Do you feel like you've got it all together?
Me either. Most of us feel like things are out-of-balance for at least a few minutes every week. For some, these moments are enough to motivate us to keep our work and life in balance. For the rest of us, it is a true balancing act to manage and maintain balance.
There are always a variety of people, priorities, and requirements on your time. Sometimes it is easy to prioritize and balance across all of the demand, but one bad day can throw everything out of alignment.
This assessment consists of only 14 questions, so it won't throw off your day. You can answer quickly to check-in with yourself. How are you really doing? If things are at risk regarding your balance, what areas should you pay extra attention to? How can you resolve this?
Information is Empowering
While this assessment is not going to resolve your work-life balance issues, it is a tool to look for root cause across various areas of your life, to give you insight into what could be stressing you out and pushing you towards burnout.
The results will give you some high-level tips, but ultimately, our goal is to help you with awareness of the areas you should watch out for, monitor, and work to actively negotiate better situations with if needed.
This assessment was created based on my experience with work-life balance issues and with the input of many others who reviewed and provided their insights. There is so much depth we could go into that there will be follow-on tools, templates, and maybe webinars or training courses focused on this.
Here's a snippet of my story. A few years ago, I was in an executive job working to open a new business line in a North American company that was growing quickly. This job required a lot of hours and travel, and I was doing my job plus some others because the other roles we needed to fill were not yet full-time roles (multiple part-time roles -- all being filled by me in addition to my actual job).
I openly discussed the rapid rate of burnout that was approaching, providing proposed solutions, and providing risk assessment of what might happen if none of those solutions were approved.
At the same time, I completed my first work-life balance assessment. I penciled it in a notebook. I wrote down all the non-work demands on my time. It was SHOCKING how many items were on the list. I realized there were two items on that list that were also high stressors in addition to work.
So, yes, my work was way out of balance. But there were two personal - away-from-work items that I thought were relaxers that were actually compounding the situation. That was an eye opener.
Several weeks later when my health started to take on the effects of all this work and stress, I put the brakes on ALL THREE items at the same time, knowing that would be required for me to heal and be able to move forward appropriately.
I hope this quick assessment can lead you through some of the same thought exercises and discoveries so you can make needed change to improve your balance. At Strategic Stacey, we want to empower you to Define Your Balance.
