Restoring Work-Life Balance: Practical Tips for Your Today and Tomorrow

It’s been a year since I left my previous company due to a restructuring decision.

Michael Judkins / pexels.com

Like others who’ve been casualties of termination, I can attest to the experience encompassing both challenges and silver linings. For me, one silver lining has been the chance to reflect upon the past and extract insights to guide future professional and personal endeavors.

Questions I’ve pondered include: What would I have changed about how I approached my job? Were my mindsets beneficial or self-sabotaging? What did I learn about human and organizational nature? Which of my prior views were reinforced, reshaped, or negated?

I also think about those left behind, the people still laboring for an organization. How can they make the most of their efforts, find holistic fulfillment, and be well prepared for potential bumps in their journey?

Distilled from my reflections, here are actionable tips for approaching your employment in a healthy and pragmatic way.

Prepare for the Unexpected

No matter how secure you feel at your enterprise, things can change in an instant. You could be flung into the polar vortex of unemployment faster than you can say hello to your manager and their HR representative at a surprise termination meeting.

Suddenly your and your family’s welfare could be threatened, particularly if you haven’t already built a foundation to weather storms ahead.

Financial planning and discipline while you’re employed are critical elements to ensure preparedness for involuntary unemployment. Without financial resources to get you through a job transition, you and your family could face especially bleak times.

Similarly, building an external professional network, cultivating expertise applicable to other employers or settings, and considering how you could pivot careers if forced to do so will position you to land on your feet in a worst-case termination scenario. Your ability to sell, adapt, and reinvent yourself are essential survival skills for life after termination.

Set Reasonable Expectations

Intellectually, most of us understand that the modern social contract between employers and employees has jettisoned long-term commitment in favor of short-term, transactional exchanges of value.

Nonetheless, employees who take pride in their work, act with a high degree of commitment, and build close-knit working relationships may unwittingly project their loyalty onto their employer. When the latter reveals its true transactional colors, an employee may feel blindsided.

Notwithstanding your professional standards and work ethic, intentionally strive to approach your work for an employer as it truly is—a tenuous and temporary relationship whose fate ultimately is outside your control.

Set appropriate expectations and keep your options open. This includes recognizing that your employer’s and your colleagues’ allegiances to you only run so deep. It also includes setting reasonable limitations on how much of yourself you give to your employer.

Always remember that you, not your employer, have your best interests at heart.

Bet Your Chips on Your Own Leadership Development

In many organizations, managers or supervisors who exhibit strong tactical performance are assumed to be strong leaders regardless of actual leadership performance. Such organizations may fail to develop highly effective leaders and hold leaders to high standards. Resulting leadership deficits do untold harm to individuals, groups, and enterprises.

Against this backdrop, developing into a highly effective leader and consistently leading with excellence can be lonely paths to forge. Yet, your choice to diligently pursue these paths can have a remarkable salutary effect on your effectiveness and satisfaction while serving at an organization. Moreover, it can equip you to more deftly and confidently chart new courses in the future if you’re voluntarily or involuntarily separated from your employer.

Define a Broader Identity

Have you ever asked yourself the existential question “Who am I?”

Often, our identity and self-worth are closely tied to our professional life. When work chapters end, such as due to termination, career shifts, or retirement, we may struggle to find terra firma. Stress and even depression may weigh us down heavily.

Because change is inevitable, we should seek more balance in our lives, so we can be happy independent of our career or any single job or employer.

Maintain a healthy degree of detachment from your day job. Build affirming relationships with family and friends. Explore outside interests and hobbies. Find ways to learn, grow, and serve others. Through such pursuits, you can better see yourself as a whole, grounded human being whose identity and self-worth aren’t rooted primarily in occupation and employment.

Be Good to Yourself

Life is short. Time is fleeting.

We may say these aphorisms, but sometimes life’s twists and turns force us to stop and think about what’s really important. When we do, we have a golden opportunity to recalibrate our thoughts and actions for the better.

Being highly dedicated to your career and employer is laudable. However, that dedication can be taken too far—it can delude you into sacrificing too much for your job.

To make the most of your present employment and pave the way for future vibrant chapters, consider implementing the above tips in concert with these overarching principles of self-care:

• Invest deeply in yourself and your well-being.

• Live your life with an abundance mindset.

• Enjoy the journey, no matter where it leads.

Your work-life balance is waiting to be restored. Begin the restoration project today!

Life's a dance, you learn as you go Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow Don't worry 'bout what you don't know Life's a dance, you learn as you go ~ John Michael Montgomery, 1992