Striking Balance

Forté does a great job of making their events as interactive as possible, so at the Corporate Best Practices Summit, our table had an assignment: come up with tips on work/life balance. In 20 minutes, while we’re eating lunch. Impossible, you say? Well, actually, we tackled our assignment with great fervor and came up with what I at least felt was brilliant advice: eliminate the term. Strike “work/life balance” from our vocabulary.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should say right off the bat that I have been advocating the elimination of “balance” since co-authoring Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace with Today’s Nontraditional Workforce. In the book, my co-author Cathy Benko and I argue that work/life balance – with its implication that work and life are opposing forces that can somehow be balanced in a perfect, static pose – is a mirage. Work is a part of life, not separate from it, so we need language that reflects this. We propose work/life integration or work/life fit.

In speaking around the country about mass career customization, I have been amazed at the reaction to the call to strike “balance” from our vocabulary. One woman came up to me afterwards almost in tears to say “that was one of the most liberating things I have ever heard. Thank you.” I get that kind of response a lot. I think many women (in particular, although men feel it too) think they are supposed to have this magical thing called “work/life balance” and so feel like failures when they don’t.

There is no need to put this kind of pressure on ourselves. Rather, we should start a campaign to eliminate balance from our vocabulary and our expectations. So that we can all get on with our lives – including how we fit our work into our lives and our lives into our work. What do you think? Will you join the campaign?