LSW#34 🤸‍♀️ Forget work-life balance. Imbalance works better.

… & a better framework to navigate the tensions

Summary

Longer post today. Here are the top takeaways:

• Work-life balance is a broken construct, even misleading. Aiming for balance sets us up for failure. We need better frameworks that reflect reality, not idealism.

• What I’ve found more useful: looking at it as three interlinked wheels of work, self, and other. One feeds on the other, and not all are the same size, or moving at the same pace.

• Don’t aim for balance. Instead, aim for imbalance that creates movement and momentum. Balance is an effect, not a cause.

• Different seasons will require varying focus and energy between the three. You’ll still have to maintain minimum speed, aka standards.

I also give a set of pointers for thinking differently. Let’s jump in.

The perfect solution to the wrong problem, is still wrong

This newsletter is ostensibly about work & careers, and specifically leadership, which is a high-impact, high-contact sport. There’s no place to hide, which means, if you’re out of alignment in any aspect, it’s hard to sustain peak performance. Which brings us to a frequent conversation in coaching engagements: work-life balance.

There are coaches who focus exclusively on getting the balance right — it’s a particular kind of language, that assumes work is inherently tough, and having to take care of yourself. This is mostly true, and there’s a place for it. As a reader of this newsletter I’ll assume you already know the basics of exercise, diet, sleep, getting organized, and so on.

But, I want to go one level upstream, which doesn’t get discussed as much — the construct itself and its flaws.

I’ve worked in 16+ hour day minimum wage jobs where I was gleefully happy and energized. But I’ve also worked in exact 8-hour day prestige jobs making several multiples of minimum wages and plenty of “balance”, but still equally miserable.

What was the difference, and what explains this disparity?

The problem with the ideal of work-life balance

How a problem gets constructed dominates the solutions we look for. For me, the balance concept itself is flawed and leads us down the wrong rabbit holes. Consider the following drawbacks to this type of thinking:

• It creates an ideal state of affairs. Anything not ideal is to be “problem-solved” away.

• Even more damning is the notion that the ideal state can, in fact, be achieved. This means if you’re out of balance, there’s something wrong. It assumes you can in fact do equal justice to all aspects. While theoretically possible, it’s hard to pull this off consistently for long periods.

• It implies a dichotomized world between life and work. Except everywhere it’s still you. We tend to “leak” from one domain to another. If you’re miserable at work, it spills over into life and vice versa. Often, balance is required because of the very fact that one of them is a bad fit (typically work).

• It’s usually presented as buckets of time that are linear and divisible, with some parts reserved for work and the rest for life. This ignores the difference between linear clock-time and existential human-time.

• It makes us think in terms of tradeoffs — one has to come at the expense of the other. It’s the classic either/or trap. What we need is frameworks that enable AND thinking.

• Achieving balance requires knowing the exact “weights”, and that they stay constant. How else would you balance it? If you look at the reality of our lives, neither of those conditions are true. It’s ever-changing, and the values are relative to each other, rather than absolutes.

• More effort in one domain, by definition, introduces an imbalance. The only way to maintain balance is to increase effort elsewhere, or back off. How does that even make sense?

• It assumes one (life) is fun and the other (work) is not. Why else would you need to balance?

The value of imbalance

Looking back at patterns in your own life, when was the last time everything actually was in balance? This brings up a fundamental paradox at odds with the notion of balance.

• Some of my most memorable stretches were when I was completely out of balance — new relationship, new job, new baby, new country, and so on. It was a massive amount of imbalance but also characterized by plenty of purpose, meaning, direction, and most importantly forward momentum.

• Paradoxically, some of my most miserable stretches were when everything was seemingly in balance. I was working precisely 40 hours/week with plenty of time for family and “life”, but miserable regardless. It was balance, but plagued by stale stasis.

Just like riding a bike, when we’re moving purposefully and imbibed with meaning, we’re automatically in balance. Balance starts becoming an issue when we’re stagnating.

Common discourse makes you focus on balance, to make up for the symptoms of a lack of movement. But this gets it all backwards. Balance is not the cause but rather an effect.

Assuming that it will be an imbalance and making adjustments to account for it is a much easier strategy to stick with. It gets us moving and creates momentum, which in turn, increases balance.

How it played out for me

It seems I went through the following phases of trying to balance:

1. Recognizing the traditional construct

2. Trying to make things work

3. Realizing that balance meant constant conflict

4. Finally, ending up disappointing all stakeholders, including myself

And it repeats in a loop, where we become determined to “fix” one aspect at the cost of others.

So if this construct doesn’t work, how then should we look at it? Let’s look at a particular articulation of this perennial tension, and then consider its implications.

