I’ve been reading an article over on Mashable about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and how she leaves the office at 5.30pm every night, and has done since having children.

She says,

”I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it’s not until the last year, two years that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly.”

She goes on:

“I was showing everyone I worked for that I worked just as hard. I was getting up earlier to make sure they saw my emails at 5:30, staying up later to make sure they saw my emails late. But now I’m much more confident in where I am and so I’m able to say, ‘Hey! I am leaving work at 5:30.’”

The emphases, by the way, are mine.

Now, I applaud Sheryl’s example. I think there are few visible role models of people who successfully rock the work life mix, and she’s putting herself out there as being one.

But what she said made me ponder a couple of things.

Is worklife balance really just for people who’ve made it?

Sheryl Sandberg is a successful woman by anyone’s standards.

And yet even she has had to get to a meteoric place in her career before it has been okay for her to come out about the fact that she’s managing her work around her life.

What does that say about those in less high-powered roles, or at earlier stages of their careers? Do different rules apply? Are they destined to put work before life until they’ve somehow earned the right to some kind of balance?

Is worklife balance really just for parents?

At the end of the video she says:

“And I hope that means other women and men – importantly, and men – feel comfortable going home to see their kids.”

So, worklife balance is just about children then, is it? What about the millions of single people in work who don’t have children to go home to?

How would it be for them to leave the office at 5.30 of an evening, and to have a life without having to defend it or justify it to anyone?

Who decides legitimacy?

And while we’re here, there’s a horrible habit of blaming employers for creating cultures from which there appears to be no escape. Like they make us sit there till 8pm each night.

Well maybe they do, and of course they have responsibility for creating the corporate cultures of their businesses.

But we’re part of those culture ourselves, and have a role in either fitting in and meeting the unwritten expectations.

Or in making things different for ourselves.

And it’s that bit that I think Sheryl has modelled very well. Irrespective of her level, or the fact that her main go-home driver is her children and her wish to be with them. What she has done is decide that both her life and her job are important to her, and she’s put down some boundaries for herself that allow her to achieve that.

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1. Lost heart with your current job? Don’t rush to escape

Today’s post comes to us care of Sarah Fudin, a Social Media and Outreach Co-ordinator from the University of Southern California. Enjoy!

I know it’s been said a million and one times, but here it is again: Your work takes up a large part of your life, so you better make sure you love what you do!

The truth is that I love my job, but I also love my life outside of work and even though I wake up excited to get into the office, I’m equally as excited to shut down my computer and take to the streets of New York. There are always a million and one things going on in New York — friends in town, concerts in every neighborhood, new restaurants opening and new places to explore in my running shoes. It’s amazing, but with a full-time job and a full-time social life, I’ve also found that it’s important to balance work and social activities with some quality “me” time.

If you’re having a hard time figuring out how to balance all of the things you love in your life, here are a few suggestions:

Take Your Lunch Break

If you have the liberty to have a lunch break, take it. And if you can, don’t just refuel your body and rush back to work. Even on a budget, you might be able to fix yourself a lunch worth savoring or meet a good friend to chat over a sandwich. The mid-day classes at my Brazilian jiu-jitsu school are always packed with men and women who shrug off their work clothes for a quick roll on the mat before heading back to the office. If you can use your lunch break to clear your mind, forget about work and do something you enjoy, why not take that opportunity?

Schedule a Fun Weekend

The key word here is schedule. That doesn’t mean you have to plan out your itinerary minute by minute, but you ought to at least daydream about some activities you enjoy ahead of time — then follow through! Use the weekend to enjoy yourself in ways you can’t during the week: Take a trip upstate to do some hiking, go dancing all night, or stay in bed with a cup of tea and a novel, but make sure that you do what you love, rather than just going grocery shopping and sitting on the couch.

Don’t Waste Time on Things You Don’t Love

I often find myself frittering away my free time on Facebook when I would rather spend it actually seeing the people I care about face-to-face.

Don’t get me wrong: In those instances when I can’t see people face-to-face, I’m thankful for Facebook — but many of my friends live in New York City, and they’re often just a few blocks away when I’m writing on their walls! It’s difficult, but when I cut down on my social networking time I find myself feeling less lonely and more loved. Put your energy into the things you care about most, and you will be surprised how much of that energy comes back to you.

