Hello and welcome to another episode of the Working Conversations podcast where we talk all things leadership, business, communication and trends in organizational life. I'm your host, Dr Janel Anderson.

Today, we're tackling a topic that is both timeless and timely, a topic that seems almost mythical in its allure and elusiveness, work life balance. Is it a fairy tale spun by self help gurus, or is there a practical path to achieving it.

I'm going to say, yes, there is a practical path, but it requires some readjustment of our mindset first. So in this episode, we'll explore why work life balance matters, and share actionable strategies to help you master the art of staying balanced. But first we need to do that mindset shift.

Now I know some of you out there might be just rolling your eyes at the mention of work life balance to begin with. It's a concept that's often discussed but rarely mastered. In fact, some people believe that it's a myth. They argue that it's impossible to separate work from life neatly and put them in little boxes, and that trying to do so only sets us up for failure, but I do think it can be reality. But again, you'll need to change your mindset first, and, in fact, change your conception of what work life balance is in the first place.

Here's how I think of work life balance. Imagine you're on a tightrope or a balance beam. You can't stand still for long, you have to keep moving. You have to stay aware of your surroundings and make constant adjustments. Some adjustments are small, like shifting your weight slightly to one side, while others are larger, like catching yourself after a misstep or taking a giant leap to stay in motion. This analogy captures the essence of work life balance. It's not about finding a perfect equilibrium and staying there. It's about staying in the moment, being mindful of your circumstances, and making the necessary adjustments to keep from falling. So that is the mindset shift I want you to take before we even get into why work life balance is important in the first place, and then how to achieve it.

All right, let me also say, as we get into this that there is no clear prescription for work life balance. What feels balanced to one person may seem way out of whack to the next, a good place to look for validation on whether you're succeeding at the balancing act is to your friends and family, are they getting enough of your time, energy effort and attention? And then also look to your boss, your coworkers and your clients, are they getting too much of your time, energy effort and attention?

And if you're hearing them to tell you to pump the brakes once in a while, there's a good chance you're out of balance. And if you're hearing your friends and family tell you that they want more of you, there's a good chance that you're out of balance. Anyway, it's highly individual. Keep that in mind, what works for one person may be very, very different from what works for the next person.

All right, let's get into it now. Why is it important to begin with. Well, first of all, there is your mental health and well being. First and foremost, achieving work life balance is crucial for mental health and well being. Chronic stress from overworking can lead to burnout, anxiety, depression and a whole host of things that will not serve you.

Now, I talked about this at length in episode 173 last week, about the importance of not overworking and how to prevent burnout and to catch yourself when you are burned out and recover if you haven't checked out that episode yet, you must. It is the perfect companion to this episode when we don't have time to recharge our productivity and creativity take a hit, which paratoxically makes us less effective at work. So that's the first reason for wanting to Master Work Life, balance your mental health and well being.

The second one is your physical health. Long hours of the office or wherever you're working from, could be the couch combined with poor eating habits, or lack of exercise, or just not giving your body what it needs, can lead to a host of physical health problems, including heart disease, obesity, diabetes and on and on and on that list goes. So ensuring that you have time for physical activity, healthy meals, adequate sleep time, relaxing with your friends and family or just by yourself, is key to maintaining good health.

Now the second reason we want to keep our work life in balance is for our relationships. Our personal relationships matter so greatly, and they have such a important bearing on our overall health and well being. So our relationships with our friends and family often suffer when work is consuming too much of our time and when our balance is off. So maintaining strong personal connections requires certainly time and effort. You can't be at work all the time if you want to have strong personal and family relationships.

So good work life balance is going to ensure that you have time on your calendar to nurture those important relationships and keep those relationships healthy and in balance as well. So that's your second reason.

Your third reason is job satisfaction and productivity. It's so interesting, the people who manage to strike a balance between their work and their personal lives often report higher job satisfaction and productivity. So if you think you're doing your best at work, you might be putting in too much time at work. Your personal life might be suffering, and your work satisfaction and productivity might not be at their best.

