Talk about an impossible expectation: Give 100% of yourself in four different arenas of your life. Most people I know end up feeling insufficient and unsuccessful in all four areas, even after strategically reducing sleeping hours and burning the midnight oil to do it all.
“You can have it all” is such a paradoxical statement because you can have it all but not the way you think. We equate “having it all” to “being it all” to everyone and everything in our lives. Being 100% myself does not require me to divide myself into five or six equal parts, parceled out to my work, my children, my partner, my parents, my friends, my community and so on.
We fail at the work life balance challenge because we are trying to balance the wrong thing. Imagine being a waiter and trying to balance food for three tables on one arm. All the plates would surely come crashing down. The goal is not to balance the external, but to become centered internally. That is where our power lies.
When you are trying to open a stubborn jar, you pull the jar into our solar plexus to get better leverage. The same dynamic applies here. If you do not go within, you will go without. If your focus remains on the external, visible aspects of life you will experience separation from your most powerful Self and will feel out of balance and over-whelmed.
The myth of work life balance isn’t that it is impossible…the myth lies in the process by which we try to achieve it. When we transform our addiction from “doing it all” to being whole and complete in and of ourselves we experience a balance, and function from a center that holds in a storm. The real question is, when we let go of the need to measure up, what do we have instead? We embrace an understanding of our wholeness and our grand purpose for being here now. Because none of us are here to go undetected.