Set Priorities

The question arises: What do you care about most?

Everyone has their own answer. My personal priorities are the people I love, my creative and professional work, and caring for my body (in that order). Everything else comes second. I don’t always do right by all three, but I do my best. And just knowing what my priorities are helps with making decisions on a day-to-day basis.

Create Your Own Rituals

I can’t leave the house without eating a good breakfast. Fixing and eating breakfast is my way of taking the time to center myself and enjoy a simple pleasure before plunging into the stress and strain of the workday.

Some people sing, some people pray, some people dress themselves with exquisite care — whatever it is, making a daily habit of doing one thing you care about, no matter how seemingly insignificant or idiosyncratic, helps to create balance in life.

Take the Scenic Route

In New York City, it’s easy to rush through the street, hail a cab or fiddle with your iPad on the subway. But when the weather’s good, few pleasures can match strolling through your local park or exploring an unfamiliar neighborhood. If you have the time between obligations, why not take the scenic route instead of descending the subway stairs as usual?
—
No matter how important or demanding your career, it definitely depends highly on taking care of yourself as much as anything else. So take a little time to celebrate yourself, to center yourself and to relax. Creating a balance between work and life requires you to set your own priorities and to be mindful of them once they’re set — but it also makes life much more fun.

–

Sarah Fudin currently works in community relations for the University of Southern California’s Masters in Teaching program, which provides aspiring teachers the opportunity to earn a Master’s degree and teacher certification online. Outside of work Sarah enjoys running, reading and Pinkberry frozen yogurt.

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Did you see the article over on HBR the other day about choosing between making money and doing what you love?

Leonard A Schlesinger, Charles F Kiefer, and Paul B Brown answered this great – and not so uncommon – question:

“If you’re passionate about what you do, but it’s not going to make you a lot of money, should you still do it?”

Their answer was a conditional yes. The condition being that the thing you’re passionate about keeps you financially viable. Because, if it doesn’t, you need to find yourself some other kind of income stream meantime.

Not because you’re a crazy person for dreaming that you could turn what you love into a job.

But because, if you can’t fund yourself today, you risk being unable to do any of what you love either today or tomorrow. As the guys across at HBR point out, it’s a Maslow hierarchy of needs thing. Get the basic requirements for food, shelter and personal safety under control, before you go off up the self-actualisation ladder.

Great stuff.

And the post got me thinking about how career attitudes can sometimes trip us up. Pertinent to this discussion is one about focusing on one thing at a time.

Focus on one thing only

Whether it’s said, or implied, a key belief, at least when you’re growing up, is that you should choose the thing to which you’ll dedicate your career. (All the better if it’s something that has kudos and earns money.)

Either this thing OR that thing. Drama or law. Music or accountancy. In my case it was either art or European languages (there’s a whole other story about how I ended up doing psychology, but that’s for another day).

A lucky few find that one thing that satisfies them ongoing.

For the rest of us, it means that we often put away some of the things that really, really gripped us in making the choice of one thing versus another.

Which can appear okay for a while, but it’s amazing how often I hear people in their thirties and forties regret that, in the process of becoming the kind of professional they thought they were expected to be, they gave up music, or writing, or art or that idea they had about running their own business, or whatever.

See, different things fulfill us in different ways and maybe it’s unreasonable to expect one thing to completely satisfy us. But that’s how we’re often hard-wired to think.

Tough at the Top

I used to run workshops called Tough at the Top for senior people who were experiencing their jobs as particularly challenging, and who wanted group coaching and peer support in breaking through where they were at.

One of the exercises I had folks do was to think about why they did what they did for a living; what they expected from it. There was a wide range of things that people were looking for their big jobs to deliver. For example:

• Challenge
• Feeling that they were leaving a legacy
• Being involved with something bigger than themselves
• The ability to connect with and to lead other people
• Wanting to be part of a team of smart colleagues
• Personal development
• Financial reward

Hardly surprising that these people were often feeling frustrated in one or more of these areas.

What if, instead of putting the onus on their big job, they considered all their needs and how they could get them met across a number of different vocational and personal interests?

