What does it mean balance between professional and personal life?

It is one of the most debated themes in capitalist societies today. Never before has there been so much talk about the need for rationality between our personal lives and our work.

This is a topic that has already been duly explored and studied by several entities. The line once created for the division of space for friends, leisure and family and that dedicated to career, business and work is increasingly difficult to distinguish. The growing demands of companies towards their employees combined with the technological evolution that allows us to be constantly “connected” means that the vast majority of employed people, and their employers, are unable to effectively manage this whole situation.

15 years ago this was not even a topic, people, however late they left their job, knew that it would be their last moment of relationship with their employer. The rest of the day was devoted to whatever they wanted, and at that moment they were “present” not only physically but emotionally as well.

So how can we solve this problem?

In order to find the fastest way to a given problem, first you have to identify what the problem really is and understand if it has something else that precedes it, otherwise we will be looking for solutions that will be more of containment than necessarily for full resolution of the problem.

In my opinion, first of all, there is an error in the premise, which has also been duly identified by Brendon Bruchard in his book “The 6 Habits of High Performance”: people associate balance with the number of hours. Now if we spend 8 hours working (plus one for lunch), logic tells us that we should have an equal period of time to do what we want, be it being with our family, eating a bucket of ice cream while watching a season followed by Casa de Papel or volunteering. The truth is that this idea, as ambitious and fair as it may be, cannot serve as a basis for saying that the balance between personal and professional life is a utopia.

One of the main reasons why we speak so insistently on this issue is related to the emotions and sensations we have in each of the contexts. If we had to group together some emotion states such as anxiety, nervousness and stress, we would most likely place them associated with our professional context. At the other pole, if I refer to sensations such as tranquility, well-being and satisfaction, most people will associate it with their personal environment. We, as human beings, respond to the environments in which we are inserted. If we are in an environment where mutual help is common practice, where the focus is on goals and getting things done and not necessarily on the number of hours we are in the office (the famous “presentism”), where our boss faces a less good result instead of giving us an ultimatum ask us what is wrong with us and how it can help us, we would certainly have another emotional state here too.

We have always tended to divide our lives into what is leisure and what is work. As if it were possible to create a wall between the person we are from 9 am to 6 pm and the person we are in the rest of our day. The emotions and sensations that one has during the day irremediably affect us not only in that period but also in the aftermath. As Simon Sinek points out “the only difference between our personal and professional lives is the clothes we wear and the table we sit at”. It’s still something that no matter how much technology is introduced will never change: human relationships and emotional states.

The main solution is to correct this dichotomy between the sensations we have in these 2 very important moments of our life. It is in the lack of balance of emotions that the real problem is found, but also the solution. We desperately seek to escape work, not to escape the place but the sensations it brings us. No matter how many techniques and methodologies exist to manage all this dynamics, if we cannot have leaderships and environments that promote good feelings that are fundamental to our well-being and sanity, these are of no use to us.

By Vasco de Matos Ramos