5 Ways to Re-Balance Your Work-Life Harmony from the Inside Out

🪫 5 Ways to Re-Balance Your Work-Life Harmony from the Inside Out 🔋

Creating greater harmony in your personal, family, work & volunteer life.

Whatever work we do – paid or volunteer, working in the home or outside the home – the boundaries between personal, family, and work life can often run together.

Many of us struggle to juggle the responsibilities, wants, and the many facets of our lives. Working and attending meetings remotely, hybrid schedules, personal, volunteer and work responsibilities frequently blend into each other, leaving little distinction between them. This dissonance compels many of us to push our personal wellbeing to the sidelines.

As a music lover, I have come to appreciate the phrase work-life harmony. Our lives are symphonies in progress. Creating a full, rich integration of life’s various components can be a beautiful, yet challenging experience, and difficult to balance. The term work-life harmony recognizes the realities of our contemporary lives – that for many of us our work, family, and personal lives intersect, overlap, and flow together. The question becomes how can we compose a harmony that is satisfying and empowers us to meet needs, demands, wants and goals across professional time, family time, and personal time?

Consider your own life. How satisfying is the harmony in your personal, family, work, and volunteer life? Of course, opinions about what constitutes harmony are different for each of us, but all of us need to make sometimes difficult discernments, priorities, and choices about what truly matters to us.

It can be useful to take into account what you have direct control over, what you may have some influence over, and where you have no direct control (Covey, 2020). Many of us expend a lot of time and energy trying to impact things over which we have little or no control or influence. If your intention is to create greater harmony, you might want to center your attention on circumstances where you have the most control. For example, your words, mindset, attitudes, priorities, choices, and actions.

Living into greater work-life harmony is an on-going process, not a once-and-done. Yet some of the answers to better work-life harmony can be quite simple.

⚖️ Here are a few practical strategies to help you compose greater harmony from the inside out.

1 – Consider how you’re feeling about your current work-life harmony. Take a few moments to consider these questions:

• What is your biggest challenge to work-life balance?
• What are one or two areas where you have direct control that could benefit from change or improvement?

2 – Your values are guideposts that can help bring greater harmony and meaning into your life.

Your values are essential to who you are, who you want to be, decisions you make, and actions you choose. Identifying and considering your values can make life easier and more meaningful, helping you discern your true priorities and how you want to steer your decisions and time (Clear, 2024).

There are many kinds of values. Examples include: order, service, reliability, learning, spontaneity, fun, perfection, security, tradition, challenge, holiness, positivity, love, belonging, structure, ambition, excellence, money, fame, sensitivity, relationships, teamwork, equity, quiet.

• What are some of your most important values?
• Consider where you’re living into your values and where are you off key from what you truly value?

3 – Lead your life with wise choices. It can help to engage in strategies that help you plan and prioritize thoughtfully.

• As you make choices, consider your values and what matters to you.
• Determine your top priorities for the day. Ask yourself – Which choices will bring me closer to my goals and/or strengthen my relationships? What’s the best use of my time? Which choices may have negative consequences if left undone?
• Break big goals into smaller, doable chunks.
• Set reasonable expectations for yourself and others.
• Where can you empower others, rather than doing it yourself?
• What can you say no to?
• Enlist help from family, friends, colleagues, and professionals.
• Practice gratitude (Emmons, 2016)
• Other:_________________

4 – Restore your personal wellbeing.

What do you need for self-care and personal wellbeing? How can you begin to include more of what you need or want in your life? Even moments can make a positive difference.

• Pay attention to your needs and wants. What’s your inner voice whispering?
• Give yourself brief intermissions to experience an emotion, pleasure, or activity that feels positive for you. Examples: reading, walking, singing, cooking, laughing, talking with a loved one, meditating, dancing.
• Consider starting with simply a 1% change and then build from there.
• What is one small change or positive step I want to experiment with?

5 – Make time for relationships.

Another key to restoring work-life harmony is relationships. Loneliness and social isolation affect many of us these days. In fact, the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, MD, has identified loneliness as an urgent public health issue, releasing an advisory stating “social connection is a significant predictor of longevity and better physical, cognitive, and mental health, while social isolation and loneliness are significant predictors of premature death and poor health” (Murthy, 2023). Dr. Murthy’s report recommends cultivating a culture of connection – paying attention to values including kindness, committing to others, service, and social connection (home, schools, workplaces, communities).

How can you increase your opportunities to interact with others?

• Engage in shared hobbies or activities.
• Take a walk or run together.
• Plan a fun, simple family/friend activity on the weekend.
• Call or help a friend, family member, or organization.
• Volunteer somewhere.
• Other: ______________

🤗 What are your thoughts about re-balancing toward greater work-life harmony?

What do you want to reflect on?
What would you like to experiment with?
What is your next right step?

An earlier version of this material was published at Psychology Today.

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References:

• Clear, J. (Retrieved 4-2024). Let your values drive your choices.  
• Covey, S. R. (2020). The 7 habits of highly effective people. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
• Emmons, R.A.  (2016). The little book of gratitude: Create a life of happiness and wellbeing by giving thanks. New York, NY: Hachette Book Group.
• Murthy, V. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The surgeon general’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community.

Ilene is a Featured Author on PsychologyToday!
Read her blog series Flourish and Thrive: Navigating transitions with mindfulness and resilience.

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