Why Work-Life Balance Doesn't Always Work

If you read self-help books you will keep running into words of wisdom that advise readers to find ways of creating balance in their lives.

You know what I mean - perhaps we have even read some of the same self-help books. "The key to happiness is in finding the correct balance between our work life and our family life; our responsibilities and our fun; our frivolity and our seriousness" .....or is it?

This sounds reasonable, until you start taking a closer look at what it all means.

To have to find a balance between, for example, our home life and our work life implies that these two parts of our life must be separated into two distinct activities, and kept separated at all cost. Family life and recreational activities do not and should not interfere with work-related activities, and work-related activities do not or should not interfere with the rest of your life. Right??? (We all know that the last bit doesn’t always work. Hands up all those who answer work emails in the evening, during the week end, or while you are on holidays?)

Our task, should we decide to put the effort into it, is to find the right mix of time spent with our families and pursuing recreational activities (the activities we enjoy doing, ones that revive and refresh up) and time spent at work (the activities that drain and stress us). This balance is supposed to be what creates happy, well adjusted individuals.

But what if we didn't have to separate our lives into balanced, segmented portions? What if we only included in our lives the activities that made us feel good? And excluded from our lives those activities that drained our energies or stress us out? We could choose to create a "lifestyle career" for ourselves. A “lifestyle career” is a career that is so much a part of our natural self that there is no distinction between our work activities and the other activities in our life.

Not only would work activities, home life activities and recreational activities be all mixed in together, almost indistinguishable from each other, but the lifestyle career we chose or created could also include our family's participation in what we doing?

Impossible you say?? Not necessarily!! There are people I know who are living this type of lifestyle right now!! And I am not just talking about farmers, although farming is most definitely a lifestyle career and for many people farming is the perfect lifestyle career choice for them.

However, there are also life coaches, mobile professionals, artists, writers, graphic designers........who are living exactly this type of lifestyle right now.

One life coach, an inspiration to us all, sold off pretty much everything she and her family owned, including their house, clothes, furniture, everything that did not fit into their van. She then packed her family and the few belongings they had left into the family van and hit the road for the adventure of a lifetime. She and her husband will be home schooling their two sons and running their life coaching/weight loss school/book writing business from the road. Their goal is to travel throughout the continental USA visiting every state in the Union, and then head over to Italy where they will spend a few more months being nomadic. After that...who knows???

Another family is running their graphic design/coaching/training school/blogging business from anywhere in the world they feel like living at any given moment.

These are not lives being lived balancing work activities with home and lifestyle activities. These are lives being lived to fullest in every possible sense.

So, here's to not finding balance. Here's to living a life of full-on feel good instead :-)