Beyond work-life balance Pt. 2 — The Complete Life
In the last article, I shared the 5C’s framework as a way to analyze and begin to fix work-life balance issues. In this article I want to talk more squarely about what lies beyond immediate work-life balance imperatives.
I want to set up another framework and take a more complete view on life.
Then, in future articles, I’ll cover the nuts-and-bolts of topics like: career change, bootstrapping a startup, or launching a creative project as ways to transform how you work and live. I’ll also talk about how to use creativity, storytelling, and a curated community as the means to do that.
Returning to the challenge of work-life balance:
“It’s better to run towards something, than away from something” — Unknown
We can become so fixated on making a work-life balance problem go away that we “jump out of the frying pan into the fire”, we think that “the grass is greener” and don’t “start with the end in mind”. We react, rather than acting deliberately.
So you change jobs…and the problems follow you?
Too often, we spend most of our time thinking about what we don’t want, and too little time thinking about what we do really want.
How do you want to live?
As hard as it might be to try to envision your future, particularly if your life feels like it is falling apart due to work-life imbalance, that is exactly what I’m going to suggest you do right now. You might be asking, “Is this all there is?”. There is always more to life, even if you can’t see that possibility right now (and that is where imagination and creativity will come in).
Perhaps, instead of being in the midst of a work-life crisis, you’re an optimizer, wanting to get every edge, and squeeze every last drop out of life? The question you are always asking is, “What’s next?”. If so, looking at life in a complete way will help your efforts converge, rather than become diffuse.
Being stuck, or being a perpetual optimizer, is a prompt to look for ways to live differently, and a roadmap is so important to turn that prompt into actions and results. And that is where the picture below comes into play. What I call the “complete” life journey.
To begin to try to solve the alignment piece of your work-life challenges in a sustainable way, you’ll get work in a place that supports how you want to live, and that in turn will make your longer-term whole life one that you’re excited to live.
Before we jump headlong into working on work, we’ll start with the Whole Life perspective, and work back from there.
Whole Life
In the top right of the diagram is the “whole life” horizon.
This whole life might be literally on your deathbed, or looking back over any meaningful time period, a period even as short as a year.
Looking back over a long enough time horizon allows you get perspective. To assess whether you’re on track, and if what you’ve be focusing on really mattered.
Look back now over the past year, were/are you on track?
On track to where?
It’s a fair question.
In the coaching part of what I do, I ask entrepreneurs and professionals what type of life they want to create. The difference they want to make in the world. This is even before we start talking in detail about strategy or goals.
It is excruciating to see time and again that, as adults, we rarely ask for what we really want.
We rarely ever say what we really want out loud, even in private, and almost never write it down.
Instead, we tend to think in terms of what we believe is “reasonable” (and who wants to live a reasonable life anyway?).
I want you to be unreasonable for a moment.
What do you really want?
When you know what you want, and the difference you want to make in the world, you have direction. When direction is connected to your values you have a healthy burning desire line that surpasses simple goal setting. Everything lines up.
Goal setting, in isolation, can also be kind of bland, and lead to fairly boring life.
Have you ever got what you wanted, and realized that what you really needed was something else?
You spend months, or years, chasing goals at the exclusion of living, rather than as a complement to living.
The whole life perspective is active rather than passive. It’s about taking some chances, being in the arena rather than on the sidelines, and getting to the end having lived an interesting (and happy and healthy) life with the fewest number of regrets.
The whole life perspective is not “set and forget”, it’s about course correcting as new possibilities are created by the actions you just took. You create a life that goes beyond what you could even imagine today.
Would you go to unreasonable lengths, by today’s standards, to live the whole life that you want?
The whole life perspective is about the present as well as the future. You’re creating and living your whole life second by second with the decisions you make.
The stakes of remaining stuck are high.
Your life is on the line.
Life.
Think about the type of life you want to live.
What does a typical day look like?
Who is around you?
In The Good Life Book, I introduced the Five Pillars as a way to think about balance. You can work out a plan (and measures) to ensure you’re thinking not only about work, but people, spirituality, health (mental and physical) and your personal expression and contribution.
The Pillars help you to crystallize your definition of balance, and give you a way to see how you’re tracking to that definition throughout the year, and make adjustments.
For me, balance includes being able to spend time with my extended family in Australia, the UK, and Oregon, and to be there for my young kids (for example, I got to attend a Valentine’s Day celebration at their school this morning, a work day).
But balance also means stretching to make art that is vital, and “dangerous”. Pushing the boundaries of what I think that I can do creatively.
Balance means working on things, at least every week, that I’d still do tomorrow even if I didn’t need money to live anymore. And, strangely enough, those “non-money” things are having the biggest influence on differentiating what I do get paid for today. This is the creative virtuous circle that I’ll talk about in a couple of articles time. (And by the way I would still do what I’m doing today if I didn’t need to. But part of the point of what I’m trying to demonstrate by sharing my own case study is that you can leave a corporate job and get paid to do something completely different that you love. You can!)
Balance, to me, also means creating compelling events and content for you that help you live complete on your terms. That is part of the difference I want to make, and thus is part of my definition of balance.
I don’t see balance as a zero sum game. Sacrificing one thing for another. I also don’t want to create a lowest common denominator life, where everything is compromised and watered down, and “sensible”.
Work out what’s important to you then switch between those different sides of yourself to achieve an overall result.
It takes imagination. But what, that is worthwhile, doesn’t?
What does balance mean to you?
Work.
Work takes up too much time and energy to do something that you don’t care about.
I see people breaking their back every day doing a career they hate (yet perhaps are excellent at) in order to hope to do something they care about after they retire.
It’s common, but that feels like a fallback position, not a target.
Aiming for the fallback is not what we’re setting out to do together today, and over the next few months, in this series on the “complete” approach.
The guts of the complete approach rest in using creativity, storytelling and a cultivated community to unlock better-than-average results for you.
I want you, in the near future, to be the person that your current group is scratching their collective heads trying to work out how you did it. And you’ll help them, if they’ll listen.
You’ll apply the same tools: creativity, storytelling and cultivated community to various ends that might include: career change, starting a business, launching a creative project, negotiating a flexible working arrangement, or whatever you need to do to avoid a lowest common denominator life, and begin to live a complete life.
By the time you’ve started working on tailoring a complete life for yourself, you’ll have begun to find a new tribe of people who are creating a unique work-life situation on their own terms.
Unique perhaps, but the ability to live a unique life is a lot more common than you think.
To fully move beyond work-life balance we must creatively explode the idea of what work is, and how we can, and should, do it.
I’ll talk about how to do that in the next part of this article: “Starting a business (even if you don’t want to)”.
Wrapping up.
Living a complete life is about completing the circle (living authentically, including pursuing what you really want) and then, if you desire to, starting to expand that circle.
Be complete now, and then be complete in the future, but different.
Complete is about creatively building a scalable and sustainable model for how you do life.
And completeness involves others, and how you help make a difference in the world.
Actions
Until next time, here are some actions you might want to think about.
Firstly, go back and answer the questions posed in this article. I mean write out the answers.
Write down what endlessly fascinates you. What “job” would you do, if you didn’t need work to pay the bills? What would you regret not ever getting around to doing in your life? This insight will be useful in future exercises.
Talk to one person about what you’ve read here. particularly what you really want. Share/Tag people to get the message out there. Follow me to ensure you see the other parts of this series.
And, as always, let me know what a complete life means to you, and any questions or comments you have.
All the best!
