Work-Life Balance
by Mo-Ching Yip

It would be easy for me to write yet another article expounding the benefits of achieving balance through yoga, meditation, nutritional diets and getting regular bodywork and exercise, yadda yadda yadda, but the truth is, few people are able to follow through with this plan. What I have to offer instead is an insight into what drives the imbalance between work and life.

Life-Work Balance. It’s like Body-Mind-Soul—a sacred trilogy. The soul holds the body and mind in check. If one is neglected to the exclusion of the other, all three suffer. Thus, Balance is the element that holds life and work in check. When all three have equal weight, then there is true health and prosperity. This, then, equals true success. In our nine-to-five reality, however, work takes one end of the scale and life takes the other, and equaling both becomes the balancing act.

Blessed are those, then, who have life without work, and for the rest of us who must work for a living. Blessed are those who inhaled the basics through a family business and for the rest of us who must learn by trial and error. Unless career is your only ambition in life, held above family, friends, rest and recreation, may these words then serve as your early warning system. For those workaholics out there, think what will become of you if your precious, hard-earned career crashed. In certain cases, in fact, such a crisis might be the only thing that would save your life. Do you think that every last person’s dying wish might be “Gee, maybe I should have worked more”? Are you kidding?

Work, like money, is in itself not evil, but our attitude towards it often is. Work is a necessary duty in life, and an employee with good work ethics is highly prized. Keeping things in perspective, let’s examine a typical human lifespan. Generally speaking, the first 20 years of our youth are devoted to education and play. Then come the throes of building work and career, the pressures of raising a family, which consume our middle years. After your retirement, hopefully there is enough health and wealth left over to enjoy peace and contentment.

Brawn vs. Brains. There is a song that goes, “If you work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Bony fingers!” If you think putting in all that overtime is going to advance you, you are terribly mistaken and wasting your energy, and digging yourself deeper into the grind. Sadly, when you look at the work world out there, it appears that most workers would prefer to just march to the nine-to-five tune like automatons, robots programmed only for certain functions. These two habits will definitely lead to bony fingers! The idea here is not to work more, but to work smarter.

Increasing your Ability. Working smarter has nothing to do with your IQ, background or education. Those rags-to-riches stories happen more often than not, including the millionaires who worked their way to the top. What it comes down to is increasing your ability. To work smarter, it means using your brain, your creativity and your imagination. It means mental discipline, organizing yourself, thinking ahead. It means hanging out with the peers who support your work ethics, making connections, and blessed are those who recognize a good mentor and heed their advice. And yes, for short periods of time, it means the sacrifice of your personal life for the growth of your career. It means setting career goals, acquiring strong communication skills, acquiring some business skill you are lacking, all of which are offered out there, in the universe, at your disposal.

How to Get to the Top. I am reminded of an incident at a department store, where the checkout was highly systematized. There were 4 to 5 clerks at the checkout station: one to punch the cash register, one to fold the items, one to bag the items, one to seal and staple the receipt to the bagged items, and the last one looking on. When we went to check out, the cash register person noticed she was the only one at her station and rudely informed us that it was not her job to bag, folded her arms, turned her head away, and pouted, leaving our many items abandoned on the counter. We were so shocked, we stood there for a time with our mouths open. There was no line behind us, and there was little for her to do. Well, in my most polite manner, I informed her that perhaps she might like to remain a clerk for the rest of her life.

Positive and Negative Stress. How many times have you heard the lamentable situation, “my career is booming, but I have little time,” and its opposite, “I have plenty of time but little money”? The point here is that both are needed in the picture of success. Success and failure both produce pressure and stress, positive and negative. Riding success is riding a knife’s edge. If you are successful, you have to stay ahead of the pack, you have to grow and expand, you find less and less time for anything else, you obsess—this is positive stress. Conversely, if your company is struggling, you worry and fret constantly, you work overtime to keep your project from going under, you obsess. There is then the ever-unpredictable fickleness of the winds, blowing in every direction but yours, downsizing, upsizing, call it what you will, someone always gets the axe.

In conclusion, if you are in-between jobs or careers, take some of that precious downtime for your recovery back to life. Be good to yourself and explore a new direction, go back to the gym or yoga, and undergo a detox diet to lose that extra 20 pounds, be with your family and friends, walk in nature, get your health back before you go back to the center ring. In other words, get back on your feet and into the balance side of life.

May your journeys be safe, may your worries be few, may the gods always watch over you. May you grow like a tree heading straight for the light, grounded into Mother Earth. Om Shanti.