The three marriages of work, self, and other

One of my favorite authors on careers is David Whyte. Here’s how he puts it:

The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another.

We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way. These hidden human dynamics of integration are more of a conversation, more of a synthesis and more of an almost religious and sometimes almost delirious quest for meaning than a simple attempt at daily ease and contentment.

…Human beings are creatures of belonging. … Interestingly, we belong to life as much through our sense that it is all impossible, as we do through the sense that we will accomplish everything we have set out to do.

This sense of belonging and not belonging is lived out by most people through three principal dynamics: first, through relationship to other people and other living things (particularly and very personally, to one other living, breathing person in relationship or marriage); second, through work; and third, through an understanding of what it means to be themselves, discrete individuals alive and seemingly separate from everyone and everything else. These are the three marriages, of Work, Self and Other.

…We can call these three separate commitments marriages because at their core they are usually lifelong commitments and… they involve vows made either consciously or unconsciously.

Why put them together? To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.

…Work-life balance is a concept that has us simply lashing ourselves on the back and working too hard in each of the three commitments. In the ensuing exhaustion we ultimately give up on one or more of them to gain an easier life.

…each of these marriages is, at its heart, nonnegotiable; …we should give up the attempt to balance one marriage against another, of, for instance, taking away from work to give more time to a partner, or vice versa, and start thinking of each marriage conversing with, questioning or emboldening the other two.

— David Whyte in The Three Marriages

There are deeper nuances to Whyte’s definitions which I’ll explore in a future edition. But this should suffice for our discussion today.

Implications

Whyte’s articulation of work, self, and other, can be visualized as three interlinked wheels in a constant conversation with each other. And it’s a different orientation from how we usually understand the work-life equation.

• It puts more focus on energy, momentum, direction, and alignment. Underperformance in one will drag down other aspects. You’re only as good as your weakest link. Paradoxically, significant movement in one can often lift up others.

• Recognize the season you’re in, and its particular requirements. Different phases of life will have different aspects needing attention. “Size”(focus) and “speed”(energy) of the flywheels change over time. Some seasons will require an imbalance of effort and focus. This is critical because we get often stressed about being stressed out, aka imbalance.

• Another context is burnout, that can also be misleading. Stress is not necessarily the enemy, but instead distress, and chronic stress are. And they are fundamentally different from eustress. You can work in a stressful job, but if you recover adequately it’ll only make you resilient. In contrast, an easier job with chronic low-level stress will do more damage.

• There’s also plenty of emerging research showing how “stress-mindsets” modulate our response. How you think about stress often matters more than the stress itself (future article coming on this). Here’s my LinkedIn post for now. The interlinked flywheels help to take a different perspective on stress and its role.

• Balancing is confusing. In contrast, CHOOSING is clarifying.

  • If career is a priority, then acknowledge that it’s an active choice you’re making. Proactive choice packs a lot of power. Indecision does the opposite.

  • This doesn’t mean you ignore family or health. But it does mean recognizing choices upfront. And this can change from year to year, quarter to quarter, even from one week to the next. This is different from being reactive and feeling perennially guilty about being out of balance.

• Also, recognize that success in one domain, doesn’t mean fulfillment in others. Balance and mediocrity in multiple domains is actually harder to pull off than success in one domain. Success in one frequently comes at the price of below mediocre performance in others.

• Consider these statements: “Working 16-hour days is OK. Prioritizing work over family is OK. Focusing on family instead of work is OK. Not optimizing everything is OK.” This is obviously not balance, but instead making proactive choices consistent with what’s important to us. The trouble starts when our actions are inconsistent with what we claim to be important, particularly with our stakeholders.

• Engaging vigorously with life and work is “net energy-producing”. When both are working well, we don’t have to think about balance. One feeds the other. Balance becomes an issue when one of them is “energy-draining”, which happens when we’re disengaged, or out of alignment.

When looked as a whole, harmony becomes a better word — it means by definition, certain aspects will be more prominent and “louder” than others. The more things are integrated, the more whole the wheel becomes, and thus stronger and resilient. It “collapses” into a single flywheel with its own momentum and dynamics.

I hope this way of looking at things gives you more options, and more helpful. It certainly has been for me.

Caveats and feedback

I haven’t hashed out all the details of this framework, but wanted to get the conversation started. In fact, if you read closely, I’m contradicting myself in some places. Clearly, there are no easy answers. At the same time, this feels truer, and more achievable, than conventional notions.

I would love your feedback. Is this consistent with your experience? Have you found better approaches? Has work-life balance worked for you? Please reply and let me know.

That’s does it for this edition. Thank you for reading.

---