Work-Life Balance and Your Hierarchy of Values

A typical weekend morning discussion in our household. Our 11-year old daughter: “can I ring a friend to play with?” We: “that’s okay, but you first have to clean up your room. You promised us yesterday you’d have it done by last night, and it’s still a mess”. A big –as we call it- Neanderthal grunt is sign of utter disagreement with this condition. “A matter of priorities, love”, we state. “You chose to watch a movie last night instead of cleaning up; this is the consequence”. “I HATE priorities” comes back the reply.

We continue our talk discussing priorities. Our daughter thinks priorities are equivalent to “annoying and boring responsibilities”. We aim to explain that priorities are the things you find important that come BEFORE other things (which obviously therefore are less important). She gets it that she definitely found watching a movie more important than cleaning up. She’s not at peace with the law of Cause & Effect, which states that every choice has consequences, wanted and unwanted.

This leads me to a more generalised question: are YOU at peace with the consequences of your priority-based choices when we look at work life balance? Many people are not, which is “funny” in a way, as they made the choices themselves in the first place.

We ALL have our priorities or values when thinking of work life balance. They are the things in life we consider first most important, second most important, etc. More often than not, we are not conscious of our individual values and the hierarchy in these values; we merely make choices because “we’ve always done it this way”. Only when asked why we did THIS instead of THAT will the decision making criterion come up; and then often in a very vague way, still: “I just thought that was more appropriate”, or some similarly fuzzy answer.

As a coach, I see business and work life balance very much as “common sense exercises”. Your current results in life and business are based on YOUR values, and therefore on the choices you make because of those values. If you value time more than money, you may work fewer hours to be home with your family more. If you value money more than time, you may work longer hours to bring home more income. Simple, really. Or, in my daughter’s case: if you value watching movies more than you do a clean room, you will pick the former.

So, again: the results in your life in terms of work life balance are a logical flow-on effect of the choices you make; they are also an effect of your REACTION or RESPONSE to things that weren’t your own choice (something happening that you couldn’t control, for instance).
Look at your life right now. Are results showing that are NOT the way you want them? There could be many that throw your (work) life balance out of whack:

• Away from home long time because the pay overseas is better
• Earning too little money, but not wanting to give up your freedom
• No business growth because you don’t want to run risks
• Seeing your kids only at night because you feel you have to work 80 hours per week
• Lesser profit because you don’t like making stressful investment decisions
• No work because you don’t like jobs “below your level”
• Financial stress in general because of high “lifestyle demands”
• No life partner, because it’s all just “too hard”
• Struggling to pay the mortgage, because you do not want to rent
• Ignoring signs of fatigue because you have to work your business HARD
• Poor health, but still smoking and drinking
• Complaining about your life, but not willing to spend money on coaching/counselling
• Etc. I could keep going for hours.

My contention is that all these circumstances are there because you are running a value system that keeps them in place. You may argue: “but I can’t just cut my working hours and spend more time with the kids! That would mean not being able to pay the mortgage!”

Well, obviously, paying the mortgage and working hard are still more important than being with your kids! In theory, you could definitely cut back hours. If you are willing to face the consequences! And these consequences are value driven as well! The consequence of financial insecurity may be a greater negative force than not seeing the kids, and so you will not change. Which is fair enough. As always: there’s no inherent good or bad in any of this. There are only choices, and consequences.

A Common Sense approach means this: either, you accept your current circumstances as the consequences of your choices, in which case you really want to stop complaining. You chose it, so get over it. Or, you accept that you don’t like what you are seeing, create a shift in your value system, and start creating new behaviours. This will, in time, undoubtedly lead to new results, but perhaps also to consequences you may not like. It’s up to you to decide where all these factors sit on your values hierarchy.

“But it’s not that simple”, you may argue. Yes it is. We make choices based on what we think is important all day, every day. Generally, the consequences are not major, so this doesn’t affect us that much. The process is still the same, though: Values, choices, consequences; values, choices, consequences. Values, choices, consequences. I have seen people make DRAMATIC changes in their lives by flipping their value system upside down completely. Why? Because they didn’t like what they saw, and decided to create MORE of what they DID like to see.

The first thing you want to do is take good stock of which values are running your life RIGHT NOW. How? Well, look at the results in your life, the tangible, real-life proof of Your Personal Value System. Awareness is where all change starts. The Integrated Development System’s foundation rests on it. Once you have a good and honest grip on what is first most important, second most important, etc., contact me. We can have a good look at how you would like things to be in terms of work life balance, and how we can start making subtle changes in your value system and behaviour. This will ultimately bring you more in line with your DESIRED value system, and consistently living in line with that one means life fulfilment.

The choice is yours.