Forget Work-Life Balance, Consider the Purpose-Freedom Continuum
I’ve written before about the problems I see in the phrase, Work-Life Balance.
When I find myself looking at something, realising that the flaws in it make it far less useful than I thought, I often find myself returning to one of the philosopher Ken Wilber’s great ideas: we can transcend and include something, moving to a more developed viewpoint with more perspective, but still containing what was useful or true about the way we saw things before.
That’s what I did with The Coaching Business Flywheel, creating the latest version when I realised one of my own clients proved my idea wrong.
That’s what I did with my ideas on productivity, when I realised they weren’t as complete as I thought they were.
And that’s what I found myself thinking about when I returned from holiday recently.
You see, I know the feeling of having had enough holiday. But I didn’t have it last month.
When I took a career break in my late 20s, volunteering in the UK and then travelling to South East Asia and North America, I thought not much about work. I let some reflection happen, but was absorbed in the adventure.
Until near the end. Then something started to happen. I started to get itchy for what was next.
Matt Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic and one of the founders of WordPress, which now runs around 1/3 of the internet (just think about that for a second!). At Automattic, staff are strongly encouraged to take a sabbatical every few years. And what they have noticed over years of this practice is something like this: the first month is about switching off, the second is about genuine break, and in the third many people start to want to get back to work.
When I came back from my holiday last month, here’s what I noticed: I hadn’t been through enough of those first two phases to reach the third. I was still in deficit.
I started looking for it - the idea that would transcend and include Work-Life Balance but be far more meaningful and useful for me. What was I in deficit of at the end of my holiday? And what had I been in deficit of or surplus of when I reached the final couple of months of my career break?
Here’s what I came to: at the end of my holiday, I was still in deficit of Freedom.
But at the end of my career break, I had reached a surplus of Freedom, but a deficit of Purpose.
Work-Life Balance doesn’t really work for me because some people who seem incredibly busy also seem incredibly energised. They aren’t worn out.
It doesn’t work for me because it makes the assumption that Work isn’t Life, but in the 21st Century many of us are lucky to have created work that really brings us aliveness.
But comparing our sense of Freedom with our sense of Purpose makes things look different.
It makes sense of my life in my 20s, when outside of somewhat meaningless (to me) jobs, I poured my energy into work filled with purpose as a trustee of charities and actor in theatrical productions.
It makes sense of the feeling at the end of my holiday, where too much work of real meaning and purpose, at home and in the (virtual) office, meant that my freedom (which of course allows for rest) need hadn’t been satisfied.
It makes sense of the way that sometimes, adding purpose in one area of our life changes how we feel about not having it in another.
It makes sense of the changes that bringing up children - an undeniably purposeful activity - can have on parents’ and carers’ psychology and attitude to their work.
It makes sense of the coaching ‘horror story’ I heard recently from a colleague who had spoken to a friend working at a high level in a professional services company about his coaching experience. His coach had almost insisted he needed to work on Work-Life Balance. And whilst that might have been true for some people, if this man had his freedom need met and had his purpose need met, then he didn’t need any more rest or time off no matter how that was different for the coach in their life.
And so, consider:
Where are you on the Purpose-Freedom Continuum? Where do you have surplus, and where deficit?
And what changes might serve you?
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.