Balance

Many years ago, I used to do jazz dance. It’s a form of modern dance where some moves are similar to ballet – turns, pirouettes, and so on. One of the skills you need for it is balance.

But balance isn’t just about keeping your core muscles strong. It’s also about how every part of your body works together. This is called coordination. There’s no way to maintain balance with your thighs, belly, and back muscles if your arms are flailing around randomly. Or if your legwork is unstable. Everything has to operate together. And just like your body isn’t a set of completely separate moving parts, your life isn’t either.

When I hear “work-life separation” – or whatever version of it: work and free time, work and leisure – it feels to me like someone’s trying to isolate the upper body from the lower body and still spin a pirouette. It’s not like a circus trick where you saw a person in half and then magically glue them together, and they still work perfectly. 

The way we usually look at life is that we slice it into separate compartments: work, family, leisure, hobbies… you name it. We associate work with money, leisure with pleasure (they sound so similar, btw), and free time with self-expression. It’s rigid, and honestly, it’s a very limiting way to look at life.

I’d suggest a different breakdown – one that’s less obvious. To me, a pie chart of life should focus on just two things: on how much you externalise and how much you internalise. How much you give and how much you take in – emotionally, mentally, creatively, and relationally.

This applies to all so-called life areas, not just work. These are the things that really need balance – not the artificial “areas” we’ve invented.

If your work or family life mostly involves engagement – leading, talking to people, problem-solving, managing gatherings – you probably need time to recharge. Time to take the back seat, intake, be taken care of, read, watch, analyse, and think.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe your days are mostly passive: attending meetings, reading, listening, observing – but you’re not creating anything, not influencing, not moving energy outward. Then your need to express goes unmet. The idea is to balance across the whole of your life without the “area” distinctions.

If we take a look at life this way – balancing input and output, activation and reflection – the perspective may actually change.

One reason I’ve been thinking about this is that I was recently called a workaholic when I couldn’t name multiple hobbies anymore or activities I cannot associate with work (just sports and picture taking). Yes, I do a lot of what people call work. But the thing is, I do a lot of different stuff. Plus, I work with the people I love. So my world is much more blended than a traditional 9-5. But this is not yet the reason…

The reason is this: all the activities I do in a week cover pretty much everything I need. I have time to assimilate other people’s thoughts, time to express my own, time to shape people when I show them different perspectives and watch them grow, time to problem-solve, time to analyse deeply when I completely lose connection with my watch, and time to build things that never existed before. Everything is there: influence, creation, reflection, analysis, and understanding behaviour and motives, which I love the most.

By the end of the week, my needs are met. The same goes for my relationships: they are full exchanges of energy. My relational needs – feeling cared for, caring for others, co-building (thanks to working together, btw), and growing – are met. Even if every single interaction isn’t perfectly balanced, the overall system works.

That’s what balance is. And that’s why I don’t need artificially created hobbies just to fill a void.

So I would suggest we move away from the simple breakdown into “work, leisure, learning, and family”, because it doesn’t hold. Just like family isn’t automatically the place where you recharge, your workplace isn’t automatically devoid of care or connection. So don’t associate it as such just because others do. The artificial separation into work versus life is, just as I said, artificial.

—

(There’s a reason why this post has this seemingly unfitted image. It was taken during a very balanced moment – when I travelled with one of my friends I work with to start a new cooperation and took the camera with me.)