“Who am I?” – a Reflection on Work-Life Balance

When I first interviewed at my job, I remember being told that the department values “work-life balance”. Looking up at pictures of my future manager’s family photos hanging on the wall seemed to reinforce that.

I thought, “That’s nice, they do engineering and they can prioritize their family, cool”.

Now, just over a year at this job, I see that “work-life balance” takes on different meanings for each employee. Interestingly (and kind of obviously to me now), all of our work is very similar in the office; however, our lives at home are all so different.

When a guy with a family and 2 kids balances work with life it looks different than the recent college grad going on trips with his buddies. However, each has the same amount of time in each day to work with, so rather than adding more or less to each side of the scale, it’s more like adjusting the fulcrum. This balance is with your time and energy, but also with who you are and where you find your identity.

I have seen employees who are so rooted in work, that the job is part of who they are. Their mood sways in sync with the company stock, and they gladly work extra hours and they live for work. Others work and do well but they don’t seem to worry about the highs and lows of the office, and when it is time to clock out, the job is off of their mind. They are working in order to live.

I am sure, as there always is, that there is a middle ground. I would hope that many of you have a job that provides some meaning to your life, and a life that is worth working for. So, where is this work-life balance? I believe it comes down to your mission.

What is your mission? With life? And with work? If you have this end goal in mind, you will be able to act intentionally according to principles that you stand behind.

To find your mission, you need to know where it comes from.

Relationship, Identity, Mission

Mission, as I mentioned, is your end goal. Working backwards from there, your mission comes from your identity, who you are.

All of us have tens or hundreds of identities. I am a husband, father, son, friend, brother, coworker, employee… I could go on. But each of these identities is rooted in, and comes directly from, a relationship to someone or something else. That is the beginning.

Relationship gives you identity.

Identity gives you a mission.

A football player is a football player because of his relationship with his team. Without the team, he would not have this identity. From that identity he gets his mission, to play his position and help the team win games.

A relationship to their teacher gives each student their identity. Being a student gives them a mission to learn, and a teacher with no one to teach loses this identity as well as that mission to teach.

This is simple when stated, but many people want to go straight to mission. Everyone is so busy. They try to fill their time and their life with activities so they can accomplish things. But they haven’t stopped to reflect on if those things are important to who they are and truly fit their mission.

In order to prioritize which mission is most important and where you should spend your time, it helps to prioritize your identities. Which one is most at the core of who you are?

So Who am I?

With so many relationships in our lives, we have so many identities, but before we go planning our life around certain identities, we need to reflect on which identity comes first. Some of these are clearly primary and others are secondary, but it is easy to plan our lives out of order. I would argue that primary identities are those that define who you are and you would not be you without them. These should be set first in your life.

If I lost my job today, I would no longer be an employee. Have I lost my core identity? No, I would still be Andrew. I would not have lost any of my “Andrewness”, because I was me before I even became an engineer. If I lost this part of me, I could seek out a new job or change fields, but I would still be me.

Primary to who we are is family. The first relationships that we become aware of on the day we are born is with our parents. Being a son or daughter is the first identity. Our initial mission then, is only to receive the love and care from those around us. Eventually, that love will overflow and enable us to return it to the community in our home. Then we will grow up and build even more relationships and identities in the greater community.

Life comes first, then work. That is a natural order of the way we live, but often it is easy of overlook. Even the way we talk about work-life balance, maybe should be life-work balance.

Who you are in your job might change, but your identity within your family will not. If you live out of your primary identities, I believe you will live a happier life. Regardless of layoffs, career changes, family leave, or retirement, if you are living and working for what is lasting, you don’t run the risk of losing yourself.

Many Missions

So how do I put this into practice?

With each relationship comes an identity, and from that identity, a mission. List your roles that you play and place them in order. This is the order that you should schedule your week. And make sure that you put yourself on there too for time to grow as your own person. Then, for each role list any goals for your week ahead. With this comes accomplishing some of the tasks that need to get done.

Lastly, in the order that you listed, place the tasks into your next weeks calendar. That way you prevent accidentally prioritizing your bro night over your family dinner.

Obviously, some events have flexibility and others don’t, so some things may be able to move around. But this way you are being sure to live your life with your priorities first.

Then along the way you can live each day knowing that you are working towards a mission that is in line with who you are.

Six Step Planning

This method of planning is called six-step planning. It assures that you are starting with the end in mind, and getting the most out of an intentional schedule. When I used to have to make my own work schedule, this was incredibly useful. Now, most of my week is planned, but my evenings and weekends could definitely use some more intentional planning. I found it clearly summarized here if you wanted to know more.

The Greatest Mission

If your first mission came from your first identity and your first relationship, what would be the first mission of the entire earth? or the universe?

When it comes down to it, everyone in the world has God to thank for their existence (see Thomas Aquinas’ third argument for the existence of God). God in himself is in relationship. He is Father, Son, and Spirit, but also he created mankind in order to share in is goodness and this relationship! (see CCC Paragraph 1).

Therefore, the ultimate identity of all mankind is rooted in relationship with God. We are sons and daughters of God the Father and we are loved by God the Son, and the Spirit. This gives us the greatest mission.

Just as I described a child before, our first mission is receptive in nature. We only have to receive God’s love and affection and be apart of His family, the Church. After all, what does every father want from his children? Just that.

As we get older, and more spiritually mature, we can overflow with God’s love and share it back to Him and all of our family here on Earth.

This is why, when asked what the greatest commandment of all time was, Jesus replied, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27)

I know that I need constant reminding of this, but we all should be living good life-work balance. Let’s work well so that we can live well, and lets make sure that both in our work life and our life work we are receiving God’s love and loving God and others in return.