Work-Life Presence
The real deal of work-life balance
I’m getting ready to leave town for a conference. The usual readying has taken up my morning. Meetings fill my day from 9 to 2, when I then have just the right amount of time to get to the airport if all goes well.
I have plants to water, a final decision on clothing packed based on another weather check. I need to book an uber. Respond to the sweet message from my wife who is reminding me if I have everything. (Postscript: I forgot a powercord.)
Emails, texts, slack channels, project tool updates. Pack a snack that I’ll call dinner on the plane. Lead a meeting with a newly formed team while teaching them how our meetings will go.
With 10 minutes left of the meeting, I see a video call coming in from my young adult daughter. She is on the other side of the world, studying abroad, and I know from the quick text she sends when I don’t answer, that she needs her mom. As I wrap up the meeting, I am already shifting back and forth in my attention between closure in the meeting and returning her call.
We know parenting asks of us to show up in a particular way – a quality of presence, interest. We know that babies and young people need to know that they matter, that this is the foundation of their resilience and security.
And so it goes, working parents are constantly pulled in a dozen directions at once. I called my daughter back, but I wasn’t as present as I knew I wanted to be. She’s old enough, of course, that I can negotiate the relationship, and plan a time when I won’t be rushed to have the conversation she needs to have.
In this case, I found time to call her once I checked in for my flight.
But I also know my team needed that same quality of interest and engagement from me.
This particular scenario, particularly as a single parent for much of my daughter’s life, of switching back and forth from her needs to work needs, as a founder/entrepreneur, working from mostly a home office, is very different of course, than it was when she was a baby.
There are 2.7 b google hits to figure out the secret to find “work-life balance.”
But maybe what makes us feel out of balance is less what we’re juggling, but more how we are holding it.
When, Where and How?
Paying attention to when we’re shifting our attention, where we’re placing our attention, and how we’re paying attention, allows us to see why, exactly, we’re so tired, but can also give us a wiser way to respond. Because it wasn’t just the stress involved with what my daughter needed, or how important that meeting was. It was how many small, fragmented, but important things I was attempting to hold at once.
When are we shifting our attention?
Constantly.
Our attention span as adults is 8.25 seconds, down 25% over a 10-year period and likely, it’s declined even further. It isn’t a secret that our attention spans are taking a hit from living in a world with increasing complexity and inputs that exceed in 1 hour the amount of information that our ancestors would have taken into their awareness in a year. I find it fascinating that the number of posts we scan in each minute of use on social media platforms is not available. But if observing the social media users in my intimate sphere is the best source of data on this topic, I would say that we’re encountering 40-50 topics a minute. I encourage us all to do our own research the next time we pick up our smartphones.
Where are we placing attention?
Each person, place, and experience call on us to reorient.
Not only are we shifting our attention but we’re shifting contexts, which Brandi Olson, in her book , Real Flow: Break the Burnout Cycle and Unlock High Performance in the New World of Work, describes as the root of our burnout. She helps leaders understand the keys to high performance by breaking down the things that lead predictably to burnout-goal shifting and rule activating, as well as managing the complexity of relationships.
In a day, a working parent shifts not just from one activity to another, but in and out of each ‘world’ of contexts, and the nuance of each relationship.
We’re jumping from…
talking to our boss/investors, working on a project timeline, taking a call from a friend and colleague, adding updates to a project, getting a call from our child’s school, relaying that information to our spouse, planning, picking up our little one from school, connecting with our neighbors/parent friends, taking another work call, being in parent space and hearing about our child’s day, planning and making dinner, and writing just one more email before we end our day.
The doing of our tasks and responsibilities takes energy, but it’s the spaces in between where we’re wearing down.
Olson, who works with organizations to build high performance while getting to the root of burnout, is challenging organizational leaders to allocate work and construct teams in ways that prevents the fatigue of context shifting. Olson describes that context shifts take far more energy than the tasks themselves: by a ratio of 60:40% and provides this illustration of how complex our relationships and lines of communication has become.
How we’re paying attention
While Olson focuses on how we approach our work, I think the same rules of energy and cognitive capacity can help us to understand what is at the root of work-family tensions.
Is it the hours we dedicate to work, and to our children, and our partners, friendships and all the things that bring meaning to our lives that should be balanced?
Relationships, activities and experiences hold the potential to be energizing, particularly the awe-filled journey of parenting and meaningful careers and work. But when we mix it into a fragmented day, we often are only half-way living our lives.
If we can practice noticing the transitions, even pausing for a moment to acknowledge them, it is a skill that builds our capacity to lead and to parent, to be in better connection with those we work with and those we live with. Are we showing up with distraction, impatience, judgment, expectation, curiosity, acceptance, patience?
Don’t pay attention for self-improvement. Pay attention for self-acceptance.
