6 Ways For Better Work-Life Balance

These days, work-life balance can seem like an impossible feat. Technology makes workers accessible around the clock. Fears of job loss incentivize longer hours. In fact, a whopping 94% of working professionals reported working more than 50 hours per week and nearly half said they worked more than 65 hours per week in a Harvard Business School survey.Experts agree: the compounding stress from the never-ending workday is damaging. It can hurt relationships, health and overall happiness.

Work-life balance means something different to every individual, but here health and career experts share tips to help you find the balance that’s right for you.

1. Let go of perfectionism

A lot of overachievers develop perfectionist tendencies at a young age when demands on their time are limited to school, hobbies and maybe an after-school job. It’s easier to maintain that perfectionist habit as a kid, but as you grow up, life gets more complicated. As you climb the ladder at work and as your family grows, your responsibilities mushroom. Perfectionism becomes out of reach, and if that habit is left unchecked, it can become destructive.

The key to avoid burning out is to let go of perfectionism. “As life gets more expanded it’s very hard, both neurologically and psychologically, to keep that habit of perfection going,” she says, adding that the healthier option is to strive not for perfection, but for excellence.

2. Unplug

From telecommuting to programs that make work easier, technology has helped our lives in many ways. But it has also created expectations of constant accessibility. The work day never seems to end. “There are times when you should just shut your phone off and enjoy the moment,” says Robert Brooks, a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and co-author of The Power of Resilience: Achieving Balance, Confidence and Personal Strength in Your Life. Brooks says that phone notifications interrupt your off time and inject an undercurrent of stress in your system. So don’t text at your kid’s soccer game and don’t send work emails while you’re hanging out with family, Brooks advises. Make quality time true quality time. By not reacting to the updates from work, you will developing a stronger habit of resilience. “Resilient people feel a greater sense of control over their lives,” says Brooks, while reactive people have less control and are more prone to stress.

3. Exercise and meditate

Even when we’re busy, we make time for the crucial things in life. We eat. We go to the bathroom. We sleep. And yet one of our most crucial needs - exercise - is often the first thing to go when our calendars fill up. Exercise is an effective stress reducer. It pumps feel-good endorphins through your body. It helps lift your mood and can even serve a one-two punch by also putting you in a meditative state, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Puder-York recommends dedicating a few chunks of time each week to self-care, whether it’s exercise, yoga or meditation. And if you’re really pressed for time, start small with deep breathing exercises during your commute, a quick five minute meditation session morning and night, or replacing drinking alcohol with a healthier form of stress reduction.

“When I talk about balance, not everything has to be the completion and achievement of a task, it also has to include self-care so that your body, mind and soul are being refreshed,” .

These exercises require minor effort but offer major payoffs. Psychotherapist Bryan Robinson, who is also professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of the book Chained to the Desk, explains that our autonomic nervous system includes two branches: the sympathetic nervous system (our body’s stress response) and the parasympathetic nervous system (our body’s rest and digest response). 

“The key is to find something that you can build into your life that will activate your parasympathetic nervous system,” says Robinson. Short, meditative exercises like deep breathing or grounding your senses in your present surroundings, are great places to start. The more you do these, the more you activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which “calms everything down, (and) not just in the moment,” says Robinson. “Over time you start to notice that in your life, your parasympathetic nervous system will start to trump your sympathetic nervous system.”

4. Limit time-wasting activities and people

First, identify what’s most important in your life. This list will differ for everyone, so make sure it truly reflects your priorities, not someone else’s. Next, draw firm boundaries so you can devote quality time to these high-priority people and activities.

From there, it will be easier to determine what needs to be trimmed from the schedule. If email or internet surfing sends you into a time-wasting spiral, establish rules to keep you on task. That may mean turning off email notifications and replying in batches during limited times each day. If you’re mindlessly surfing Facebook or cat blogs when you should be getting work done, try using productivity software like Freedom, LeechBlock or RescueTime. And if you find your time being gobbled up by less constructive people, find ways to diplomatically limit these interactions. Cornered every morning by the office chatterbox? Politely excuse yourself. Drinks with the work gang the night before a busy, important day? Bow out and get a good night sleep. Focus on the people and activities that reward you the most.

To some, this may seem selfish. “But it isn’t selfish,” says Robinson. “It’s that whole airplane metaphor. If you have a child, you put the oxygen mask on yourself first, not on the child.” When it comes to being a good friend, spouse, parent or worker, “the better you are yourself, the better you are going to be in all those areas as well.”

5. Change the structure of your life

Sometimes we fall into a rut and assume our habits are set in stone. Take a birds-eye view of your life and ask yourself: What changes could make life easier? 

Puder-York remembers meeting with a senior executive woman who, for 20 years of her marriage, arranged dinner for her husband every night. But as the higher earner with the more demanding job, the trips to the grocery store and daily meal preparations were adding too much stress to her life. “My response to her was, "Maybe it's time to change the habit,'” recalls Puder-York. The executive worried her husband might be upset, but Puder-York insisted that, if she wanted to reduce stress, this structural change could accomplish just that.

So instead of trying to do it all, focus on activities you specialize in and value most. Delegate or outsource everything else. Delegating can be a win-win situation, says Stewart Freidman, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and author of Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life. Freidman recommends talking to the “key stakeholders” in different areas of your life, which could include employees or colleagues at work, a spouse or a partner in a community project. “Find out what you can do to let go in ways that benefit other people by giving them opportunities to grow,” he says. This will give them a chance to learn something new and free you up so you may devote attention to your higher priorities.

