Work-Life Harmony

I just met a happy road warrior, a professional who loves his work and travels the world, skipping across time zones like a flat stone bouncing across a glassy lake.  Last year he was “home” a total of 30 days.  He loves it.  He is single, mature, curious, and healthy.

I recently interviewed a physician who lives 20 minutes from her practice.  She is fried.  She is never exactly sure when she is going to be able to leave her office, or if she is going to be called in on an emergency several nights a month and at least one weekend.  She also knows she’s going to work more with less, and probably for less.  She is single, with two children under 10.

The point is that our ideal lives are as individual as our fingerprint.  What makes us happy and content, and what ignites stress and frustration, are very different in the details.  But the big drive we have in common is inner harmony.  The opposite, inner conflict, lights our guts on fire with nasty stress hormones that cruise through our bloodstream like drive-by gangsters, spraying bullets in our otherwise peaceful neighborhood.  These stress bullets physically shoot holes in our wisdom–slowing our thinking, distorting our emotions, and causing us to feel raw and constantly irritable.

The stress we feel is the frustration of feeling stuck with a trade-off that violates our deepest desires. Trade-offs like “I can either excel at work or at home,” or “I can either live close to work and hate where I live, or I can live where I want to and commute two hours each day,” or “Either I can stay in my stupid job and pay my bills, or I can do something I love and risk going broke.”

These are nasty dilemmas that seem unsolvable.  These are the kind of problems that many of your questions are based on.  When we are conflicted at the level of our core values, it is easy to feel helpless, even powerless, to do anything.  We may feel victimized by previous bad choices, or by new unforeseen circumstances that we must pay for over and over again in the grind of daily unhappiness.

Psychologists tell us what we long for is inner harmony.  The peace that comes from living at a pace and rhythm that sustains our relationships, our health, and our reasonable lifestyle.  But many of us are confused as to exactly what that is.  Social comparison is the emotional logic that tries to define our path to happiness by comparing ourselves to people who seem better off than we are.  Television has opened up a torrent of fake lifestyles and fake relationships that can sometimes make us wish we had no challenges, a new car, an expensive home, normal children, and happy endings everyday.

But inner harmony doesn’t come from comparing our own lives to the imagined lives of others.  It comes from deep self-knowledge about what uniquely matters to us, and persistent optimism that we are making progress toward a more sustainable balance.

What this requires is having a high-fidelity life vision.  A new life story in which you feel fulfilled by your work, engaged with your loved ones, and stimulated by your personal passions.

Now I realize that if your current life is far from your ideal one, you might think daydreaming about something better will just make you crazy.  But it’s not true.  What makes us most unhappy is not knowing what we want, but knowing only what we don’t want.  We cannot define our future as simply an escape from our present troubles.  We need to lead our lives by having a clear, values-drenched vision of what we deeply long for.  When we do, experts report, we’ll think more creatively, expand what’s realistic, and see opportunities that were previously invisible.  A clear life vision will also guide our next steps so they take us forward rather than just speed up walking in circles.

Do you have a clear life-vision?  Of course it will be dynamic in details of execution.  Wagon trains that left St. Louis in the 1850’s never knew which exact mountain passes they would traverse to reach California when they started because every year the weather was different.  Nevertheless, they left for the Promised Land they envisioned.  Their direction was clear, the exact path unknown.  That’s how our best-lived lives unfold.

Here’s a chart to help you think about your life vision.

If you can articulate your life vision, please post a summary of its highlights in our comments section so we might be inspired.  Together we can help each other come up with new ways of seeing our present circumstances, and a build a sturdy bridge to our best future.

As our research team continues to examine the trends and opportunities concerning our careers and lifestyles, we are discovering more insights and connecting more dots on how to navigate the future.  There is so much to tell you, but please continue to send me your questions at askwill@thoughtrocket.com so we can make sure we are addressing the issues on the bull’s-eye of your real life challenges.

Look up and see your best future.
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