Dropping the idea of “balance”
A conversation about priorities
From time to time the Design Dept. team gets together to discuss topics we’ve been thinking about or struggling with. Often these are issues that have come up in our own lives that we’re also hearing others bring up in workshops or coaching sessions.
Recently, we’ve been pondering the idea of “balance.”The terms “staying balanced” and achieving “work-life balance” get thrown around a lot in the workplace. There is this idea that we can somehow maintain a state of equilibrium in which we equally prioritize the demands of our career and the demands of our personal life. But is this truly a viable concept?
Here’s what Courtney Drake (Instructor), Mandira Midha (Designer), and Aïcha Doucouré (Coach) had to say about it in a recent conversation:
COURTNEY: When I think about the concept of balance, I think of myself as a hub with spokes radiating out, like in a wheel. The hub is my identity — me as a person. The spokes are work and parenting and my marriage and recreation and hobbies.
In my 20s I didn’t have much separation between the hub and the spokes — and I didn’t have that many spokes, really. I had my identity, and work. Work was a big part of my life and it crept into the hub area. Back then it didn’t seem like a big deal.
But in this phase of life, whenever I’ve let work take up more space and creep into the hub, everything starts to fall apart. When I experienced burnout, it was because I just let work take over my life.
MANDIRA: I had a similar experience in which the first decade or so of my career was very much all about building up my career and my identity together as one thing. As I’m getting older, I’m realizing that work is a part of me but it’s not all of me. I’ve been switching that ratio so I’m working to live instead of living to work. I can separate myself from my work now, which allows me to actually do better work because my ego’s not so attached to it.
When I think of “balance” I think of the concept we talk about a lot at Design Dept: putting your own oxygen mask on first. You have to take care of yourself. For me, that looks like getting enough sleep, eating well, moving my body, and having fun.
I used to compromise those things because I had a never-ending to do list of work. But I’ve realized I have to preserve rest, fuel, play, and creativity so I can show up as my best self at work.
AÏCHA: I’m thinking about the times in my life when I’ve been the most unhealthy, and the concept of balance just doesn’t apply. It just doesn’t make sense. If you think about putting your oxygen mask on first as Mandira said, that is actually imbalance! Taking care of yourself in that moment can’t be the same weight as work, because you have to put more weight to taking care of yourself. Like in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you need that baseline of the pyramid to be set. You need to take care of yourself before you can attend to other things higher up in the pyramid.
I think “imbalance” can be a misleading concept. To me, it’s more about priorities than about balance. Some things have a bigger weight than others, and that’s ok. When things are going badly, you have to shift your attention from the outside world (What’s everybody needing from me?) to the inside (What do I need?)
You have to be able to observe yourself and think about how you are feeling in your body. When things are healthy, there is more spaciousness and the rhythm is slower. In integral coaching we talk about density. When you have a healthy relationship with work, it feels less dense. Your vision is wider. There is more space, there is more time. Urgency is not a driver.
When you’re unhealthy, you feel more contracted. Your vision is narrow.
“Imbalance can be a misleading concept. To me, it’s more about priorities than about balance. Some things have a bigger weight than others, and that’s ok.”
COURTNEY: When you say “vision is wider,” I definitely feel that. The way that I’ve experienced it when I’ve been far from any notion of balance or healthiness is that I’m in such survival mode that I’m living in the present and the past all the time. I’ll have a hard time being present in a way that doesn’t fill me with anxiety.
When I’m in a healthier place, I feel like I can be more present in the moment, and like Mandira was saying, I think it makes me better at what I’m doing.
AÏCHA: Some people go into the past when they have anxiety. I go into the future. It’s a trait of the 7 in the Enneagram. It’s hard to be in the present, so we go into the future, which can also be a source of anxiety.
When I think about being in the present, the thing that comes to mind for me is the Tetris game. You know, there is this shape coming down and you have to figure out where to fit it. If you’re in the future you’re just looking at the shapes that are coming for you. If you’re in the past, you’re just looking at the shapes you already placed. Both of those are too hard. If you stay grounded in the present, then you can deal with things as they come.
COURTNEY: When I’ve been in my most unhealthy places, it took a big reset to get me out. It wasn’t like I could just start doing yoga once a week. It was like I needed to quit my job.
I’m curious, in both of your experiences, when you get to that unhealthy place and the idea of balance isn’t even on the table, do you need a big reset or is there a gradual path back to health and to re-setting that foundation?
MANDIRA: A big part of it for me was the lack of awareness around what it actually feels like to burn out. I had heard the term floating around for so long and I’d seen so many people go through it and I just always thought the same thing everyone thinks: “Not me! I take care of myself.”
But now that I’ve been through a burnout and a big reset myself, it feels different. I’m aware that burnout doesn’t go from 0 to 100. You start to veer into it a little bit here and there as you make unhealthy choices. You need to set up trip wires to alert you when you’re heading into dangerous territory.
If you have no awareness about what’s healthy and unhealthy for you, then you can succumb to all those external and internal pressures and it can be easy to go so far into the deep end that recovery does require a total reset.
AÏCHA: The way I see it is that the big reset is the thing that’s going to wake you up. If you get more benefit by continuing on the way you always have, then why change? There has to be something that shocks the system so you re-evaluate the whole thing. People have different names for it, they talk about “breakdown” or “mid-life drift.”
The question is, how do you get to the awareness Mandira was talking about without having a big breakdown?
Practicing self-observation is key to becoming more self-aware. Simply put, self-observation is a routine of checking yourself. When you put some attention into observing yourself, you can start gathering data about who you are and what you do. You’d be surprised. There is often a gap about our perception of ourselves and our actions, and who we really are and what we really do. Once you see that gap, and once you accept that there is a gap, instead of feeling bad, you can put your energy into accepting yourself and adjusting your choices to support the real you.
For example, maybe you have always thought of yourself as outgoing, but by using practices around observing your body language, you realize that you’re not as outgoing as you thought. This explains why you feel awkward in certain social situations.
Instead of feeling shame or being envious of super extroverted people, you can now use this insight to make better choices about which social situations you want to participate in. You can decide to get some support learning how to be more outgoing or learn some techniques from friends who are more socially gregarious.
These are all valid strategies, but you can only start considering them if you can have clarity and accept your real personal capacity. Self observation allows you to consider a wider range of strategies.
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