Want More Fun In Your Worklife Balance? Put Some Me Time Into The Mix!

April 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Today’s post comes to us care of Sarah Fudin, a Social Media and Outreach Co-ordinator from the University of Southern California. Enjoy!

I know it’s been said a million and one times, but here it is again: Your work takes up a large part of your life, so you better make sure you love what you do!

The truth is that I love my job, but I also love my life outside of work and even though I wake up excited to get into the office, I’m equally as excited to shut down my computer and take to the streets of New York. There are always a million and one things going on in New York — friends in town, concerts in every neighborhood, new restaurants opening and new places to explore in my running shoes. It’s amazing, but with a full-time job and a full-time social life, I’ve also found that it’s important to balance work and social activities with some quality “me” time.

If you’re having a hard time figuring out how to balance all of the things you love in your life, here are a few suggestions:

Take Your Lunch Break

If you have the liberty to have a lunch break, take it. And if you can, don’t just refuel your body and rush back to work. Even on a budget, you might be able to fix yourself a lunch worth savoring or meet a good friend to chat over a sandwich. The mid-day classes at my Brazilian jiu-jitsu school are always packed with men and women who shrug off their work clothes for a quick roll on the mat before heading back to the office. If you can use your lunch break to clear your mind, forget about work and do something you enjoy, why not take that opportunity?

Schedule a Fun Weekend

The key word here is schedule. That doesn’t mean you have to plan out your itinerary minute by minute, but you ought to at least daydream about some activities you enjoy ahead of time — then follow through! Use the weekend to enjoy yourself in ways you can’t during the week: Take a trip upstate to do some hiking, go dancing all night, or stay in bed with a cup of tea and a novel, but make sure that you do what you love, rather than just going grocery shopping and sitting on the couch.

Don’t Waste Time on Things You Don’t Love

I often find myself frittering away my free time on Facebook when I would rather spend it actually seeing the people I care about face-to-face.

Don’t get me wrong: In those instances when I can’t see people face-to-face, I’m thankful for Facebook — but many of my friends live in New York City, and they’re often just a few blocks away when I’m writing on their walls! It’s difficult, but when I cut down on my social networking time I find myself feeling less lonely and more loved. Put your energy into the things you care about most, and you will be surprised how much of that energy comes back to you.

Set Priorities

The question arises: What do you care about most?

Everyone has their own answer. My personal priorities are the people I love, my creative and professional work, and caring for my body (in that order). Everything else comes second. I don’t always do right by all three, but I do my best. And just knowing what my priorities are helps with making decisions on a day-to-day basis.

Create Your Own Rituals

I can’t leave the house without eating a good breakfast. Fixing and eating breakfast is my way of taking the time to center myself and enjoy a simple pleasure before plunging into the stress and strain of the workday.

Some people sing, some people pray, some people dress themselves with exquisite care — whatever it is, making a daily habit of doing one thing you care about, no matter how seemingly insignificant or idiosyncratic, helps to create balance in life.

Take the Scenic Route

In New York City, it’s easy to rush through the street, hail a cab or fiddle with your iPad on the subway. But when the weather’s good, few pleasures can match strolling through your local park or exploring an unfamiliar neighborhood. If you have the time between obligations, why not take the scenic route instead of descending the subway stairs as usual?
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No matter how important or demanding your career, it definitely depends highly on taking care of yourself as much as anything else. So take a little time to celebrate yourself, to center yourself and to relax. Creating a balance between work and life requires you to set your own priorities and to be mindful of them once they’re set — but it also makes life much more fun.

 

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Sarah Fudin currently works in community relations for the University of Southern California’s Masters in Teaching program, which provides aspiring teachers the opportunity to earn a Master’s degree and teacher certification online. Outside of work Sarah enjoys running, reading and Pinkberry frozen yogurt.

 

Filed Under: Thriving @ work Tagged With: , ,

How To Do The Work You Love – AND Pay The Bills

April 17, 2012 by 9 Comments

Did you see the article over on HBR the other day about choosing between making money and doing what you love?

