Work/Life Balance and the Demanding Job
I’ve been thinking a lot about balance lately. Those of us who are recovering perfectionists have to develop a flexible relationship with the concept of “balance” because we can easily let balance become a rigid set of rules we chase after so we can be perfect. It becomes a striving, and getting out of balance becomes something that we use as evidence that we are not good enough.
Self-care, balance, and boundaries all go together. When we learn that self-care is prioritizing our needs in a holistic way, we develop routines for staying balanced. We often need to set boundaries in order to make sure we maintain that balance.
This is all good!
This is holding ourselves accountable for making sure we show up fully in the areas of life that are most important to us.
This is making sure we have the bandwidth to be there for the people we love and the fulfillment of living out our calling.
But life has a way of getting in the way.
A medical diagnosis. A car accident. A job change. World events. A betrayal.
These things cause us to regroup, which causes us to prioritize different things while we search for our footing.
We tend to think of the big stressful things of life as the stuff that throws us out of whack with feeling balanced in life, but the good things can do that, too. Even the small-ish ones.
This is why it is on my mind lately. I have had a cluster of really fun, good, fulfilling things converge in my life, and my normal daily self-care routines have had to bend and flex to accommodate them.
It occurred to me that it is important to debunk the myth of perfect, static balance.
Balance is dynamic.
Have you ever tried to stand on one leg for any length of time? Go ahead, try it.
Notice how you have to make adjustments one way and another to make it happen. If you are about to fall to one side, you may need to make a huge adjustment to keep the pose. It’s not just a perfect standstill, but an ever-moving process.
In life, we can have that ideal of balancing our self-care, our work/home/fun balance, but we have different needs at different times. We can keep shooting for standing with poise on one leg, but we have to make necessary adjustments to make it happen.
When we talk about those adjustments in life, we are not always talking about little adjustments.
Sure, sometimes. On routine days, my small adjustments can look like bringing my journal along to a sports practice so I get my journaling done while I am waiting in the car (instead of journaling first thing in the morning). It can be writing the undone task on tomorrow’s calendar because it is time to shift from my work self to my home self. If I have been doing a lot of high-energy, social events, the introvert part of me needs some down time, some extra solitude.
But when the big things happen, bigger adjustments are necessary. My daughter had massive jaw surgery this past summer. For the week following her surgery, I didn’t do much other than keep track of her medications, watch movies with her, try to make pureed food look appetizing, and be there for what she needed. Nobody else in the family got much of my attention that week, because she needed it. I worked hard to spread the attention to the rest of the family once she recovered, but I couldn’t have done that on a daily basis while she was recovering.
There is an ebb and flow that can restore balance on a greater scale, so we can give some grace with the expectation of daily balance.
The key is to develop ways to check in with yourself and evaluate how you are doing in the areas of life that are important to you.
There have been times of my life I have formally tracked this with a habit tracker chart, or just a weekly or monthly evaluation section in my journal. Sometimes that sends me off the rails with a rigid expectation of perfection and I have to step back from doing that kind of thing. Lately I have been doing an informal check-in as I close my work-week down on Fridays. I have a little bit of a ritual I do on most Friday afternoons that involves a look at my planner, some reflection, some planning, and most importantly tidying up my desk and closing my planner.
That’s great for the times we can somewhat control, but sometimes life hits us with things that are harder to bring into balance.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with some amazing military spouses about work/life balance (This is one of the good things that converged in my life lately. I traded a few things in my home life to be able to put together some words of encouragement for them, and it was well worth the swap!)
Work/life balance can be particularly elusive when someone in the family has a demanding job.
When that job is also a calling, like the military or the ministry, it can loom even more demanding. Those types of jobs carry the weight of helping others, making the world a better place. To do them well, the balance gets off kilter and it is not easy to make time to adequately readjust. This kind of situation can create conflict in the family as the person with the demanding job is often choosing between good and good.
Both things (work and home) connect to fulfillment, purpose, values, dreams, and identity.