The romantic parallels

Which reminds me of a client I’ve worked with for a number of years, and a challenge he was having, not with his work, but with a relationship.

See, he’d been dating this one woman, with whom he was very happy and very much in love. They did lovely things together, he told me that their sex life was good, and he enjoyed being around her. However, he’s a pretty intellectual guy and he had become frustrated that this woman either couldn’t or wouldn’t have the big-brained type of smart conversation that he enjoyed having from time to time.

Did this mean that they were not compatible?

His dilemma led me to support him to get really clear about what he needs from other people, particularly from his key relationships. He listed out: companionship, a sense of belonging, sex, fun, intellectual challenge. I then got him to think about whether he needed to have all of these met by one person. This got him thinking of some good friends he had with whom he loved intellectual sparring, and how, if he spent a little more time with them, he’d feel fine.

Here’s the interesting bit: when he gave himself permission that he could have different needs met by different people, he enjoyed both sets of relationships even more.

The moral of the story

It’s the same with work.

If we expect something that we love to make us money when it won’t or it’s simply not yet at that stage, we’ll resent it.

Ditto, if we expect something that makes us money to give us a bigger sense of purpose, if in our heart of hearts it doesn’t.

What if we learned from my client’s story?

What if we reframed that stuff about having to choose one career stream over another and thought creatively about how we might meet all of our vocational needs?

What might we end up doing?

In a nutshell, some of the work you do you’ll love. Some of the work you do will earn you money. Different kinds of work serve different purposes. Get over it and get on with relishing all that you do.

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I’ve recently conducted a little experiment at work, which has completely changed my work and personal life.

I was stuck in a bit of a rut, not enjoying coming to work so much, struggling to balance my relationship with the overtime I had to do and feeling a bit out of it in general. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with any part of my life, but getting up in the morning got a little harder. Then I read this article about the benefits of smiling.

At first I skimmed over it, thinking it was just another one of those nonsense filler articles. But just reading about smiling made me smile immediately and that made me happy instantly. So I decided to conduct an experiment at work; I would try to smile as much as I could for a week. The result was incredible!

Smiling is contagious

I’ve never had so many compliments in my life!

It gave me so much energy that I got all my work done with time to spare, I even found time to do little things I had been putting off for a while. It made me feel positive all the time, it helped me deal with disappointments and even made me feel more attractive.

Another great thing about smiling is that it is contagious. I noticed that my colleagues’ faces would light up when I talked to them. It also made them open up and I’ve had some interesting personal conversations with people at work that I didn’t know very well before.

My improved attitude towards my work also influenced my personal life and relationship. When I came home I had so much more energy left to do fun things. I realised that when I didn’t enjoy my day at work I took that energy home with me and couldn’t let that go. Now there is a healthy separation between my work and personal life.

I’ve never believed much in all these books and article’s about ‘changing your life in 5 steps’ and ‘creating a more positive outlook’. It’s not as easy as that. When someone gives you the advice to “just cheer up” you can’t magically feel better can you? But the great thing about a smile is that you can start with a fake one and it automatically turns into a real one.

I know that sounds wrong and I’m not saying you should have a strange grimace on your face all day long. But if you try it out and practice it becomes really easy and genuine! It has been proven that smiling and laughing releases endorphins, so smiling is like a natural drug

You might shrug at reading this, but I dare you to try it and deny it works!  So leave a comment if you would like to

Written by:
This post was written by Martijn who is working for Springest.co.uk, an independent comparison website for training programmes and courses. They help around thousands of people a month finding the right course which suits them best at the moment and would make them smile.

photo credit: ubo_pakes

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It was always going to be tough for Marcus Buckingham to trump his own work.

His StrengthsFinder assessment, hot on the heels of his paradigm breaking First Break All The Rules, began to allow us to create both the mindset and language for focusing on what’s right with us. Rather than on the weaknesses that had until then been the natural orientation for development.

Now, post Gallup, and a decade or so later, he has created StandOut, a follow-up strengths assessment, positioned as a new way of looking at and thinking about innovation.