So when employees feel that their personal lives are respected and valued and they feel that everything is more in balance, they're much more engaged and motivated at work.

Now we've made a case for the importance of having work life balance in the first place. Your mental health and well being, your physical health, your relationships and your job satisfaction and productivity are hanging in the balance. Now let's get down to how to actually create that work life balance.

Imagine you're on the tightrope. You're holding on to the bar to help keep your balance. Remember that bar is not attached to anything. That bar can be the tools and strategies that we're talking about here today. It's you're holding on, and it's giving you some sense of balance, and it's helping you tip from side to side as needed. Okay, so I'm going to give you kind of a broad concept and then a very actionable tip to go along with each one of these strategies.

So the first strategy is to set clear boundaries. So one of the most effective ways to create that work life balance is to set clear boundaries between your work time and your personal time again. For those of you who might be working from home and not doing a commute, I'm going to encourage you to put in a commute, and I don't mean get in your car and drive around. I mean take a walk around the block, or walk your dog, or listen to a podcast episode or read the newspaper, do something that symbolizes your commute, because that creates the boundary between your personal life and now you've stepped into your professional life.

So likewise, at the end of the day, shutting everything down. For those of you who are working in an office and you're commuting home, that's the end of your workday, the commute is that transitional period where you are crossing a boundary from your work life into professional life, so regardless of where you're working, this means not checking emails after a certain hour. This also means designating specific times during the day when you're not available for work related tasks because you need to do something with your family, or because you are taking a lunch break or an afternoon coffee break or a walk around the block break. So setting those clear boundaries.

Communicate those boundaries to your colleagues, to your boss, to your family members again when you're working from home, and here in the US, it's summertime, and kids are still home from school for their summer hour or their summer vacation, and so you might need to be setting those clear boundaries with your family members.

Family members if you're working from home, or setting those clear boundaries with yourself regardless of where you're working. Okay, so here is your actionable tip. Set a firm End Time for your workday and stick to it. Let your colleagues know that your working hours are from this hour to this hour, let your family members know my home hours are this hour to this hour, and if there is any blurring of those boundaries, if you do need to make some changes on an ad hoc basis because of a specific situation that's come up, whether that's in your personal life or in your professional life, communicate those Changes to whomever may be impacted as quickly as possible, and then as soon as that circumstance has been dealt with, go back to the clear boundaries that you have set. So set clear boundaries and specific actionable tip, set your work hours and keep your work in those hours, and keep your personal life in your personal hours.

Number two, prioritize and delegate. It is so easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work tasks and the things on our to do list, so prioritize those tasks based on their importance, based on their urgency. Delegate. For those of you who are managers and supervisors, delegate the tasks whenever possible so that the things that are left on your list are things that only you can do. Remember you do not have to do everything yourself.

So here's your actionable tip, use some sort of a task management to do list, project management system, whatever it is to keep track of your priorities, tools like Asana or Notion or Trello can help you stay organized and delegate tasks effectively, even right within Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office Outlook, that whole suite, there's a task management tool in there as well. So if that's what your office uses, just go ahead and use that, but use that task management system to track your priorities, your To Do lists and then look for things that you can delegate

All right. Number three, make time for yourself. Self Care is not a luxury. It is an absolute necessity. Now you want to make sure you're scheduling your self care to not be during work hours, but it should be regular time for activities that help you relax and recharge and stay centered, whether that is exercise or reading or gardening or knitting, doing yoga, spending time with your dog, whatever it is, make sure you are carving out that time for yourself and really honoring it, because for most of us, that is the first thing to go when the to do list gets too long, is our personal time.

So here's your actionable tip, block out time in your calendar in your work calendar before your workday starts or after your workday ends. For your self care activities, when you put them in the calendar, you're putting them into existent reality, and is much more likely that you will get them done. So put them in the calendar, just as you would for a work meeting, treat this time as non negotiable strategy.

