Work Life Balance

For years I have been encouraging my co-workers to remember the reason they work. The salary from our jobs is the means for us to live our lives and enjoy our hobbies. My friends have repeatedly told me they couldn’t do something because they had to work, they missed something fun because their boss asked them to stay late, or they had to reschedule a doctor appointment because they couldn’t get time off. Then it dawned on me. I am not walking my talk! From food to fitness, I do what I suggest other people do. I choose healthy options, I limit sugar, I work out, and I try to treat people the way I expect to be treated. But, when it came to my work life balance, I had it all wrong.

In early January, one of my bosses took me to lunch and, during the course of the meal, we talked about living in New Hampshire and working in Boston. Then he roughly calculated how many hours of my life I spent in traffic each week and I was appalled. As I tell my clients, once you know something, you can’t un-know it. Since that pivotal lunch, I found my commute more and more difficult to tolerate. Even still, it took a two hour ten minute commute home during February vacation week for the straw to snap the camel’s back. Seeing a job I had eyed reposted, I applied without hesitation. What followed was a whir.

Within the week, I accepted an offer and gave my notice. I t took another three weeks for me to really sever the cord - did I mention I really love the people I worked with? - but after only one week at my new job, I am feeling better each day. I get eight hours of sleep and wake up without the need for an alarm, I spend more time with my husband and my cats, I can work out or run, shower, and eat breakfast at home, and I leave for work after my husband! Even though everything is new to me, I find my patience has returned and my ability to learn and retain has improved. Where I had expected to be nervous, I find that there is no need to be so.

Now that I see what it is like to have a job within a reasonable distance from home, I understand what others have been trying to explain all these years. And, I can see how it has been insidiously affecting my health.