Innovation delivery

In his book, published in the UK on 13th September, he talks about business’s current preoccupation with innovation. He highlights the propensity for it to be captured, learned and institutionalised by companies intent on harnessing its power. Hence the investments that are made in Centres of Excellence, Knowledge Capture and Corporate Universities.

Instead, he argues, innovation is a very personal thing, emanating from the essence of the unique blend of strengths and talents of the individual for whom serendipity strikes. Also, that small innovations – those that allow for shortcuts or better techniques – are as valuable to a corporation than massive ones like creating the Internet. And that, what works well for one person in one situation, may bomb if replicated by another, in a different context.

Rather than hang out in search of the holy innovation grail, Buckingham argues, we should all get clear about what gives each of us our edge, and work more from that place.

The assessment, to which you get access if you buy the book, describes that edge in terms of your top two of 9 roles: Advisor, Connector, Creator, Equalizer, Influencer, Pioneer, Provider, Stimulator, and Teacher.

What’s great

StandOut has quite obviously been developed for an audience of cubicle warriors. The well produced assessment reports headline where and how you’ll be of greatest value, and all of the roles are grounded in examples of phrases you can use to help you describe your edge, how to take your performance to the next level, and examples of things to watch out for to ensure you don’t misdirect your strengths.

It’s that practical stuff that exemplifies so well Buckingham’s move to focus less on measurement and more on what can be done with it.

These tips are further broken down for leaders, for managers, for client service sorts, and for sales. They also give ideas about what types of careers work best for each role.

And the whole framing around strengths is very positive and inspiring.

What’s not right yet

While it’ll work well for corporate folks, I feel it works less well for entrepreneurial sorts, who work and live outside of institutionalised work or aspire to do so. In that regard, I’d rather point people to Roger Hamilton’s Wealth Dynamics as both a body of thought and an assessment methodology.

Also, having done the assessment myself, I was left with a bit of a “so what?”. I can see StandOut being a useful tool or piece of input to leadership and employee development, and indeed to coaching, as it certainly provides a framework around which to have a conversation.

It’s more holistic and action based that his original strengths work. But I can’t see what it adds beyond a well facilitated discussion around existing instruments like Myers Briggs. From having done the assessment myself, I emerge as Creator/Pioneer. These things I knew of myself 20 years ago when I did my psychometric test training initially. Maybe the difference is that StandOut attempts to describe one’s genius in a way that other things don’t. And if that’s true, I think that hooking the whole thing around innovation limits its accessibility.

I’d also, as part of my own coaching, recently done his Find Your Strongest Life questionnaire, and found that many of the questions used across both assessments are the same. So, if you’re not new to Buckingham, you may be disappointed.

I also suspect there’s a wider application of StandOut that could be used to help teams, or businesses better understand their innovation edge. This is hinted at in the technical summary, but there’s a real opportunity waiting to be leveraged there. I’ve already recommended the book to a couple of my consulting type clients for whom the insights of the book, seen through a cultural lens, could be pretty useful.

So what?

On balance I thought the book and indeed the whole system is interesting and insightful. I suspect it’ll be of value to corporate folks, new to Buckingham’s work, who are ready to stop living on automatic pilot and step up to being their best selves.

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Meet George.

He’s a fictitious client, but not that fictitious.

He’s a lawyer. At school he had the ambition of getting into a top university and doing a law degree. So, he got top A Level results, and is invited to do law at Oxbridge. He gets a first.

Along the way he meets Sophie who’s studying international business studies.

While still at university he sets his next goal: get hired by a top firm to do his professional exams. Being such a stellar candidate, the Magic Circle firms line up to offer him a place.

He accepts one of these and begins to see the next horizon of ambition opening up to him: get qualified so he can actually call himself a lawyer, become an associate of the firm, and then work his way up to be accepted into the hallowed sanctuary of the partnership.

While he’s grafting at the coal face, he asks Sophie to marry him. They have a big, expensive party. White dress. Beautiful photographs.

She’s working for an investment bank and they handcuff themselves to a mortgage for a bigger house that they can’t really currently afford, in a good part of town, knowing that their income can only grow.

The early years of married life are full. They’re both caught up in parallel achieving and, although they see little of one another Monday through Friday, it’s exciting and they share their sense of themselves as a successful, young career couple.

