The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life
by Patty Azzarello, copyright © 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.
Work and Life Do Not Have to Compete as Much as You Think
It’s important to step back and really think about what you want—not just your next job or your next house or your next trip. If you fast-forward twenty years and then look back, what will make you feel good about how you spent those twenty years? Real success is personal. It’s not what anyone else wants for or expects from you.
Often people have trouble coming up with the answer to the question, “What does success really mean to you?” They don’t have a particular goal. If you want to be a CEO by a certain age, or have a particular amount of money in the bank by a certain date, those are fairly concrete goals. But if you don’t have really clear goals, how do you answer the question?
Your True Desired Outcome
Try thinking more generally about what you want to make come true in your life. Do you want to have adventures? Do you want to pass your values on to your children? Do you want to spend lots of time in nature? Do you want to be with really smart people? Really think about what you want to make sure happens in your life. That is the root of your true desired outcome.
Your true desired outcome is true to you. It’s not what it is “supposed to be.” It’s not what your family or your colleagues think you should be doing. It is not all about work. It is about work and life and what you really want to make happen overall in your life.
Why is this useful? Because plans don’t work. It is impossible to plan a sequence of steps in your career over ten or twenty years. But establishing a true desired outcome for your career and life is really helpful. Here’s why.
You Avoid Wasting Time
The more clear you can be about your true desired outcome, the more clear you can be in the moment about whether or not you are wasting your time. You can ask, “Is my role building capital to achieve my desired outcome or degrading it?” It lets you make judgments at different points to see if what you are doing in the moment is helpful, neutral, or damaging to achieving your desired outcome in life.
The great benefit of having this defined is not that it prescribes a specific plan, but that, in tough and confusing times, it gives you a picture to fall back on—a vision of what all this effort and activity is supposed to amount to.
As an example, I once left a job that I loved. I loved my boss; my boss loved me. I loved my team; my team loved me. We were doing great. But one morning I woke up and thought to myself, “Damn! I am starting to waste time here. If I spend any more time in this lovely job, I am missing an opportunity to build the career capital and the experience I need to become a CEO.”
I ended up going after what turned out to be the worst job I’ve ever had. It was a turnaround situation in a failing business where everyone was angry. For the first six months I was completely miserable, but because this job required me to be in charge of strategy, marketing, and sales generation globally, it was exactly the kind of experience I needed to become a CEO.
So, as hard as it was, I made the tradeoff between a happy, fun job, and the experience I needed to attain my desired outcome. I felt good about it because I made the choice on purpose, and it helped me survive the low points.
We ultimately turned the business around and it became a great job—in fact, it was my last job before becoming a general manager. But I never would have left my happy job if I had not had a desired outcome defined, causing me to assess my situation and question it.
This choice to move from a happy but safe to an ugly but high-impact job serves as a great example of how having defined my big desired outcome allowed me to make decisive and effective choices and tradeoffs in my career. The CEO outcome served me very well for many years. Ultimately, after achieving that goal, I decided to incorporate more life-oriented goals into my big-picture desired outcome. I realized that I had a broader desired outcome than operating as the head of a single company.
The Hard Part—There Is Conflict
There is inherent conflict in fitting your job into your life. Say you want to have a big career and make a lot of money, or make a difference in the world, but you want to spend time with your family and enjoy your life outside of work too. You feel like these are in conflict.
Or you really don’t enjoy your work and really just want to be spending your time doing other things.
Both of these situations result in constantly questioning: Am I doing the right thing?
I know people who second-guess themselves for years and years, either feeling guilty about working a lot, feeling resentful that their success is limited by their family obligations, or feeling depressed that their job is sapping all the life out of their life.
Unless you are already independently wealthy, you need to be earning an income to pay the bills and fund your fun. But you don’t need to let the fact that you need to earn money ruin your whole life.
Many people feel unhappy because they try to optimize everything at once, and the resulting failure to do so feels bad. In reality, having a desired outcome defined is not magically going to eliminate the need for a paycheck or give you double the time to do what you want to do in work and life. But it does let you make decisions and tradeoffs on purpose. And that not only makes it feel a lot better and less stressful, but also helps you to
Make much better judgments about how you are spending your time and whether it is amounting to anything—so you can proactively avoid wasting time, stuck in a job that is not helping you.
Make some tradeoffs on purpose, so you feel like you are more in control of the outcome and not questioning yourself all the time.
Make Tradeoffs on Purpose
The clearer you can be about what you really want in your work and your family life, the more easily you can make tradeoffs on purpose. And you can make different tradeoffs at different times.