Number four, learn to say no. No is a magic word. It is a complete sentence. It is okay to say no to additional work. It is okay to say no to social commitments or family commitments when they are impinging upon your personal time or the amount of time that you have dedicated to work, otherwise you will get overextended. So learning to say no is a powerful skill that can help you protect your time and your energy. And if you're feeling like you wish you could say no, but you say yes instead, you know what, you're being passive aggressive. So say no to the things you don't really want to do, practice assertive communication.

Here is your actionable tip. Practice assertive communication, politely decline additional tasks by explaining your current workload and offering an alternate solution when possible and when it is in your personal life, you can simply say no, thank you. Or you can say no, thank you not this week or No, thank you not this month or whatever. You can say, I'm overextended. Say what you need to say, but you can also just say no, thank you.

Strategy number five, embrace flexibility. Now. Flexibility can be a game changer for achieving work life balance. This might mean negotiating flexible work hours. This might mean negotiating remote work options with your employer or hybrid days. It might mean negotiating your start time. In fact, many people have found that in changing their start time, even by you know, anywhere from a few minutes to a half an hour, it just really gives them a greater sense of empowerment over their day. So whether that means you're working early in the morning and then taking maybe a longer, extended lunch break, especially for those of you have to run kids to day camps or things like that, it's around the lunch hour, and then coming back to work as soon as that's over and working the second half of your workday.

So embrace that flexibility. Advocate for flexibility for yourself, if you don't feel like you have the flexibility that you need, because again, that might just be the game changer that makes things feel more imbalanced in balance.

So here is your actionable tip. Advocate for yourself to propose flexible work arrangements with your employer if you need them, if you don't already have them. Advocate flexible work arrangements with your spouse or partner as it relates to moving kids from point A to point B, or housework or whatever it is. So highlight the benefits, whether it's at home or at work for both you and the organization, such as increased productivity, job satisfaction, family satisfaction, sharing the load, so embrace that flexibility.

My friends, all right, and the last one regularly reassess your balance as with that tightrope analogy, and you're holding on to that beam to support the differences in fluctuation as things go along. Maintaining balance requires those constant adjustments. So we're not going to make the adjustments if we're not taking a moment, taking a pause, taking a beat to step outside of it and look at it and see how we're doing.

So regularly assess your work life balance and make changes as needed. So here is my actionable tip for you. My friends on this and you're probably not going to be surprised, it has something to do with your calendar. Schedule a monthly check in with yourself to assess your work life balance. Think about how much time you've been devoting to work, to your family, to your friends, to your hobbies and the things that bring you joy, and then make some adjustments as needed, to your routines and so that you can keep more of what's working and discard whatever's not, or at least do a little bit less of what's not working.

All right, now let's take a look at the long picture. So making those adjustments and staying balanced in the long haul, making work life balance is not like a one time task that you can just check off your list, like I said, at minimum, put it on your calendar for a monthly check in with yourself. Life is dynamic, and so is your work and your personal commitments.

So here are some tips for making these adjustments and staying balanced like in the moment. Number one, be mindful of your limits. We all have different limits, and they change over time. If you're experiencing something that's really stressful or taking a lot of extra personal time, energy, effort, commitment and so forth, then be mindful of your limits at work and vice versa. When you have a big project at work, be mindful of the limits that you have available and the time that you have available in your personal life.

Number two, and this falls right on the heels of being mindful of your limits. Communicate with your friends, family, colleagues, everybody, communicate openly, so keep the lines of communication open with your colleagues, with your boss, with your family members and your friends about what's going on, what are your needs, your boundaries, what help do you need? All of that clear communication can prevent misunderstandings and ensure that everyone is on the same page. So if you've got that big work project that's really going to require you to put in some extra hours make sure your family knows, or you've got something going on in your family that's really taking your energy away from work, even if you're still put in all the hours, just make sure your boss knows. You don't have to give them all the gory details if it's very, very personal, but if something is happening, let people know.

