7 warning signs that work is starting to affect your family life

Our work-life balance has never been more challenged than in today’s busy and ever-changing environment, with 24/7 digital connectivity and a high expectation of being available at all times. Are you guilty of:

1. Only partially listening to your family members’ or friends’ problems,being miles away at work?
2. Feeling bad about taking some time out for yourself?
3. Sometimes wondering what will explode first: your personal life or your reputation as a reliable manager?
4. Feeling trapped in a job because you need to provide for the family?
5. Fearing that you have become a bad role model for your children or those around you?
6. Displaying a short-tempered side of you that is not who you really are or want to be?
7. Abandoning friendships because of work obligations and lack of time?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, you might be a victim of poor work-life balance, like so many other hard-working managers. If you do not take action right now, the negative impact could reach much further and be way more devastating than you would like to admit.

By all means, I am not interested in yet another work-life balance debate; I would much rather like to redefine the term ‘work-life balance’ and give you a different perspective. Working closely with hard-working managers and their leadership qualities, I can confirm that many of us struggle to ‘switch off’ from work and be present in their social environment with family and friends. This often comes at a high cost to physical and mental health – from low job satisfaction to high divorce rates, from unhealthy eating habits to stress and anxiety, just to name a few.

Before you read on, please take a moment to think about what work-life balance means to you and the beliefs you have around this topic. – The term balance would suggest there be an even amount on both sides of the scale and I think we can all agree that the equal times of 8 hours of work and 8 hours of fun (plus 8 hours of sleep) are long gone, especially if you want to be a successful manager and leader.

So, how about we change the terminology from work-life balance to ‘sustainable relationship between business, life and well-being’? This has a completely different feel about it; it creates choice based on our attitude, what we want and desire, as well as how and where we want to spend our precious time.

Do we know what we want?

“You will never feel truly satisfied by work until you are satisfied by life.” ~Heather Schuck

In order to achieve a sustainable relationship between business, life and well-being, it is important to understand what you value and how to create the life-style that gives you (and the people that matter to you) happiness, success and fulfilment in all aspects of life. Of course I appreciated that to succeed in today’s competitive market you must be a high performer. However, don’t mistake a high performer with a workaholic!

• A high performer works smart in a healthy and sustainable environment and feels in control, happy and fulfilled
• A workaholic works hard and long hours in an unhealthy and unsustainable environment and feels out of control, frustrated and over time burnt out without having a purpose or feeling good enough

So here are a few points that differentiate workaholics from high performers:

Making progress in our career or business is not solely measured by revenue and net profit. We need to live a life we love, without feeling guilty. Of course we need to learn from the past and plan for the future, but we also need to be present in the NOW, because ultimately this is all we ever have. And there are times, where you should swap a fancy screensaver for a real sunset. Work with people you like and live with people you love! Value yourself and your time, because you can never get it back. Choose wisely when you build your sustainable relationship between business, life and well-being!