Work-Life Balance: There is More to Consider
Posted On: Friday, September 1, 2023
Work-Life Balance is something that many people want to accomplish. They are intimately connected. In The E-Myth, author Michael Gerber, asks entrepreneurs to first work on their Primary Aim. He says, “…Before you determine the role your work will play, ask yourself:
What do I value most?
What do I want my life to look and feel like?
Who do I want to be?”
If you answer these questions, you can create a life vision that gives clarity and structures that enable to create a work vision as well that is informed by your life priorities. You then integrate your life and your work in a way that allows you to impact the world.
Taking on your life, your work, and your world
These three aspects of expression create magic when they are integrated and fulfilled.
No more boundaries that have different aspects of living occur as a series of separate buckets, but connected parts that affect each other. There might be more weight put in one area but the lack of attention on one would affect the others. Like a 3-legged stool that is missing one of its legs. When all three are fulfilled and integrated, life becomes an opportunity for creativity and contribution. It creates a fertile ground for living your dreams.
This is the model I have been using with my clients.
One of my clients, who has a successful business in the trades, started planning for the future by selecting a higher gross revenue goal.
It took a while, but the other day, he realized that that was an ego-based projection that didn’t take into account all of what was important to him. He loved his family; his partner and two children. Would aiming at that external number, take him away from them in ways he didn’t want? Would he be driving himself, thinking that reaching that number would mean success?
He realized that he needed a new model to consider what was truly important. Not the work-life balance view, which would make those two elements adversarial, but an integrated model of appreciating and integrating the 3 elements of Life, Work, and World.
He took three pieces of paper and wrote down what was important to him in each area. The next time we had a coaching session, he wanted to discuss what he was exploring in the World element, because he was thinking about vision, legacy, impact, making the world a better place, and being the solution. Since his family had immigrated to the US when he was less than a year old, he had benefitted from being enculturated as an American at an early age. In his business, he hired workers who were immigrants who didn’t get the opportunities he had received.
He is very committed to being that bridge that enables immigrants to be successful here. Many of them are supporting themselves and their families back home, so now he is thinking of how do I create the entrepreneurial spirit in the people back home. Isn’t it better to teach people to fish rather than giving them a fish?
This bigger vision will serve as a catalyst for having an organized business that would support him and his family here and others back home. From that perspective, he can teach others to do what he is doing. So, rather than reaching a higher monetary goal to prove himself successful, he can now grow and organize his business to be something that integrates and fulfills all of who he wants to be in his life, his work, and his world. Coming from there, an external number won’t matter, but he could naturally and organically accomplish that goal coming from a bigger vision of impacting the world.
We all need dreams and aspirations that enable us to move forward and be all we can be. This Life, Work, and Work model can give entrepreneurs, leaders, and individuals a clearer insight into a larger, more inspiring vision that support them in having better lives, more fulfilling work and making more of man impact on the world.
Join me for an integrative workshop, Sept 14, 12-1:30pm, to explore how applying this model to your situation could give you a better future. Register here.
