Systems of Survival (1/2) - Work/Life Balance is BS

If you're looking for balance, start with an audit of what you still consider 'normal'.

Here’s your disclaimer - this is not an article about how to increase work performance, improve your ability to hustle, or an instructional on how to rub some dirt in it and show your competitors you mean business.

There’s one million articles on that. Courses. Social media posts. Bros and doctors alike, tweeting.

This is about a need to be actively abnormal as a service to your future self and your community.

It’s not that I hate hard work.

It’s not that I have no ambition.

It’s not that I don’t want to contribute.

It’s that I’ve seen the same shitty story play out, time and time again - since I was initially too young to understand what I was seeing - and the worst, most frustrating part about it?

It’s avoidable.

The fallacy of the work/life separation

I’ve been divorced from the notion that there is any separation between work and personal life for a long time.
The very same patterns that show up in your personal life are with you at work, and vice versa.
It’s not about how you can’t stop checking your emails at night like you told your partner you would - it’s about what’s at stake for you underneath the inability to stop checking your emails. Wherever that compulsion comes from, it doesn’t just exclusively affect your work life.

This is how our history tends to repeat itself, unless we introduce active abnormality.

There are different levels to the awareness of how your self-relationship and unresolved inner conflict can push you into this place where excessive working, guilt, anxiety and dread about work, and other work-related stressors are your norm.

As a society we’ve responded to this all-too-common issue with a passive-aggressive (light on the aggressive) form of off-brand community.
If your working life sucks you can commiserate with nearly anyone about hating work, find 948 memes about it, and spend every lunch break or huddle complaining and swapping war stories.
Our sense of simultaneous powerlessness/resentment/martyrdom is there in plain sight. I call this community off-brand because I question its purpose - is just knowing others are also suffering actually benefiting us in any real way? What can we do to get beneath the meme into the core issue?

During my career in Operations — in industries such as health, manufacturing, construction, and tech — I’ve had a lot of the same foundational responsibilities, often the same relationship roles, and the same visibility into how a company is functioning and the issues it is facing.
Some of these issues were just challenges any business faces, but others were highly dysfunctional cultural patterns on repeat.

Then I was standing at a metaphorical intersection -

I quit a management position at a company that was not doing well on multiple fronts (draining, ego withering), and moved on to a company that was doing really well on most fronts (exciting, ego boosting) -

when a metaphorical bomb went off -

My dad died, very suddenly, within a long legacy of overwork and financial insecurity.

This combo triggered a cascade of pent-up work/life related baggage to rain down, and abruptly turned a lazer-like interrogation lamp on me and my work life - forget the companies I worked for. I started to make uncomfortable realisations about just how much my personal history and learned beliefs about work had led me around by the nose for over a decade. My work history and behaviours had become what Beyonce sang the line “Baby, I swear it’s deja vu” about.

And the one thing I couldn’t blame these environments for was my continued participation.

My unconsciousness — even though some of those environments capitalised on it just fine — was still mine to manage. And this is where the deeper reality of how your internal world and your working life being synonymous really started to hit me hard.

Accountability is near impossible if you don’t know how to process your own shame and grief - but it’s the ultimate Uno Reverse if you can.

Common themes from a decade in Operations

Operations, primarily for small business (companies with under 30 employees) has offered plenty of variety over the years even though the deeper foundations remain pretty much the same. You often find yourself as the designated HR rep where there is no fully-fledged HR department, and a ‘bridge’ from different departments to a time poor, spread thin Director, COO, business owner. This can be awkward, and required me to develop (too slowly, after plenty of error) a skill for diplomacy that it’s safe to say I was not born with.

While trying to balance my own desires to not ‘lose myself’ in work like some of those around me, with wanting to also do well, be proud of my work, and solve big problems - I began to realise that these desires were common to a lot of other people, but that they created a tonne of internal conflict. Why?

Because the desire to do well and be proud was being hijacked by a dark fear of inadequacy, of losing - over a desire to grow and innovate. The covert and overt messaging of the systems we work within (for both the employed & self employed) swoops in to capitalise on those types of fears, boundary violations ensue, and the resentment and disempowerment grows.

So, what keeps feeding this cycle?

1. We mistake extraction for validation — and lose sight of the transaction

We accept a lack of transparency constantly in our working relationships.

These relationships are highly transactional, and yet we continually lack clarity on the transaction. We focus on being seen as productive, valuable, invested - and not the reality of how these traits can lapse into manipulative leverage points so easily.

We also let the transaction age like milk - we set it up, and then mosey along while an insidious creep of responsibility and expectation is often being allowed in the background (turnover and layoffs are often a good example of how responsibility creeps, under the guise of ‘being a team player’).

The public education system is a solid example of this.

Teachers and educational assistants are consistently trying to get better wages, working conditions and a more balanced working culture — and yet consistent after hours work and teacher-funded activities (“there’s no budget for that!”) have become part of the socially expected working culture in a lot of schools.

