Living in the modern world means juggling seemingly endless responsibilities, from Zoom meetings at work to picking your kids up after school, to taking your evening workout classes at Equinox. With so much on your plate, you may feel overwhelmed and that you need to create a “perfect balance” between your personal and professional endeavors to feel fulfilled.
However, constantly striving for work-life balance isn’t actually the answer. Let’s explore why…
Work-Life Harmony vs. Work-Life Balance: Is There a Difference?
While the concepts of work-life balance and harmony share some similarities, there is a key difference: the perspective they take on the relationship between work and personal life.
Work-life balance aims to maintain a clear separation between your work and your personal life, ensuring that one doesn’t dominate the other. This concept is based on the idea that there’s a finite amount of time and energy available and that we need to manage these resources effectively to maintain a healthy and fulfilling life. Jeff Bezos is famously quoted as saying, “I get asked about work-life balance all the time and my view is, that’s a debilitating phrase because it implies there’s a strict trade-off.”
Work-life harmony, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of integrating your personal and professional life to achieve a fulfilling existence. It focuses on finding ways to create synergies between different areas of life, rather than viewing them as separate entities. Harmony recognizes that if you aren’t happy at home, it will likely carry over into your career, and vice versa.
Rather than viewing your personal and professional life as separate entities and trying to achieve perfect balance, instead, focus on living harmoniously, where you can find ways to create synergies between the two.
When you harmonize your personal and professional life, you can achieve a more pleasurable existence, find greater fulfillment and passion in your work, and be better equipped to avoid burnout.
6 Tips to Create Work-Life Harmony
By harmoniously integrating your work and personal life, you can achieve a more fulfilling well-rounded existence. Here are six ways to get started.
1. Identify and Apply Your Values
Values are an essential part of living with integrity and identifying them will help you understand what matters most to you and guide you in making decisions. To gain clarity on your values, start by asking yourself insightful questions.
Once you’ve identified the values that hold the most weight in your life, find ways to integrate them into your daily routine. For instance, if health is your top value, you can try to take fitness classes during your personal time and seek out career opportunities in the wellness industry. By doing this, you create the opportunity to live out your values consistently in both your personal and professional life.
Similarly, if you value adventure, you can seek out a role that involves frequent travel and use those “bleisure” trips as opportunities to learn about new cultures and explore when you’re not in meetings.
If creativity is an important value to you, look for a career that allows you to express your creative side, such as graphic design or art direction and continue to flex your creative muscles in your free time as well. This will enable you to fully utilize your creativity in both your professional and personal life.
2. Create a Shared Vision
Think of different ways your personal and professional life can evolve harmoniously rather than separately. This could involve setting long-term goals that align with both aspirations. For instance, if you want to become more confident, you can set a goal that applies to both your personal and professional pursuits. Perhaps your purpose or “why” behind that goal is to be able to network more effectively in your professional life to open up more opportunities and create better relationships in your personal life. By achieving your goal, you can reap benefits in both aspects of your life.
To further solidify your goals, create a vision board that encompasses both your personal and professional goals for a visual representation. This can help you stay focused and inspired when your motivation wanes.
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Similar to identifying your vision, it’s important to recognize your strengths and explore opportunities to utilize them in both your personal and professional life.
For instance, if you possess strong communication skills when it comes to your friends and family, you can leverage this skill professionally by leading a team or delivering presentations at work. By applying your strengths to both aspects of your life, you can find greater ease and satisfaction.
4. Practice Effective Communication
Although it’s important to remain professional at work, don’t be afraid to have some fun and build healthy relationships with your colleagues. When you get to know your teammates better and feel more comfortable with them, it creates a more positive work environment. Engage in small talk during the day to liven up the atmosphere.
Additionally, don’t hesitate to communicate openly when something isn’t working for you. For example, if your workload is too intense and it’s completely derailing your personal time and sleep schedule, don’t be afraid to speak up and express your concerns to your supervisor or boss. Without expressing your concerns, nothing will change.
5. Integrate Self-Care
Taking good care of yourself is essential for establishing harmony between your personal and professional life. If you don’t prioritize self-care, such as getting sufficient sleep, eating healthy, and working out, it will not only negatively impact your mental and physical well-being but it will also have potentially adverse impacts on your career. Not to mention, certain aspects of self-care can have direct positive impacts on your career. Exercise, for instance, has been shown to improve decision-making abilities.
Look for methods to integrate self-care into both aspects of your life. For instance, you could squeeze in a walk during your lunch break or use a treadmill desk while you work. Other ways to incorporate self-care into your professional life could include keeping a water bottle on your desk to stay hydrated, participating in a fitness class during lunch, scheduling stretch breaks, or even doing facial yoga or eye exercises at your desk.
6. Schedule it Out
At the end of each week, take a moment to plan how you want to spend the following week. Determine how much time you can allocate to different projects and prioritize them based on their importance. Take a look at the bigger picture (your calendar) and see if your schedule seems reasonable. Are you prioritizing self-care after those long workdays? Does your schedule allow you enough time for sleep?
Identify tasks that can be moved around or delegated to make your week more manageable. Schedule something to look forward to each day, either at work or during your personal time, and find ways to make your day less stressful. By proactively evaluating your calendar, you can take control of your week and identify ways to seamlessly assimilate your work and personal life.
The Bottom Line
By integrating your personal and professional life so they both complement and enrich each other, you can create a sense of harmony that allows you to live a happier, more fulfilling life.
Remember that this process of integration isn’t always easy, and it’s important to remain adaptable and make changes as needed.
To learn more about creating work-life harmony, join us for an empowering conversation on February 21st during Arootah’s Energy Seminar. Be sure you’re signed up to our newsletter for more details.