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How to get your life balance right

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19th Apr 2012
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Modern life skills expert Liggy Webb offers up more great advice on getting that crucial balance between work, family and friends. 

As featured in Sift Media’s TrainingZone.co.uk, here are some top tips on getting your life balance right.

When life is busy, or all your energy is focused on a something, it's all too easy to find yourself 'off balance’ and not paying enough attention to the important areas of your life.

Life balance: Top Tips

• Find your own balance and what it means to you

• Work out your priorities and prioritise effectively

• Learn how to time manage more successfully

• Greet the day early and with a positive attitude

• Factor in thinking time to review and evaluate

• Draw a line between home and work

• Set yourself limits and create realistic parameters

• Make time to spend with your family and friends

• Develop new interests and hobbies

• Feed your soul as well as your bank account

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. You name them: work, family, health, friends and soul - and you are keeping all of these in the air. You will soon learn that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls: family, health, friends and soul are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably damaged or even shattered and they will never be the same again.

Too often in the fast-paced lives that we lead we neglect the things that are the most important. Work takes over and your health suffers, relationships start to disintegrate because we don't have the energy to nurture them. Sadly, some children grow up having a more in-depth relationship with the television or internet than they do with their parents.

'Work-life balance' is a phrase that has been bandied about since the 1970s. Personally, I think the term 'work-home balance' is a better description - or just 'life balance'. 'Work-life balance' tends to infer that we go to work and we have a life. The reality is that many of us spend more time at work than we do at home and more time with our work colleagues than we do with our friends and family, so it is a huge part of our lives.

Work is fast becoming the way in which we define ourselves. It is now answering some of the traditional questions like “who am I?” and “how do I find meaning and purpose in my life?” Work is no longer just about economics; it's about identity. About 50 years ago, people had many sources of identity: religion, class, nationality, political affiliation, family roots, geographical and cultural origins and more. Today, many of these, if not all, have been superseded by work. 

The idea of work/home balance is further complicated by the fact that today's workforce is more culturally diverse and also made up of different generations, each with its own set of priorities. Additionally, businesses are in various stages of their own lifecycles. Instead of looking for a generic, standardised concept of work/home balance, we need to understand that it is our own responsibility to make sure that we implement personal strategies that help us to get a better perspective on how we balance our time and energy between the two. 

One important thing is the distinction between work and home – and to be aware of the negativities that we can potentially carry between the two. If we are not careful, it can become a bad habit that, at the end of each busy day, we offload to our partners all our moans and whinges about our work day, thus infecting our home lives with the stress of work. A good habit to get into is spend time at the end of each day sharing your achievements and successes and focusing on the positive outcomes of the day. 

Work and home life are equally important, and the key to happiness is about finding the right balance so you can get the best and the most out of both of them.

Liggy Webb is a leading expert in the field of modern life skills and workplace wellness. She is the founding director of The Learning Architect a consortium of niche industry experts.

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Teignmouth
By Paul Scholes
20th Apr 2012 12:58

Head & Heart

Just to add another dimension I prefer Work:Me balance. 

All Liggy says makes sense, which is the head bit, but how about the heart (behaviour) bit? How do I naturally live the balance without the need to beat myself up @ 6pm still being in the office or when I forget an important event at home?  Bit like knowing that all those lovely carbs I'm addicted to are not doing my health any good and so living a battle between the knowing and the doing.

There's obviously no easy answer, especially as we are all different.  At one time for example, I enjoyed what I did at work about as much as I enjoyed what I did away from it and I think that was probably the closest I got to a reasonable balance with time, worry, urgency & enjoyment being evenly spread.  Think that might have been a week in April 1987!

Whilst it shouldn't be necessary to force the issue the method I've used from time to time is to practice saying NO, ie when a client asks to meet or for me to do something, I'll err on an automatic NO, adding "but I can do Tuesday after next".  What's sad is that, at times when the balance is all over the place, I use this method at home as well.

Probably all a bit too heavy for a Friday but why the topic grabbed my attention is that after over 30 years of running work from an office, I've moved it back home this month and all sorts of weird things are happening. 

To sum it up, Home (or me) now have the upper hand and so, a few lines above, as I stared out of the window at the bird feeder and the fox next door I noticed that it had started to rain and so rushed downstairs to bring the washing in....and get attacked by the dog....and cut my home made loaf to put it in the freezer.....and ignore the work phone going off upstairs.  Think I've cracked it!

Have a balancing weekend all

 

  

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