Work-Life Balance:
Positive Practices for Hard Times
by Molly Gordon, MCC
It's important to get a handle on
mood swings or energy shifts if you want to maintain
your work life balance and be successful in business.
According to psychologist and researcher Martin
Seligman, some folks appear to be hardwired to respond
optimistically and hopefully to work life balance upset
and life's ups and downs. Others are wired for opposite
responses. Fortunately, you do not have to settle for
the wiring you were born with. With practice you can
improve your resilience and your hopefulness by
acquiring solid positive thinking skills.
I like to think of the process of
building hopefulness, resilience and positive thinking
skills as an analogue to building physical fitness: it
takes attention, concentration, commitment, and
repetition. If you approach a workout program with those
qualities, you can almost always improve your fitness.
The first hurdle to get over is the
belief that you already need to be different in order to
succeed. You don't. You are the way you are and you can
start from here, overwhelmed, worried, anxious,
whatever. Don't fall into your story about how you feel,
but take a stand for what you intend to accomplish to
restore your work life balance and where you plan to go.
You do not need to feel better before you try these
practices -- do them now. Another caveat: Do not
interpret your progress in the short term -- measuring
increase in strength and endurance after a single
workout would be silly.
Seligman points out that people with
an optimistic approach to life habitually accept
positive thoughts and dispute negative thoughts. Those
of us who are wired to be more pessimistic tend to
dispute the positive and accept the negative. Optimists
tend to assume that their life balance will be restored,
good events will happen again and that bad events are an
exception; pessimists assume the reverse. I am
oversimplifying his rigorously considered arguments, and
I encourage you to read the book if the science of this
is important to you.
Here's a practice he recommends for
shifting from hopelessness to hopefulness. I
successfully use it with my clients to help them restore
their work life balance. He calls it ABCDE for:
Adversity -- Beliefs --
Consequences -- Disputation -- Energization.
A - Adversity
Start by spelling out the nature of the situation.
Notice that you can experience hopelessness in response
to ostensibly positive situations as well as to negative
ones. For example, getting a new client or being
accepted into a final round of interviews can upset your
balance and send you into a whirlwind of anxiety and
fear that produces just as much hopelessness and
overwhelm as not getting the job or not making the cut.
B -- Beliefs
This is your opportunity to spell out the thoughts and
beliefs that are fueling the negative response.
C -- Consequences
Look at the consequences of your beliefs -- what
happened as a result? How do you behave? What happened
then?
D -- Disputation
Actively dispute the beliefs that break your life
balance and send you into the downward spiral. This is
where you practice arguing with yourself in a productive
way.
E -- Energization
When you have been effective in disputing the problem
beliefs, you feel an influx of energy, a sense of
renewed hope, or at least of peacefulness.
So, here's an example from my life:
Adversity:
I was excited about moving forward on two projects when
I fell on my bike and cracked my ribs. I was okay and
working hard with this for almost three days, then
depression and anxiety set in and my usual positive
thinking ability left me. Instead of feeling like moving
forward I felt like bursting into tears.
Beliefs:
How will I ever restore my work life balance and get
things done if I can't stop these mood swings? Maybe I
am just not meant to lead these projects. I don't know
enough and I can't seem to get started -- I probably
should have said no in the first place. It would be
better to bow out now, as embarrassing as that will be,
than to keep going and have a bigger train wreck later
when I just can't make the grade.
Consequences:
These beliefs leave me feeling very sad and small, like
a six year old, and then I wonder how a six year old can
possibly be a leader. I find it hard to concentrate and
I just want to hide.
Disputation:
Constant low-grade pain can take it out of anyone. The
world is not going to come to an end if you delay things
because you've been injured. And who says you have to do
it alone anyway? Some of the problem is that you don't
have enough information to go forward. That calls for
making requests of others, not for blaming yourself. And
when you're not leaning on yourself so hard, your
positive thinking ability starts coming back and your
mood lightens -- so maybe it would be smart to cut
yourself some slack this week after letting folks know
what is going on. You don't have to crawl under a rock
-- you can reach out instead to restore your work life
balance. And even if some work projects end up being
passed on to others, there will always be other
opportunities.
Energization:
I called and emailed colleagues to regroup. Not only did
these conversations relieve my anxiety, they made simple
next steps quite clear. In one case, my summary of a
conversation ended up being exactly what our group
needed to move forward. Who knew? I had been worried
about making things happen on my own when all along my
strength was in articulating and clarifying complex
input from many sources.
See how this works? I do strongly
recommend the book as there are many more practices in
it that address different aspects of overwhelm and ways
to restore your work life balance. But if you struggle
with hopelessness and challenge yourself to work through
this one exercise on a regular basis (and if that means
five or ten times a day, so be it), your positive
thinking skills will grow and you WILL get relief.
Remember -- don't measure change before it can happen --
keep doing the practices long enough for significant
positive shifts to take root and grow.
©2001-2007 Shaboom, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
Molly Gordon, MCC, is a leading figure in business
coaching, writer, workshop leader, frequent
presenter at live and virtual events worldwide, and an
acknowledged expert on niche
marketing. Join 12,000 readers of her Authentic
Promotion® ezine, an invaluable self
promotion and small business marketing resource, to
grow your strong business while you feed your soul.
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