Let’s just look at one aspect of parenting that is a common tension. Intimacy. Parents often describe the challenge shifting from a day at work with meetings, deadlines, and at home with feeding schedules, diapers, and bedtimes to being fully present for our intimate partnerships. From working with parents, the reflexive withdrawal from ‘one- more-person-who- needs-something-from-me’ is common. In many ways, it might just be one more shift we just can’t bear to make at the end of the day.
When we acknowledge that the shift in this particular moment between bedtime routines, and cleaning the kitchen, and finding connection with our partner, is actually a context shift, the first step is just to notice. We might notice that this resistance comes up, and we can ask ourselves : “What am I experiencing?” and “What do I need?”
The answer may be some solitude and restoration, or it might be to connect with our partners with greater honesty. The most helpful response, not the right or wrong response, but the most helpful, is available when we pay attention with acceptance, non-judgment, and compassion.
As someone who is putting some of the lessons of Olson’s work into practice, as a leader, I know we can’t change habits until we build awareness. It’s been a challenge to break the habit of multitasking within our organization. I think we all have some degree of attachment to the habit of having too much on our plate.
While paying attention to what we’re doing as we’re doing it helps us to be less reactive and to buffer the stress impacts in our lives, there is something of value to paying attention more specifically to the transition between what we’re doing now and what we’re doing next. Driving our lives means we have to know when we’re shifting lanes, and gears, speeds and even directions.
I know we’ve used ‘work-life balance’, and ‘work-life’ integration, but I’m going to suggest a third way to think about this elusive contentment that we are reaching for: ‘work-life presence.’
Work-Life Presence In Practice: Awareness of Transitions
Slowing down is less about how we plan our schedules (although that is also true) but how we appreciate what we’re doing, who we’re present to, and how we’re experiencing it, and when we’re walking through the door of a transition to another context.
One practical tip I use with care professionals is to have what I call a porch meditation (for home visiting models) or what doctors and nurses can use as they move from room to room.
Taking a few breaths, we bring ourselves into our own bodies, check in on our own mind state, emotions and experience, as we acknowledge that we’re about to move into a new relationship with another person and their mind state, emotions and experiences.
It’s easier to imagine transitions when we are physically moving spaces, as a nurse or doctor may do from room to room in a hospital, but consider how you might build into your day a pause, whatever your professional life asks of you. Even a quick practice to reorient to the present moment with some anchoring breaths before, and after, a meeting or a pause in between emails, can keep us in better contact with our experience.
Designing our Lives to avoid burnout
As we now work more from our own homes than ever before, and no longer have the commute time as a space of reflection and shifting contexts, can we build in a practice of awareness, and restoration, in those transitions in some way? A walk, a brief yoga session, an intentional closing of the laptop even. (I am guilty of leaving my laptop open and available, and clearing my desk and my open windows has been helpful.)
Are we planning for adequate childcare and spaces to focus our attention? I worry that for some parents, the ability to work from home means a disregard for the need for full-time childcare, and often leads to more fragmentation throughout our day. What we may do in the spirit of ‘integration’ runs some risks. I know that nursing our babies or getting a lunchtime cuddle can give us a dose of hormones that not only gives us great connection with them, but also can support our regulation systems. But are we shifting so much between our work and family that nothing is in flow?
When we practice awareness of what we’re doing, as we’re doing it, who we’re in relationship with, and how we’re reacting, we start to get a handle on that energy expenditure. When we’re doing something that is nourishing, we can actually notice and allow the positive experience to saturate us. When we’re focused, we can be in flow and appreciate our accomplishments. When we’re resting, maybe, just maybe, we can rest our minds and bodies more completely.
As a founder, I could watch the ways that my planning and strategizing thoughts became a 24 hour workday. On a walk, during dinner, sadly, when in conversation with people I love, even in the middle of the night, I would wake thinking about work.
It always sounds simple when we say “pay attention.” When you dedicate yourself to a mindfulness practice, you don’t get to some state of perfection, you build something to turn to over and over again. You can intentionally choose to restore and reset with transitions from one thing to another with restorative breaths or feeling your feet on the ground, or paying attention to sounds. You can anchor yourself by feeling your coffee cup.
The practice of paying attention, with kindness, compassion, curiosity, to our relationship to with ourselves, with others
The results - we can’t change the complexity of the world we live in, but with intention we can design our lives for simplicity and stillness to be prepared to greet it, and we can’t control the day, but with greater regulation, we can actually live the day, enjoying the rich lives we have and who we happen to be sharing it with.
Join us at The Metropolitan Club in Chicago for a lunch and learn series Thursday May 18th, and again on June 15th to explore work-life presence with Leah Lemelin (May) and Karen Laing (June) for a facilitated discussion and connections with other professionals relating to parenthood.