Then Sophie becomes pregnant. It was in the plan, and they’re both delighted. For a while she slow tracks her career to spend more time with the baby.

Meantime, George is working away. He has specialised in International Capital Markets and, if not pulling all nighters to meet the deadlines on deals, he’s travelling across Europe and The Middle East.

Baby number two comes along. And Sophie starts to have a different take on life. She enjoys motherhood and wants to be successful in work without having to follow investment banking career rule protocol. She wants to make work fit life for a change.

She hires a coach, quits the bank (they’re doing another cull so that she walks away with some cash), and sets up a niche business doing organic baby foods that she markets to her network of professional mothers.

Part of the life she now seeks is about spending more time with George and her children.

At which point, it starts to become apparent to her that George is not around much to spend more time with.

She tries talking to him about it.

“We can’t all run flaky businesses,” he says, “and one of us needs a secure income.”

Months and years pass. Nothing changes. George is missing his children’s first words, their first steps, their bath times, their funny little sayings, their first days at school, their first report cards.

Sophie tries talking again. She’s sad that he’s missing out and that his children are too. It would be great if he’d at least come to parent-teacher evenings with her.

But by now he’s been appointed as an equity partner and really does feel that he has something to prove.

“I need your support,” he says. “Not your criticism.”

Things continue as is. Or so it seems.

The first thing I know about any of this story is, in fact, a call from George’s HRD.

“He’s top talent,” she says. “But his performance appears to have hit a wall. His associates and peers are complaining about him, and his Managing Partner is concerned. We’ve all been very understanding, but there’s a finite period of time that our support for him can continue. I think he has some work life issues…”

Then, George himself is sitting in front of me.

“My wife, Sophie, left me,” he says and begins to unravel.

He has never questioned her or their marriage at all. They’ve been together forever, so he has assumed they always will be. Sure, he knew she was pissed at his hours, and his travel, and the dedication he puts into his job, but she’d known that this was his thing when they married. It had been hers too early on. It was unfair that she’d changed the game on him.

Now he’s embroiled in a different kind of legal battle. They’ve, of course, engaged their separate top divorce lawyers and are going through the painful minutiae of their lives. The children, money, property. Who gets what.

Yes, he’s aggrieved that she has up and left him.

But it’s only now that he confronts how important she and his children have been to him. He has hired a cleaner and the firm has a laundry service he can use. But it’s hardly the same as walking into an orderly home day after day. And he wonders whether he can offload his Waitrose online shopping to his PA or how else he’s going to ever return to the phenomenon of the abundantly full fridge.

And he’s seeing more of his children than ever now.

Because that’s the agreement the divorce lawyers struck in court. Which is as odd as it is sweet. Seeing them there, all by himself, in what has been the family home. Forming new relationships with them. Finding the words to say he loves them.

And with that he has lost the ability to oversleep at weekends to catch up on his energy. At least every other weekend, when he has them. Though, in any case, sleep is shot. There’s no such thing in his life as rest.

He has spent the first months since Sophie left in continued denial. Imagining she’d come back; that this was just some big protest to capture his attention. She has it, so why isn’t she returning?

Imagining too that he could wall off his broken heart when he went to work. But he can’t. His emotional upset spills over. Being exhausted, he can’t focus. His fuse is short and he snaps at the least little thing.

And the longer she’s away, the more reality is hitting him. Still, he struggles to understand just what’s happening to him.

He can’t believe that she says she no longer loves him.

He can’t believe the words that are being conveyed to him about his behaviour via his legal council.

Neglectful. Abandoning. Emotionally abusive.

He can’t believe that the courts are on her side.

“Of course my numbers are down,” he says. “How could they not be?”

His heart is no longer in the game and his head is scrambled.

“What’s the point?” he’s asking himself. “What has ever been the point?”

Good questions. Questions that I wish on his behalf he was not having to ask in retrospect.

And I suspect there’s going to be more pain yet for George before there will be answers. But even George himself, with the benefit of hindsight, can offer some reflections on how it could have been different.

Top of his list is that he didn’t listen.

“I just avoided what was going wrong. I imagined it was a phase and that it would go away.”

