Work life balance doesn't exist- dispelling the myth

There are multiple people in the corporate world right now including coaches who suggest that work-life balance doesn’t exist but at Julia Trask Coaching we believe this attitude is just another way to ensure that you don’t take time for yourself and instead focus too heavily on one aspect of your life. This is why we often talk about life-work balance because we believe that life happens when work doesn’t take over the living and that it in fact is not elusive nor far fetched at all but essential for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Entrepreneurs often step in the business space to escape the reality of the corporate world, long hours, minimal days off, and more time spent bargaining for time with loved ones than actually getting it. It doesn’t then make sense to create a business that leaves the life out of the lifestyle. Some professionals in the health and wellbeing space suggest that harmony is better than balance because balance requires a perfect amount of both lives and work while harmony allows for an ebb and flow between the two which ultimate should balance itself out however we believe that no balance between work and life actually stunts work itself.

Think about this- you work for 8hours a day in an office or coworking space, then you go home and work some more never making time for a workout, never removing yourself from an electronic screen except to eat and take toilet breaks. What would your health look like? What would your productivity rate? Chances are you would feel sluggish after that 8 hours, your productivity would be heavily declining and you’d be supporting a local café with all your coffee purchases to get through the hours. Whereas if you workout for a couple of hours a day, spend time with family, watch a television show or socialize with friends you can easily work 8 hours, relax for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours without getting burnt out. So why don’t people do it then?

Work-life balance comes down to one thing: perceived reality. Entrepreneurs and high achievers sometimes fall into the trap of believing that if they just finish this, or just do this that the work will be completed and they can rest properly but in business, work doesn’t stop. In business you have to MAKE work stop otherwise you do not get a life. This is why we believe work-life ‘harmony’ is just a soft, PC cop-out to people who want to let themselves off the hook for what really matters- growing your business while growing yourself.

You see the entrepreneurial space tells business owners worldwide to read countless books, some say 1 per week for a year (at least), to get a team, to structure their business so they get their time back but they don’t necessarily go towards building out the next step: actually creating a PLAN for personal development, active personal development. Active personal development as Julia Trask calls it is activities that require movement, engagement, and physical activity. This could be social sport, fitness or gym sessions, dance classes, attending meetup groups where you have to converse with others, acting classes, Toastmaster groups- a space where you are not sedentary you have to actively engage in a completely different manner to work. Some entrepreneurs have mastered the art of active personal development that they’ve combined exercise and learning using tools like Speechify to allow their latest book to be read to them while they take a walk, clean the house or do the shopping. This helps the entrepreneur to maximize their time while also getting active and it’s important.

There is nothing more demotivating than knowing you have a great business but your waistline has fallen by the wayside because you haven’t got up to move it. There is also nothing more frustrating trying to get more work out of yourself when you are on a deadline but nothing is working because you haven’t committed to making time for life as much as work. Business owners can often forget this.

Growing in one area of your life while others do not succeed doesn’t create the same level of fulfillment. It’s not about being obsessed with success but rather about having some perspective about how fast you need to arrive at it. The internet is FULL of suggestions for entrepreneurs to ‘hustle hustle hustle’ and it does not promote the importance of work-life balance enough. The very hustle frenzy you are fed as an entrepreneur forgets that if you don’t eat, sleep, rest well you cannot hustle, you are useless and what’s more, your body will tell you that’s the case if you do not listen to it.

As an entrepreneur, our founder Julia always wants young children, in particular, to always see that the balance of work and life is important. Through witnessing this balance children then can understand that work isn’t more important than life and life isn’t more important than work but rather that both things need each other for us to experience full success. We have to play to work hard and we have to work hard to enjoy our play. When we work hard we enjoy our play, when we play hard we are happy to go back to work as a different kind of rest. Children, adults, and entrepreneurs need to remember this because work-life balance matters, it needs to exist for us to reach our full potential. After all, we don’t play a game of soccer without doing the training, do we? And we don’t train without a game of soccer in mind at some point either?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on work-life balance. How you keep it and what your tips are, please feel free to put the comments below.

What is your current work life balance like? Comment below.