Leonard A Schlesinger, Charles F Kiefer, and Paul B Brown answered this great – and not so uncommon – question:

“If you’re passionate about what you do, but it’s not going to make you a lot of money, should you still do it?”

Their answer was a conditional yes. The condition being that the thing you’re passionate about keeps you financially viable. Because, if it doesn’t, you need to find yourself some other kind of income stream meantime.

Not because you’re a crazy person for dreaming that you could turn what you love into a job.

But because, if you can’t fund yourself today, you risk being unable to do any of what you love either today or tomorrow. As the guys across at HBR point out, it’s a Maslow hierarchy of needs thing. Get the basic requirements for food, shelter and personal safety under control, before you go off up the self-actualisation ladder.

Great stuff.

And the post got me thinking about how career attitudes can sometimes trip us up. Pertinent to this discussion is one about focusing on one thing at a time.

Focus on one thing only

Whether it’s said, or implied, a key belief, at least when you’re growing up, is that you should choose the thing to which you’ll dedicate your career. (All the better if it’s something that has kudos and earns money.)

Either this thing OR that thing. Drama or law. Music or accountancy. In my case it was either art or European languages (there’s a whole other story about how I ended up doing psychology, but that’s for another day).

A lucky few find that one thing that satisfies them ongoing.

For the rest of us, it means that we often put away some of the things that really, really gripped us in making the choice of one thing versus another.

Which can appear okay for a while, but it’s amazing how often I hear people in their thirties and forties regret that, in the process of becoming the kind of professional they thought they were expected to be, they gave up music, or writing, or art or that idea they had about running their own business, or whatever.

See, different things fulfill us in different ways and maybe it’s unreasonable to expect one thing to completely satisfy us. But that’s how we’re often hard-wired to think.

Tough at the Top

I used to run workshops called Tough at the Top for senior people who were experiencing their jobs as particularly challenging, and who wanted group coaching and peer support in breaking through where they were at.

One of the exercises I had folks do was to think about why they did what they did for a living; what they expected from it. There was a wide range of things that people were looking for their big jobs to deliver. For example:

  • Challenge
  • Feeling that they were leaving a legacy
  • Being involved with something bigger than themselves
  • The ability to connect with and to lead other people
  • Wanting to be part of a team of smart colleagues
  • Personal development
  • Financial reward

Hardly surprising that these people were often feeling frustrated in one or more of these areas.

What if, instead of putting the onus on their big job, they considered all their needs and how they could get them met across a number of different vocational and personal interests?

The romantic parallels

Which reminds me of a client I’ve worked with for a number of years, and a challenge he was having, not with his work, but with a relationship.

See, he’d been dating this one woman, with whom he was very happy and very much in love. They did lovely things together, he told me that their sex life was good, and he enjoyed being around her. However, he’s a pretty intellectual guy and he had become frustrated that this woman either couldn’t or wouldn’t have the big-brained type of smart conversation that he enjoyed having from time to time.

Did this mean that they were not compatible?

His dilemma led me to support him to get really clear about what he needs from other people, particularly from his key relationships. He listed out: companionship, a sense of belonging, sex, fun, intellectual challenge. I then got him to think about whether he needed to have all of these met by one person. This got him thinking of some good friends he had with whom he loved intellectual sparring, and how, if he spent a little more time with them, he’d feel fine.

Here’s the interesting bit: when he gave himself permission that he could have different needs met by different people, he enjoyed both sets of relationships even more.

The moral of the story

It’s the same with work.

If we expect something that we love to make us money when it won’t or it’s simply not yet at that stage, we’ll resent it.

Ditto, if we expect something that makes us money to give us a bigger sense of purpose, if in our heart of hearts it doesn’t.

What if we learned from my client’s story?

What if we reframed that stuff about having to choose one career stream over another and thought creatively about how we might meet all of our vocational needs?

What might we end up doing?

In a nutshell, some of the work you do you’ll love. Some of the work you do will earn you money. Different kinds of work serve different purposes. Get over it and get on with relishing all that you do.

Filed Under: Thriving @ work, Work and life Tagged With: ,