Let’s face it. There will be times in your career that you will cancel your vacation to deal with a launch or a customer issue, and other times that you won’t. If you are clear about your outcome, you can make those choices on purpose—different priorities at different times.
You can sometimes work “too much” for good reasons, and at other times you can pass up work opportunities in favor of family. And along the way you can prioritize small things that keep you connected with your family, even if you can’t spend as much time as you want with them sometimes. When you make choices for reasons that serve your desired outcome, you feel much more in control and much more satisfied.
You can also recruit your family to be on your side if you share your thoughts about what all this work and money is for. What is it amounting to? This shared understanding of your true desired outcome can relieve you of huge amounts of stress.
Balance, No—Purpose, Yes
I’m sorry, but balance just doesn’t work. Particularly if you are ambitious. You are going to work very hard and focus on your career at the expense of the rest of your life from time to time.
However, building your career and letting your life go to hell does not work either. The trick is, if you want to do better at either work or life, you need to get better at both.
If this seems impossible, just think about it this way. If your work is making you miserable, you won’t be good to your family, and if your family is making you miserable, you won’t be as good at your work. The only way out of this is to force yourself to get incrementally better at both.
If your family is a source of strength, you can apply even more energy to your work. And if you are handling your job with ease and grace, you will have more energy to be good to your family.
Don’t Make It Such a Competition
Try to think of work and life as mutually reinforcing instead of in competition.
If you are doing great in your career but your family is unhappy or your life has no life in it, you have the constant stress of causing disappointment, or outright arguing, and feeling guilty about your family and time outside of work. That energy drain is keeping you from fully optimizing your career.
One of my favorite stories is about a colleague, a very ambitious hard-working woman in her thirties. Her husband is a gifted school teacher. She is investing a lot of time and energy in building her career, and her husband is doing good in the world with his teaching and supporting her every step of the way.
On the day when a new blockbuster movie came out, he called her at work around noon and said, “I’d really like to go see the movie today on opening day.” She looked at her workload and said, “Sorry, I have to work late.” Instead of being disappointed, getting upset, and giving her a hard time, here is what he did. He said, “The last showing is at 9:30 p.m. If we meet at the movie theater, can you make it?” After she agreed, here is what he did: He cleaned the whole house and packed her a dinner. He put it in a fancy shopping bag with a silk scarf over it, so the movie theater would not see that it was food and would let her bring it in.
That is a picture of a couple whose life and work are both working!
Don’t Zero Out
There is finite time in the day, week, and month. Even if you are optimizing for work, it is important to not let the rest of your life zero out completely.
KEY INSIGHT: There is a much bigger difference between doing nothing and doing something small, than between doing something small and something big.
If there is something you want to be doing and you’re not doing it at all, the feeling of zero feels really bad. But the feeling of something, even if it’s small, stops that really bad feeling of zero.
People tend to set themselves up to think if they can’t do the big thing, then life is bad. If you love to travel the world, but your work or family prevents it, then you are miserable. But why not go away for a weekend somewhere once or twice a year?
Or if you really crave some peace and quiet and time to think, but can’t get away, go sit in your car for fifteen minutes every day.
There is a huge difference between zero and something. You can always do something.
I was talking to a very senior consultant whose job kept him on the road virtually all the time, including weekends, when he would travel to and from clients. He felt like he was getting no time at all with his family. The big thing he wanted was to spend lots of evenings and weekends with his family. That was just not going to happen in this job. So he told his firm that one weekend a quarter would be his. The difference between zero and something makes a big psychological difference for you and your family.
Later he made another career choice, to optimize the time he spent with his family.
You can’t optimize everything all at once, but you can make sure you don’t zero out.
You can easily trade off some work time for some life time. These days, for an increasing number of people, it is very easy to work outside the office. Tell your boss that you are going to come it at 11:00 on Wednesday, and take your partner out to breakfast. Trade a weekday to go on a school trip, then do some work on a weekend.
It’s Up to You to Be OK
Part of your job is to figure out how to not be fully consumed and burned out. The better you get at your job, the more you can get done in a shorter amount of time with less effort and energy. You’ll then have more time and energy to do things outside of work.
You need to take responsibility to make time to do the things over and above your job description that will make you successful, including claiming some time to get better at your home life. Your company wants you to have a good life that you enjoy. They know they will get more out of you at work if you are happy outside of work.
. 
courtesy of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All Rights Reserved. 
Recent Comments