Where did this come from? How did it become acceptable and who perpetuates it? What does it take to be seen as a ‘good’ teacher now?

Teachers that care about their students take on more work, self-fund more activities — and the result is a culture where hard work increases entitlement, martyrdom is encouraged, society that dismisses the presence of the trap (“no one is making you do that!”), and governing bodies continue to extract because they’ve been allowed to historically. The health industry operates similarly, where burnout and its symptoms (like compassion fatigue, lack of curiosity, apathy) are common in doctors, nurses, and first responders.

Across industries, our measure of value is how much work we can take on and how we can continue upping the ante performance-wise - but our wellbeing, career direction, engagement and satisfaction at work, and wages and benefits rarely keep 1:1 pace with the mounting responsibility and expectation. This is extraction.

We can make transparency and continued conversation a requirement, but we would be required to follow through where it is not considered ‘normal’ to do so. We would be required to hold our boundaries in the micro (in the day-to-day, against social expectations) and not just the macro (e.g a union bargaining table). It’s also fantastical to imply there wouldn’t be a price attached to doing this (and I’ll touch on that further in Part Two).

2. The core value that isn’t on the website - Scarcity

This is not just about how many zeroes are, or are not, in a profit margin. It’s about what the belief & behaviours are around what is needed to create more (of anything, money or otherwise).

Do you believe to have more, you need to create or double down on extraction?

Our profit fixation makes us suckers for developing a culture of scarcity. In case it isn’t obvious, greed is a blood relation of scarcity. The energy of scarcity in any environment will always equal extraction unless someone consciously switches off the tap.

The way financial stress and insecurity is managed, really, really matters.

Does it trigger an automatic state of reactivity - constriction and micro management?Or is there an ability to pause, review, and make effective changes without succumbing to the emotions that arise out of the trigger?

I’ve seen businesses handle financial hardship in so many ways, but they all exist on a spectrum of ‘mistake that will echo through time’ to ‘constructive lesson in longevity’ that was dictated by how much scarcity sat at the baseline of that organisation.

Learn to spot scarcity, and know that it will go hand-in-hand with extraction.

Apply that knowledge to yourself and your own behaviours first.

Engage with scarcity riddled environments mindfully, as scarcity fuelled behaviours and reactions always have a price that supersedes the original problem.

3. You underestimate what your insecurities do to your career

What you start off ‘knowing’ about money, discipline, hard work, emotions, attachment, loss, etc. is programmed early on, and takes conscious attention & new experiences to deprogram. Just as you can be drawn to familiarity — even if it is deeply dysfunctional — in your personal life, the same will occur in your working life.

The way your lack of awareness, poor relationship to yourself, fear of connection, or terror around money may have created patterns and cycles in your life - is already embedded into your career.

So, we combine our own luggage with our current society’s system of work - which is heavily incentivised to always prize profit over anything else.

This overlay is something we are reminded of on a daily basis as our ability to make money and appear useful determines our survival, our feeling of safety as we move about the world.

Our felt sense of safety affects the bandwidth we have in every aspect of our lives — physical health, relationships, creative energy, and self-belief. A lack of bandwidth can trigger us to strive, try to compensate and make up for our perceived shortcomings with force and impulsivity.

The things we deeply desire in life can start to fall by the wayside. We sacrifice time with our family, our health, and our sense of autonomy and power (especially when we are not producing!) on the altar of “but if I do this now, I’ll be able to feel safe then. If I do this now I’ll never end up like X did. If I do this now, I’ll have everything I want in the end.”

We propose timelines to ourselves — “it’s just a year, it’s just five years, it’s just a decade of my whole life…” — and we don’t realise that we are training ourselves now, likely compounding on decades of previous training, that ultimately harms us. We forget our next breath is as uncertain as our next decade when we negotiate with ourselves this way, and we give no real weight to how teaching ourselves to override our body, mind, and heart’s boundaries on repeat is not something we will later just be able to ‘turn off’.

Slowing down and listening in is also a skill set that takes concentrated effort to build- just like digging in and staying locked on a task is - but we are deeply conditioned to see sensitivity and deceleration as weakness, flagging, losing behaviours.

When we won’t even back ourselves internally on how we feel about our work (life), we neglect and/or shame ourselves instead, and shame thwarts our ability to create lasting change.

The way we show up to support ourselves is deeply informed by our personal histories, and understanding what exactly that means and how the skeletons in your closet might trigger you to react in different circumstances, will protect you long term. What is normal for you now, will inform you on what abnormal will need to look like.

Water Break….

Here we pause for intermission - we’re about halfway through what I want to share with you about my own awareness around reclaiming self agency at work (life).

Part Two will focus on a couple of extra tripwires that can delay our progression into changing our work life, the patterns I’ve seen from business owners time & time again - and how change can start with small internal shifts that lead to bigger external ones.

See you there!

- Jasmine