Donald is the Chair of our Board and is the Chief Executive of Scottish Care. He wrote to let us know how he manages his work life balance for Work Life Week.
One of the dictionary definitions of balance is that it is ‘an even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady.’ For a lot of people that even distribution seems an impossibility away. To get the balance between work and life seems as illusive as trying to capture and hold a child’s bubble.
I’ve spent a lot of my professional life in the world of social care and health talking about the importance of self love, of looking after yourself physically and emotionally so that you can look after others. I’ve researched and published on burnout, stress and the importance of allowing ourselves the time to focus on our mental wellbeing. I know that those who give through the care of others must feed themselves and nourish their energies or the well will dry up. I know that those who care are disproportionately the sort of folks who think about themselves and their needs last of all. So probably more than most I know the theory, the benefits, even the ‘how to’. And yet…the sense of balance is as elusive as it ever was.
And I wonder why?
My work-life balance
As someone who leads a team of others, and as someone who is a Chief Executive, I know that more than at any other time I need to get the balance right and to model for others a healthy integrated living – but perhaps more than at any other time it’s harder than ever. I even asked a few fellow CEOs in preparation for this blog if they had discovered the secret formula. After most of them choked with derisory laughter I concluded that we were all searching for that balance and most of us failing to achieve it.
I suppose that brings me to my point. Most of us know what we need to do, we know the critical importance of getting balance but are failing in the struggle to achieve it. The graveyard, as the saying goes, is full of people who worked themselves to a stressful early death.
So my message to myself this week is not to get stressed about not having balance – it would be perverse to be getting more anxious than we need to be about not getting that balance right.
The second message to myself is to do more of what I know gives me balance even if fleetingly – a walk along a breezy Ayrshire beach, the latest mind-numbing Nordic TV detective series, getting soaked doing the back garden, being beaten at SNAP by my three year old daughter…
Many spiritual traditions emphasise the need for us to enjoy the moment and in the ordinary activity of living to find energy and renewal – so that’s what I’m going to do – worry less about my work-life balance and where I can and when – just go about discovering and enjoying it – however fleeting.