The moral of this tale? Don’t take your marriage or core relationship for granted. It should never be a finite thing. It needs to adapt and grow with one, other or both of you, and if it doesn’t you’re setting it up for failure. If you find communication difficult, confront that as early on as possible. Even seek out a relationship coach or counsellor to help you have the tough conversations that you might not otherwise have.

While you build your career and are learning the intricate skills that will allow you to advance and propel it, learn too what it takes to have a good relationship, and allow yourself to grow as a person and not just as a professional.

What about you? What other advice would you offer George? What lessons might you learn from him?

photo credit: HikingArtist.com

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Neil Usher (@theatreacle on Twitter.) Part property professional, part performance poet, part parent. You can find out more about Neil at the end of the post.

So where do you do your thinking?

This post had its roots in some tweets between @ThinkingFox and @JulesJ85 where the former suggested that I might be on the naughty step, and the latter that we both might be. I responded that this location was where I did my best thinking!

I’ve spent almost twenty years designing workplaces, focussing on creating spaces that are motivating, enlivening, and that foster both interaction and focus. I’ve visited numerous great examples of the “latest thinking” in design, and hung out with those on the fringes of the profession such as psychologists and anthropologists, all to try and increase my knowledge and capacity to improve the design and build with each iteration.

Much to my immediate dismay, I recently concluded two things:

Firstly, that given a choice between the latest fast and chic IT kit and connectivity or a superb flexible workplace, I would choose the former. Human beings are amazingly and inherently adaptable and we can devise workarounds for the latter but in this day and age its hard to work around slow and cumbersome IT kit and infrastructure.

Secondly, that we all have our own special places to think that are – in the vast majority of cases – not the workplace. Effectively the workplace is used for everything else – and therefore everything but. The artificial just cannot compete with the unique and natural pull of our own creative essence.

Why is it that we find our inspiration in the gym, the shower, the pouring rain, the 65 bus to Kingston, the café, the splintered bench third on the left through the park gate, or the naughty step?

In the case of the last of these, I imagined that creativity was inspired by reproach. However a stimulus of any form may not always be required, the space may just be the spot that sparks creativity or lucid reasoning. I am not sure that there is a reason why, it just is – and there is nothing wrong with that.

However there are implications for workplace designers. We have to acknowledge that however much effort we put into delivering spaces to think and create, the occupants will always find their own special space, most often outside of this environment, regardless of what we do. It’s not easy realising that your opportunity to make a difference is fundamentally limited by human nature.

And just for the record, the idea for this post came to me on the number 23 bus between Oxford Street and Paddington. My workplace just provided the facilities I needed to write it down.

Image: Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Neil Usher a global workplace manager, with nearly 20 years’ experience in a variety of sectors and countries. He writes today’s post in a strictly personal capacity and as such, to find out more about Neil, please visit his Theatreacle Blog or head over to Twitter and say hello.

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Such a simple conversation.

I could have missed it in amongst all the others going on in my coffee shop one morning last week.

But I was sat pondering work/life issues for some new stuff I’m planning and was attuned to what went on.

A mother had come in with three children and was sitting chatting to another woman, with the youngest on her lap. The other two, on half term holiday, were playing around the baby’s pram, parked up a few feet from the shop door.

What struck me first off was just how well behaved they were in comparison to some of the café’s regular kids who can make the place look and feel more like a badly run crèche.

Just then a man who’d come in for a takeaway walked past and recognised the eldest child, a little boy. I make up the story that he was a school teacher. Or maybe the father of the child’s little friend.

“Hey, Thomas,” he said. “How you doing?”

“Fine,” Thomas said, clutching at the pram handle for confidence.

“You having a good holiday?”

“Yes,” the wee boy said.

“What you doing today?” said the man.

“Shopping.”

“You’re shopping, Thomas? What do you mean? For food, for…?”

“Shoes,” said Thomas. “I’m getting new shoes.”

“Lovely,” said the grown up. “What for? School, or play?”

Thomas mumbled the answer into his sweater, so I didn’t hear it, but the man did.

“Play?” he said “Oh, that’s great, Thomas. Well, enjoy your shopping.”

