Five ways to improve your work-life balance
As we live in a culture of urgency where chasing success has become normal, a healthy work-life balance is something a lot of us strive for. There are practical and emotional challenges when trying to juggle our personal and family lives alongside work and this can feel overwhelming.
Inspired by The Music & Meditation Podcast, life coach and former social worker Tamu Thomas, and producer Charlotte Parr, suggest five ways you can improve your work-life balance.
1. Try a new way of looking at the issue
Instead of thinking about work-life balance, which suggests that it should be possible to split our time equally, try thinking about work-life harmony instead. As harmony might shift and progress throughout the different sections of a piece of music, similarly your own priorities might need to shift depending on the challenges you face. Perhaps you need to focus on your friends or family for a period of time before turning your attention in the direction of delivering a big project at work. Allowing yourself to prioritise one demand over another for a fixed period of time relieves the pressure of thinking that it’s possible to meet all of the demands placed on us at any one time.
2. Get into the habit of asking yourself: What do I need?
We’re often very attuned to meeting the needs of those around us but we’re often not great at doing this for ourselves. When you feel like things are urgent and you must push through and keep working, just stop for a moment. Try taking a small step back and question your perspective: can this wait until I’ve met my own needs?
Often, after taking a lunchbreak or getting some fresh air, we can focus on work or our friends and family better. Remember the analogy of airport safety briefings: put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.
3. Practice meditation on a regular basis
Meditation encourages us to connect with our bodies rather than being stuck in the mind. When we set aside time to listen to what our body is telling us, we’re more likely to make positive changes on a small or large scale. This could be noticing you’d benefit from taking some deep breaths or adjusting your posture, to realising you’re due a day off to rest.
Often experiencing illness or poor mental health is the only way you might notice a change would do you some good. But can you help yourself before you reach this point? Meditation allows us space to notice the warning signs before our physical or mental health deteriorates. Meditation helps us unlearn the pattern of dismissing our bodies’ needs in the name of being productive, and return to the idea of living in balance or harmony.
Try to build in a regular time, however small each day, to listen to your body until it becomes a habit, like brushing your teeth or making the first cup of tea of the day. By practicing each day you can learn to recognise what your body needs.
4. Be curious about your values
If you find yourself repeatedly overstretching, either in your work or personal life, ask yourself: why might that be? Is that really what I want? Fears are often at the root of constantly needing to prove ourselves: wanting to feel ‘good enough’ or seeking external approval.
Think about your values and where you want to direct your energy long-term. From there comes goal setting and after that you can build day-to-day intentions for yourself.
Remember: we are human beings, not human doings – so try to incorporate a little more time each day to just be.
Every episode of The Music and Meditation podcast invites you to escape the noise of daily life through an inspirational chat with a special guest about how meditation can help you navigate everyday life. You can then experience a personal guided meditation to help you wind down, all with beautiful, carefully curated music to calm your mind.
You don’t need to do this alone. Join Izzy Judd, host of The Music & Meditation Podcast every week to discover a range of meditation techniques to help you deal with whatever challenges life throws your way – from managing your fears to expanding your creativity and much more.
5. Build in time to reflect
Start to build in time to your daily, weekly and monthly calendar to reflect on how your work and life demands have panned out: what worked, and what can be improved going forwards? Writing these reflections down helps to identify patterns over time, which can lead to making positive changes. For example, tightening boundaries or altering the amount of energy you spend in certain areas of your work and personal life.