Number three, seek support. So don't be afraid to seek support when you need it, whether it is getting help from your boss, getting help from a mentor, or talking to a mentor to get their opinions and ideas, seeking professional help, or just asking a colleague to help out with something, or asking a family member or a friend to help out with something in your home life, can make a significant difference. So don't be afraid to ask for help.

And number four, this is my last one, practice gratitude. So cultivate a habit of gratitude. Reflect on what you're grateful for, and that can really shift your focus from stress and challenges to the positive aspects of your life. And let me just give you a quick example here of a client of mine that I've been doing some executive coaching with, a situation came up where a relative is going through an extreme health crisis, and my client is the closest geographic relative, not the closest by relation, but the closest geographic relative to the person who is experiencing this significant health crisis.

And so my client ends up being the person who has to take this relative to all of their medical appointments, because nobody else lives nearby. And so on top of an already stressful work situation where this person is a senior leader in it, in their organization, taking on a lot now they are also responsible for taking this relative to and from their medical appointments. And this person was really feeling like, is all completely out of balance. And they had taken so much pride in usually having great balance. And so they're like, What do I do?

So one of the things that I suggested is a technique I call anchoring. And so what I suggested to this person is, every time they get in their car to take this relative to and from a medical appointment, or to get in their car to go anywhere, just to grab onto their keys, their key fob, their keys, whatever it is that they use to start their car. And just take a moment of gratitude. I'm so grateful for my own health. I'm so grateful for the work life balance that I have to be able to take this relative to their medical appointments. I'm so grateful for whatever the particular thing is that you can find gratitude. I'm so glad that I have a car that works, or I'm so glad that there's gas in my car today and I don't have to stop for gas on my way to pick up my relative before I take them to their medical appointment. So just taking a moment to check in with yourself and have a little bit of gratitude, especially on those times when it feels like you're stretched too thin.

What is one thing that you can be grateful for in the moment? And then ideally, you can have that anchor, that specific object that you touch, whether it is your coffee cup every morning, or your water bottle or your keys when you're getting in the car, to take that relative somewhere or where, you know, taking your kids to to work or picking them up from their friend's house, or whatever it is, all right, my friends at the end of the day, work life balance is about what feels right for you and for the others in your life who are important to you, and that includes your family, your friends and your organization.

If any of them think you are out of balance, you probably are because it is in relation and relationship with them that the balance occurs. So creating a work life balance that works for you is a continuous journey, much like walking that tightrope. It's going to require constant awareness, mindfulness and little adjustments or big adjustments by setting clear boundaries, prioritizing your tasks, managing your time, including time for yourself, that might mean learning to say no, embracing flexibility and regularly reassessing your balance, you can navigate that tightrope with greater ease and grace.

I hope these tips help you create a healthier work life balance. Remember, it's not about achieving perfect balance. The balance is always going to be shifting and changing. It's about making conscious choices that align with your values and your well being and your work and staying on that tightrope. So stay on that tightrope, my friends, stay balanced, stay mindful and keep moving forward.

Because remember, the future of work is not only about technology, it's about the values we uphold, the communities we build, and the sustainable growth we all strive for.

We need to keep exploring, keep innovating and keep envisioning the remarkable possibilities that lie ahead as always, stay curious, stay informed and stay ahead of the curve.

Tune in next week for another insightful exploration of the trends shaping our professional world. If you enjoy this content and you're watching on YouTube, make sure you hit the subscribe button and knock that little bell so that you get notified every time there's a new episode out. I've got other videos over there too. So even if you're listening to a podcast, to this podcast on a podcast player, you're going to want to head over to youtube.com/JanelAndersonPhD, and subscribe so that you don't miss a thing wherever you're listening or watching.

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