How to achieve a Work to Life Balance

It's no joke that many people consider balancing work and Life a juggling act. I'm married to someone who, as a young man, was a professional juggler and still amazes me with his 5 clubs in the air routine. Now if only I could be so skilled with my life!

I'm going to posit that this work/Life thing isn't so much a balance or juggling act as it is a teeter-totter.

Juggling to me implies that you have many items in the air and you're constantly scrambling and shifting underneath to keep them there because should one item drop, they all come tumbling down. Not so catastrophic for juggling balls but potentially so for Life and work and stuff.

Balance implies to me that all the Life and work and stuff is neatly weighed on a balance beam and that you are skilled at not letting any one thing tilt to far either to the left or right. Again should the tilt be too severe, everything might go tumbling down to the mat below...hopefully there is a safety mat below.

Rather I like the idea of a teeter-totter. I was watching a pair of toddler boys about a month ago mastering the art of the teeter-totter. The fun came when they finally got the rhythm...the fun is the going up and down, first one end and then the other. I think Work/Life balance is more like this.

I've tried the whole superwoman thing with working, career, marriage and raising my children as well as community involvement. Talk about a lot of balls in the air! Like many career-minded women [whether the working is by choice or necessity] I stressed over the fact that I was expected [a perceived expectation granted] to give 100% on-the-job and 100% at home and 100% to community efforts. But I wasn't a 300% human...most days I was lucky to register about 72%.

Now that I'm older, hopefully wiser, and a grandmother I have discovered this teeter-totter philosophy. Whether we think so or not, we all choose what occupies our time. We choose to marry, we choose to parent, we choose to be an employee or employer or a solo-preneur. We choose our lifestyle. We make our own mistakes and carry our own trophies of victory. So I put all my choices on one end of the totter, myself on the other and enjoy the ride.

What that illustrates is that sometimes I'm the one who is up and sometimes it's all my self-chosen obligations that are up. And that is that. It is what it is, to use the vernacular.

One of my favorite online reading locations is She Takes On The World. Natalie MacNeil always has interesting and thought-provoking articles in this award-winning blog. On June 24 she wrote about the release on dvd the first season of a new series on the TNT network called "HawthoRNe." Natalie said in the post, "...One of the issues we talk about A LOT on She Takes on the World is work-life balance, something many women struggle with. The issue of work-life balance is very prevalent in TNT’s hit series, HawthoRNe...."

I discovered this series when it first came out and quite agree. I could relate. I was a single mom at one point in my life and had to work a fulltime job to support my family and pay off staggering debt. Finding time for my girls while trying to give 100% at work was always difficult...I constantly felt I was neglecting something. Usually that something was me. Had I adopted my new teeter-totter philosophy back then, I would have realized that "me" was important too and would have given myself more care...which meant I'd have not been so sleep deprived nor so nutritionally deficient which would actually have equated to a healthier, better rested mom and employee. Go figure!

So. How to achieve a Work to Life balance: