Much has been said already about how we could keep the balance between our personal life and work life. However, not all of the advice you get can actually match with your personality and lifestyle. While it is true that focusing too much on work and having very little time for your personal life is not good for your well being and even for your performance at work, not everyone is willing to change a routine they’ve long been used to. What’s worse, forcing yourself to work less and play more can leave you more uncertain and stressed out in the long run.
Wouldn’t it be much better if you could find a way to live a life that enjoys, embraces and deals with the challenging concept of ‘work life’ rather than continuously finding a way to escape it?
Here’s what you can do to achieve it:
1. Set goals. Work hard. Achieve results.
By working hard and getting good results as a team or individually can be a great source of fulfillment and satisfaction. You shouldn’t get too scared of working too hard because it gives you a lot of things to be happy about. This doesn’t mean, however, that you should do nothing but work. Of course, you still need to step back a bit and think about your lifestyle. You should not avoid periods of hard work and enjoyment. Instead, you should enjoy it.
2. Be brave to make bold decisions.
Burnout can be caused by losing control of things around you. You easily get burnt out when you feel like nothing’s changed despite the hard work you’ve been doing. In this case, you should be courageous enough to make bold decisions so that you may start feeling like the success or failure of a particular project depends on you. Although this sounds stressful, it can give you a renewed sense of purpose and control.
3. Enrich your knowledge and stimulate your imagination.
It could be quite stressful to keep looking for ways to empty your mind because it just can’t be! Instead, use your spare time to acquire knowledge that will also help stimulate your creativity and imagination. Don’t let yourself get stuck in the simplest perspective of life. By engaging in something interesting, you help yourself grow mentally and emotionally, and you can use such knowledge to rise above tough situations.
4. Don’t forget to take time off.
While it would help you combat stress and burnout to learn and do new things, you also need time to focus on things not related to work. Taking time off doesn’t mean you have to wait for holidays or weekends to enjoy your life. Even while at work, you should allow your mind to wander. Be imaginative and spend more time thinking of things you like or want to do.
5. Have humor in your life.
If you can find humor even while doing a complicated and very important project, your work will never have control over you. A humorous person has the ability to see things from different angles, and this can help him or her find solutions to problems, or improve things around them.
As any personal coach would say, life isn’t all about work, but it isn’t all about pleasure either. It is way too complicated to separate your work life from your personal life, so why not just enjoy the life-work aspect instead?
Cecile Peterkin is a certified career and retirement coach, and a registered member of the Career Professionals of Canada and the International Coach Federation. She is also the Founder and Senior Career Strategist at Cosmic Coaching Centre, provider of career and life management services for middle managers and mid-career professionals across Canada, United States and Europe.