Talking Talent

Do you live to work or work to live?

There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, but it may help you clarify what’s important to you in life.

In a recent issue of Recruiter Daily, life coach Sophie Robertson said we all need to determine what life balance means to us.

“For some people, they really live to work, which is fine. I heard a radio interview with the late Bing Lee and when asked whether he regretted not having spent more time with his family, he replied ‘No, my work has always been very important to me’.

“So there is no right or wrong answer. However it is important that you live according to your own values.”

Robertson suggests people divide their lives into 10 different areas:

• Health
• Knowledge and Learning
• Social
• Financial
• Family
• Partner
• Spirituality
• Career
• Giving to others
• Giving to self.

Then assess your level of satisfaction in each of these areas.  It will rapidly become evident where your life is out of balance.

Managing your life effectively means balancing each of your priorities and pursuits.  If one significant area of your life is neglected, the whole wheel of life will eventually give way and the road will become bumpy.

There’s no denying that work life balance is a challenge.  John Howard called it a ‘barbecue stopper’ in 2007.  Keeping your career on track, your family happy, your social life buzzing and your bank account in the black often seem adversarial goals.  Life just seems to play an “either/or” game at times. 

In my book, Selfscape: Success through balance, I remind people that we are all busy.  Henry David Thoreau once said: “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants.  The question is, what are we busy about?”  If you are able to spend the best part of your time on the things that really matter to you – that speak to your highest values – then life slides along on an even keel.  And what do you get?  Work/life balance.

“What do you want to do with your life?”

It’s a conundrum that most of us have wrestled with at some stage of our lives.

If you need some direction, 43 Things is a social networking website built on the principles of tagging.   Users create accounts and then list a number of goals; these goals are then connected to similar goals constructed by other people.

43 Things not only encourages people to write down their goals – an important factor in high achievement – but also provides a social networking space for people to meet other enthusiasts with the same (sometimes very obscure) goal, to share their progress and to learn from other people who already achieved that goal.

More than a 1.1 million people have joined the site and have set themselves goals such as ‘donate blood’, ‘learn sign language’, ‘travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway’, ‘grow my own vegetables’, ‘watch every Bette Davis movie ever made,’ ‘keep up with current web trends’ or ‘be happy even if the rest of the things on this list never happen’.

43 Things is very much like the ‘21 things to do in a lifetime’ concept that I’ve often talked about in motivational workshops, and written about in my book, SelfScape: Success through Balance.

My list includes ‘write a novel’, ‘retrace the steps of a famous explorer’, ‘ learn something from a child’, and ’sail the seven seas’.

The first time I wrote my list of 21 things, it was the result of a session facilitated by my supervisor at the time.  He was a creative thinker and looked for different ways to develop better teamwork among his executive group.  Each of us wrote our list and then one by one we displayed them and discussed each point.

My manager was looking for common areas of interest where the team or a sub-set of it could undertake activities together on the basis that that the best relationships are developed through shared experiences.  It lead to some of the group sailing together through the Whitsunday Islands, some racing cars in serious races and some four wheel driving across the Simpson Desert.

That was in 1995.  I wonder if today we’d all sign up for 43 Things and then share our lists through the Internet?