Work-Life Balance: The Impossible Wave We Will Never Ride
It was 4:30 am during my usual personal study when I received an insight so profound to a question on my heart regarding some significant challenges at work. I felt good, I felt motivated, I felt sure of myself as a leader and business owner in that moment. Have any of you felt this way before - it feels good right?
The next minute, I turned to my wife to share my thought and answer to my plaguing questions. However, to my surprise, and due to lingering home issues, we began arguing. Have any of you experienced something like this before - it does not feel so good, right?
Looking back, I’m not even sure how it happened, why it started, or what it was about. Needless to say, my feelings of motivation and inspiration turned into a looming feeling of frustration and self-deprecation.
Now, sitting alone as my wife stormed away in aggravation, I made an important and life-changing realization… it was this:
In my efforts to pursue excellence at work as a leader, I had become average at home as a husband and father.
This realization hit me like a tidal wave. I was reminded of my time living on the north shore of Hawaii when I ventured out into the ocean in my attempts to body surf for the first time. “I am an athlete, I can do this,” I thought. Only to be slammed by a wave twice my size, over and over again. If you have never been in the ocean with waves this size, let me explain what happens. If you don’t know what you are doing, you will get tossed about by the waves. One wave hits you, you tumble around underwater, come up for air, then another wave hits you, and until you manage to get outside of the break, you can spin in circles gasping for air and relief.
I share this story because the truth is, what happened with my wife that morning was not the first time. There are countless moments where I have felt inspired, confident, and resolved in my professional life—only to be met face to face with my shortcomings at home. Like the waves crashing down on me over and over again, things become repetitive and leave me “gasping” for a solution and longing for relief.
Work-life balance is a myth.
We talk about it all the time, we plan as if it is attainable, and we even take courses—in fact, in my Ph.D. coursework, I came across reams of research on it. However, the truth is, we cannot separate the two. Who we are at the core does not change when we walk through the door at work, and it cannot change when we walk through the doors at home. We may put on different masks or behave differently, but our values and essence cannot shift so quickly. In our efforts to find balance, we can swiftly become out of balance because of the ever-slamming waves hitting us whether at home or at work. It is an impossible game to pursue this balance.
That morning, as I made this realization that in my pursuit of excellence at work, I had become average at home, it led me on a journey of transformation. Namely, realizing that transformation is holistic, it is all together or not at all. It helped me realize that change can be selective and that I had attempted changes in my life to create work-life balance, but ignored the fact that my life is all connected and change cannot cure what only transformation can.
I had to consider the difference between change and transformation and put my heart into transformation. Just as in the ocean, I had to learn to navigate the waves, the currents, the pushes and pulls of the sea in order to simply learn how to ride a wave. To be an excellent leader and achieve true excellence at work cannot be achieved fully if I am average at home. I may get recognition, praise, reward, but if I’m average at home, I know I am not truly excellent. The same goes in reverse if I am excellent at home but constantly show up poorly and average at work. We must stop relying on the confidence in our life in certain areas to cover up the areas where we lack.
During my own journey of transformation and pursuits of excellence, I discovered a process, I have since validated in the work we do with leaders (who are also parents, spouses, and have families), and what we have found is remarkable. We want to share this process and pattern of transformation with you.
