Do You Live to Work or Work to Live?

Are you married to your job … or going through the motions? If you live to work, you may be crossing that fine line between being engaged and being consumed by work. When passion becomes preoccupation — when a disproportionate amount of your time, thoughts and energy are devoted to your career — your work-life balance can be threatened. On the flip side, when you work to live, you miss out on the rich sense of fulfillment that a meaningful career can elicit.

If you work to live, you might envy people who truly enjoy their career. But the grass isn’t always greener. People who live to work, like Donna, run the risk of relying too heavily on work for gratification — to the exclusion of other sources of joy. Some might call them workaholics, addicted to the adrenaline that comes from solving a crisis, closing a sale or otherwise tying their worth to their work.

What’s worse, they’re often on the fast track to burnout. The capacity to understand the long-term implications of over-engagement is critical. Over time, a lack of work-life balance takes a toll on your physiology, interferes with your ability to handle stress and impacts your overall well-being. And more often than not, you can’t see it because you’re moving so fast, completely immersed in the reality that you’ve created — knowingly or not.

When your career is aligned with your natural abilities, your talents, your interests and your values, it can be hard to put the brakes on work. Work never stops, and so, at a certain point, it’s up to you to stop working. What is that point? For some people, it’s exhaustion that manifests in physical aches and pains, irritability, sleep issues or even a failed relationship.

WHAT DRIVES OVER-ENGAGEMENT?

When you live to work, restoring balance can be complicated because of several drivers that often lie beneath the surface.

Powerful, but usually unrecognized, some of those drivers include:

The vicious cycle of high performance — Some people have a need to perform at a very high level so as not to disappoint others. They have to deliver at this level — consistently and continuously. They love being a top performer, and it becomes tied to their identity. Their bosses and companies reinforce their exceptional performance, and expectations rise in tandem.

An excuse to suppress unwelcome emotions — When life gets so busy that there’s no time to think … conveniently, there is no time to think! Quiet can invite anxiety, especially around life’s biggest questions — Am I living a meaningful life? Am I doing what I really want to be doing? Am I fulfilled?

The inability to say “no” — If you have a strong drive for harmony, for peace, for not creating discord or upsetting the apple cart, you’re going to have a hard time saying “no” to others. As a result, it’s going to be hard to carve out time to say “yes” to you. This is especially true for women, frequently raised to be caretakers. More likely than not, that role bleeds into their workplace as well.

achieve balance in work life coachingFilling a gap — Some people acknowledge some sort of gap in their life, but are quick to dismiss it in a way that’s almost dissociative: “I don’t know what’s missing, I just know something is missing, and work fills it. End of story.”

Uncomfortable as it may be at first, the answer is to create stillness. Nothingness. Time to reflect, with intention. Ask yourself questions that will inform your intentions, for example: “If I won the lottery tomorrow, and I didn’t have to work ever again, what would I do?” While you’re not likely to win the lottery — tomorrow, or ever — this type of conversation provides breadcrumbs to follow to understand what’s missing. And sometimes, you can pull into your life those small pieces that will feed you.

Some people, like Donna, think “I’d love to have the time to read more novels … travel … take better care of myself.” All of these things are possible once you become very efficient at understanding priorities: what’s truly important, and what’s not — and what’s truly urgent and what’s not.

IF YOU LIVE TO WORK … OR WORK TO LIVE

Most well-run companies recognize the importance of employee engagement as one of the strongest drivers of performance. But what many individuals fail to recognize is the importance of finding the “just-right” level of engagement for themselves.

As a result, you may be living your life on one extreme or the other, in a constant struggle to find work-life balance. Sometimes taking a few steps back — or a few steps forward — is the key to identifying the roadblocks standing between you and the life you envision.

While living to work and working to live both pose a threat to your overall wellbeing, problematic, the good news is that there is a middle ground … a much healthier ground, characterized by work-life balance, engagement and energy.

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