The time and energy demands of both work and home life can often be in direct conflict. It can be so easy for the person with the demanding job to become hyper-focused on the job and miss the importance of things at home. Likewise, it can be easy for the person primarily caring for home life to be out of touch with the significance of the demanding job. Whether both partners have fulfilling, demanding jobs, or one is working and the other caring for the home, balance can start looking like an aggressive game of tug of war.
There are often systemic forces maintaining expectations in the workplace. With the military, there is never a shortage of things to be ready for; the work is never done. Ministry is often the same way. In those examples (as well as others… the field of medicine, first responders, etc.) there can be life and death matters at stake. In other career fields, a culture often exists that rewards those who do not display good work/life balance.
In situations where balance is extremely hard to find, it is important to communicate. Find ways to express your needs to your partner.
They may not be able to meet them, but speaking up can remind you and your spouse that you are allowed to have needs. It gives honest information about how the job is affecting you. Expressing your needs can get the two of you thinking outside the box for ways you can try to meet those needs in unconventional ways.
Speaking up gets you working as a team. Teams do not work if one team member does not have all of the necessary information.
Sometimes the balance issue is not a result of systemic influences.
You or your spouse could be out of balance because you have your own limiting beliefs driving you to spend more time in your job than in the rest of your life. Check out my blog on the thoughts that tend to hide under perfectionism for an idea of what might be driving these actions. Perhaps work is a good distraction for difficult things happening at home. Maybe work brings a feeling of “good enough,” because it offers concrete affirmation for a job well done. There could be personal meanings connected to earning a living that magnify the importance of reaching that next salary tier. Maybe it’s just that at work, there’s a sense of feeling respected. (If you are a parent of a teenager, this can feel particularly refreshing.)
What if these things apply to your spouse, not so much you?
Reach for your empathy hat. Do whatever you can to understand your spouse’s job, what stresses they face, what fulfillment they find in it. Find out why time at work is so important. Don’t do this with an agenda that you are going to show them they are wrong and need to be at home. Just find out what is going on for them that drives them to spend so much time at work. Find something that makes sense about that. There will be something, even if it is just a tiny part of what they tell you. Communicate validation for that part.
Accept this gentle reminder that we can’t change other people, we can just change ourselves. Take what you learn from your spouse and figure out what you can do with it. Are there ways you can celebrate your spouse’s presence at home, so they don’t feel like work is the only place they feel “good enough?” Your efforts to empathize and involve yourself in your spouse’s world might be the springboard that helps them learn to empathize with you. If not, it may be important for you to speak up about your needs in that area.
Engage in some self-reflection. If it truly seems like your spouse could make some changes to be home and just isn’t, then spend some thoughtful time identifying your needs. Get specific with yourself about your needs before you try to express them to your spouse.
Set boundaries. Boundaries will not heal your spouses’ workaholism, but it will communicate your commitment to the protection of what you value. Sure, a byproduct of your boundaries might be that your spouse gets some help for workaholism, but we do not communicate boundaries to control other people; we do it to protect the things we value.
Consider your timing. If you know there is something incredibly hard that your spouse is facing, and there is an end in sight pretty soon, you might want to hold off on big conversations. But don’t hold off forever because your spouse needs to know what is going on in your mind and heart.
You may have some personal work to do to figure out what you need to do for your own self-care and cultivate a sense of healthy balance in your life. You may need some extra support because you are facing a life challenge that makes balance seem like a pipe dream. You may be living with someone who is not pursuing work-life balance and you are realizing you want to set some boundaries.
Therapy can help with any of these situations, because therapy helps you separate your own limiting beliefs from the situation. Therapy helps you get to know yourself so you know what you need. Therapy equips you to set boundaries to protect your needs and values.
Give me a call if you are a woman in Pennsylvania looking for that kind of help.
Jennie Sheffe is a National Certified Counselor ™ who helps women find freedom from anxiety and peace in their chaos. She sees clients virtually in the state of Pennsylvania, or in her Carlisle, PA office. She offers Christian counseling and EMDR Therapy.