And with a smile and a wave to Thomas’s mother, he opened the shop door and off he went.

I sat there for a while and thought. The child couldn’t have been more than six years old and here he was already having work and life polarized for him in something so everyday as the shoes he was wearing.

I understand the need for children to be educated. I understand why, in the UK, for the most part at least, they wear uniforms.

But I’d never really thought before about how shoes could be so defining.

Yet we’ve all been there as children. Shoes for school; shoes for play. The styles required for one, not always okay for the other. Bits of ourselves getting locked away as we learn to conform, as we learn to compartmentalize ourselves into our various sub-components.

No wonder when I sit with coaching clients decades later, helping them unravel their work/life dilemmas that they struggle with the prospect that work and life are not indeed different things.

“It’s about your whole life,” I say. “Of which work is part. It’s about integration. Not separation.”

And sometimes they get there. But often, too, it takes time. That split between who and how you can be in one setting versus another is hard-wired from the beginning.

Which now has me thinking about all the other subtle ways in which we set up work/life splits. And what we can do to make it different.

What kind of things do you notice? How would you make things different to allow more work/life integration?

Photo credit: Richard Tenspeed Heaven

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Sukh Pabial from pabial.wordpress.com.

If there’s one thing I think makes a big difference in the way someone works it’s how they express their self awareness, and to whom.

This isn’t restricted to leaders in our businesses. Authenticity is a much-used word in our reading material. That, together with “being genuine”, “emotional intelligence”, “high value thinking”, and many other interesting buzz words.

What I appreciate though is someone’s ability to acknowledge a shortfall, and express it, to the right person in the right way.

What do I mean by this? Let’s look at what I don’t mean!

Think about someone at work who moans about their work load. They not only moan about their work load, they also moan about their commute. They not only moan about their work load and commute, they moan about not enough support. They not only moan about their work load, their commute and not enough support, they moan about others in their team.

And it goes on. And on. Draining just reading it, isn’t it?

That’s a good example of what I don’t mean but how about what I do mean?

Think of someone at work who is discreet about who they talk to, and about what. I’ve seen really good – successful – people do this. And they do it well.

They understand that only certain people need to know certain information. It shows me that people have the desire and motivation to do better, for no other reason than that they know they can. That’s really heartening to see.

What can we learn from people like this?

• They appreciate the value of discreet personal relationships.They don’t spill their guts to anyone that will listen. They take the time to get to know their ‘audience’ and carefully choose who, for them, is reliable and helpful.
• They are open to receiving feedback and acting on it.This is so powerful. It is something we should all be taught how to do, yet only a small percentage will ever do it well.
• They are highly self-critical.That’s why they’re so good. Because they recognise that they haven’t reached a height that is acceptable for them. This in turn means seeking advice and support.
• They listen to what’s going on around them.That is, they take in information from a wide source. This feeds their minds with a lot of useful opinions and thoughts that they can take, digest and decide what needs to be done.
• They have different avid interests.You can’t concentrate on only one thing and be consistently successful. You need a distraction which helps relieve your mind and exercise other muscles.

I’m sure you do things which are equally successful. But therein lies the other key – learning from others to improve yourself. What do you think?

Sukh Pabial writes and thinks about learning at pabial.wordpress.com. You can also talk Twitter with him (@naturalgrump)

image:studiostoer

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No, it’s not what you think.

It’s the word “soul”.

But that’s the question Phil Bowermaster, of The Transparency Revolution was asking me about the other day when he interviewed me for BlogTalk Radio.

It’s pretty common in career parlance to talk about the self, or the whole self. But using the word soul, as I have done in my eBook, The 7 Most Soul Sucking Career Mistakes Ever (And How To Avoid Them), takes things to a different level.

And is that okay?

In Phil’s interview we touch on all kind of career related things. Like the major disconnects we can experience between our values and how we live and work, and how we can begin to close the gap.

Oh, and also, the role organisations play in cutting through what I call corporate mythology. And how their getting real is in everybody’s interests.

Anyway, without giving more away, here’s the link to the interview.

http://www.transparencyrevolution.com/2011/05/your-life-your-career-your-soul/

I’d love to get your reactions in the comments!

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