Chapter 1: What are the biggest misconceptions about work-life balance?
There is a lot of flawed advice out there on work-life balance, not only in how we divide our time, but our emotions as well, including even things like the amount of passion that we have or that we reserve for our job. What are some of the most common misconceptions that you hear around this idea of balance?
biggest misconception I think I hear is people think that work-life balance is about something you do in the world. I will add two hours of yoga to my schedule. There we go. Balanced we are. Where work-life imbalance happens is primarily in your head. And it's our thinking. It's our approach. It's how we think about ourselves and how we think about ourselves vis-a-vis our work.
That's where the imbalance is. That work becomes incredibly primary for us. Our unconscious mind is quite primitive, but it considers work to be the most important thing in our lives. And for good reason. Work is what gives us all the things we need for basic living. It's what pays our bills.
Chapter 2: How does our mindset affect work-life balance?
It's what gives us shelter, security, status, self-appreciation, appreciation by others. So our unconscious mind thinks, well, that's the most important thing for you. Anything else is disturbing it. And so it really focuses us on work. So the balance has to be first corrected in your head in all kinds of different ways. That's one misconception that people have.
And the other misconception that people have is that by just doing something, by doing that extra, you know, yoga or the meditation or like I'm going to, you know, go to the gym twice or, you know, whatever the thing is, now you've fixed something. Work invades our thoughts, right? when we're outside of work. It takes over our thoughts in all kinds of intrusive, invasive ways.
So you can be doing something, but if you're still thinking about work, you might be at the gym, but you're at work. You might be having dinner with a friend, but you're at work if you keep thinking about that annoying email, etc., etc. So that's the misconception, that it's an action in the world where it first has to be an action in the head.
You know, the COVID pandemic and work from home certainly changed how all of us feel about work and home. So on one hand, it forced work into all of our homes. On the other hand, we kind of had to practice how to cope with that. Do you think it changed our idea of work-life balance for the better or for the worse?
I would love to say that the pandemic and especially the shutdowns that kept us working from home for long durations actually allowed us to practice, quote unquote, mastering the division and the psychological separation between work and home. I didn't see a lot of people practicing that. I saw a lot of people struggling with that.
But I didn't see a very intentional effort to create that separation. It was a survival mode. You know, it was like, and there was an understanding. And that's what also, like, created, you know, like, it wasn't just us that, you know, it broke a boundary for. It was our managers. It was our workplaces.
Because they felt like, well, you know, before it was like, well, should I intrude on home, on their home life by emailing them after hours or by contacting them on the weekend? But now it's like, well, they're home working, so there's no intrusion. That's where they work. It just psychologically erased a barrier for them and for employers and for employees. And it's never really been fully...
resurrected, unfortunately. So I don't think it was for the better. I think working from home has many, many benefits, but I think it actually then imposes on us a greater burden to be more mindful and intentional about how we create that separation, psychologically especially, because those barriers have been reduced.
One simple example, and I was giving a lot of talks over the pandemic, and I was trying to say to people, like, if you are working from home, it is imperative that you find a small little corner of home you work from and work only from there. Do not infect your home with a feeling of work. Try and keep it maintained to a very small space.
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