Work-Life Balance Doesn't Work: Try Work-Life Harmony Instead
Work-Life Balance Doesn't Work Try Work-Life Harmony Instead
Trying to balance everything in our lives just stresses us out more. The key to happiness is more about creating work-life harmony®.
We hear a lot about work-life balance. It’s a nice catchall phrase that tries to explain the daily attention we place on both our work and home life. Can you give equal attention to a career and a family all of the time? Not realistically.
Instead, I prefer the practice of work-life harmony. This phrase invokes the idea that you should enjoy work and life at the rhythm that makes the most sense for you and what’s taking place in your life at any given time. In fact, more people in the business world have embraced the idea of work-life harmony over work-life balance. And research continues to find that applying work-life harmony principles in the workplace improves employee productivity, including creative thinking and problem solving.
Work-life harmony is a constant dance between you and the worlds of work and of family. But the two can co-exist. To help me cultivate work-life harmony in my own life and to help other entrepreneurs and business leaders do the same, I developed a concept I call, the B³ Method.
Knowing your B's: The B³ Method Explained
Business: It’s about how we navigate our professional and personal journeys and tackle the challenges that inevitably arise. Sometimes, it's the hours we pour into our work at the expense of personal time, or the promotions that slip through our fingers, procrastinating and missing deadlines, or even how we handle the stressors we have at work and in our personal life with people around us.
Balance: These are the natural tools that we have inside of us of mindfulness and collaboration techniques to offset the stressors we have in our life. Just like working out, we need to practice these techniques so that we can find the presence of mind in our day and intentionally create the energy we want for ourselves and those around us. Discovering these internal techniques we contain or outside hobbies we can do where time disappears, creates the balance that gives ourselves the space to process and reset each day.
Bliss: The goal of bringing ourselves into Balance is to create joy inside of us each day and not waiting for the outside world to bring us happiness. Bliss is what keeps you centered, focused, and aligned with your vision for harmony. Being intentional of how we can culminate that happiness and joy inside of us each day provides us an intentional way to create the energy we want for ourselves that is contagious to those around us.
Find your balance.
So how do you get started in applying the B³ Method to your own life? Your first step is to find your balance—that physical or mental outlet that makes you feel alive. Most people already know what gives them balance if they ask themselves the right questions.
These questions and brainstorming ideas can help you identify activities you are passionate about or that can recharge you.
What is your fantasy job, even if it’s not realistic?
What is something you have dreamed about trying, but talked yourself out of doing?
Look to your childhood for inspiration. What did you enjoy doing as a child? It doesn’t matter if it was a team sport, arts and crafts, or board games. What activity was always fun and made you happy?
Consider a complementary activity. If you enjoy music, but not learning how to play an instrument, embrace something related, like collecting vintage records or guitars, or even regularly attending concerts.
Make a creativity board. Fill a large poster or bulletin board with a collage of images, quotes, articles, and people that you find inspiring. As your board evolves, you will begin to note a pattern of what interests you.
Using bliss to maintain your balance.
Once you adopt and embrace your balance outlet, you can then use it to find your bliss—or the way that you maintain your new activity so that you feel the benefit over time.
My balance, for example, is yoga. One of the many lessons I have learned from yoga is to remember to breathe. We are in stressful situations each day at work, and we forget to breathe. It seems so simple, however, yoga reminds me how the power of the breath can possibly change my body’s autonomic nervous system, which lowers my stress levels so I can think more clearly and make smarter business decisions.
My bliss is to sustain this yoga practice of remembering to breathe at work. I have found it’s as simple as a calendar notification or writing a Post-it note that is always kept in sight as a reminder to stop and take grounding breaths throughout the day.
By incorporating the B³ Method in my own life and business, I’ve experienced greater work-life harmony and so have my employees. So begin by finding your balance using the questions above. Then commit to it, and as you do, focus on the skills that work for you. Then decide how you can maintain your new-found balance activity so you can feel the benefit -- the bliss -- that comes from regular practice or creating a good habit. Over time, these tools will not only help you get through difficult situations in business but they will also help you begin on the path to create greater work-life harmony.
Unleash the full potential of the B³ Method with a grounding practice. 'Achieving Work-Life Harmony Through Yoga Fundamentals - Part 1' is your gateway to a more balanced life. Enroll and Transform.
Updated November 7th, 2023. Originally published on Entrepreneur.com October 24, 2017