6. Start small. Build from there.

We’ve all been there: crash diets that fizzle out, New Year’s resolutions we forget by February. It’s the same with work-life balance when we take on too much too quickly, says Brooks. Many of his workaholic clients commit to drastic changes: cutting their hours from 80 hours a week to 40, bumping up their daily run from zero miles a day to five miles a day. It’s a recipe for failure, says Brooks. When one client, who was always absent from his family dinners, vowed to begin attending the meals nightly, Brooks urged him to start smaller. So he began with one evening a week. Eventually, he worked his way up to two to three dinners per week.

“If you’re trying to change a certain script in your life, start small and experience some success. Build from there,” says Brooks.

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Are you a Leader or just a Boss?

I often find that many people on fuse leadership with positional power. We tend to believe that a person in a position of authority or someone with a title, has their position or title due to their leadership qualities. However, in many cases there is no correlation between someone’s position and their leadership ability. Just having a title does not make you a leader, leaderships is about influence. Title only buys you time to exercise true leadership, and in this time your leadership either increases or diminishes and eventually fails. There is a huge difference between being a boss and being a leader…! Consider the following…

* “The boss drives group members; the leader coaches them. 
* The boss depends upon authority; the leader on good will. 
* The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm. 
* The boss says ‘I’; the leader says ‘we.’ 
* The boss assigns the task, the leader sets the pace. 
* The boss says, ‘Get there on time’; the leader gets there ahead of time. 
* The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown. 
* The boss knows how it is done; the leader shows how. 
* The boss makes work a drudgery; the leader makes it a game. 
* The boss says, ‘Go’; the leader says, ‘Let’s go.’“

– Author unknown



People follow the boss because they have to if they want to keep their jobs. People follow leaders because of who they are and were they are going. Too many leaders today rely on their position to lead. How about you?

Hard Work Vs Smart Work...

It’s always a big question in the Industry where I am working, or is it a common phenomenon? People, who do work as a duty, or rather as an obligation try to drag it till the end and end up in the swirl of procrastination. That embarks a journey of crib club..

If you work for what you believe, its not hard work! You will consider it hard work when it becomes an obligation. Alas, we don’t find entrepreneurs in every day of life, at least to the nonobservant eye. Probably they are the same people whom we tease as hard workers or the one who don’t find time to take for themselves. What we may not realize is that their enjoyment lies in work. A typical phenomenon I observe is that people believe that they work for their ends and there exists a fine line between personal enjoyment and professional work. Ask what effects personal enjoyment? I have strong objection to people who resign themselves to 12 hours of long work the moment they enter office campus. Neither do I have respect for canteen mongers, or the shirkers who pretend to work only when their boss lands at their cubicle.

One should have a balanced approach to work. Even if I love my job, there are certain finer aspects for which I pay attention to. Probably it’s my fav music, a book by bed side, a morning workout at the local gym or a walk by the wild side. That’s where smart work comes in. Engaging mind and body in what we love to do every moment. As my boss quotes often, “if you got no mood to work, don’t work lady. Coz U will spend 8 hours miserably doing what you can finish off in a couple of hours!” Quite true indeed! In this high tension world, where struggle for life is quite evident in every walk of life, one should realize oneself to the full potential. Being smart, managing priorities in the deliverables, intelligently balancing different aspects of life, being focused on career and emotional balance helps in a big way! Keeping a sense of humour about oneself and wearing heart on sleeve helps too.

Even in a recession, some companies are hiring

Even in a painful recession, some companies are hiring, but competition for jobs is fierce.

Help wanted: pharmacists, engineers and nurses. Believe it or not, even some banks are hiring, at least for their technology teams.

While the recession has claimed 4.4 million jobs, the economy has created others, many of them for highly trained and specialized professionals. More than 2 million jobs openings now exist across a range of industries, according to government data.

Job seekers beware, though. An average of nearly five people are competing for each opening. That's up sharply from a ratio of less than 2-to-1 in December 2007, when the recession was just starting and nearly 4 million openings existed.

Human resources executives say companies that are hiring are benefiting from a top-notch talent pool as applications pour in from a larger base of job seekers. The number of unemployed Americans has soared, to 12.5 million last month, from 7 million when the recession began.

Broadly, jobs are being added in education, health care and the federal government, the Labor Department said, with the government adding 9,000 new jobs last month alone.

But beyond those areas, jobs can be found in a variety of sectors. Some places that are hiring, such as companies that make nuclear power equipment, haven't been hit that hard by the recession. Others, such as discount retailers, are actually benefiting from the downturn as shoppers turn thriftier.

Even some businesses at the center of the economic meltdown are managing to add a few employees. Banks involved in recent mergers, for example, are hiring information technology specialists to help integrate companies, said Tig Gilliam, chief executive of the Adecco Group North America, a human resources firm.

Some mortgage lending companies, notably those never involved in subprime or other exotic loans, are actually growing and hiring as larger competitors have folded.

"We've been busy," said Terry Schmidt, chief financial officer of Guild Mortgage Co. in California, whose company has doubled in size, from around 450 to close to 900 employees, in the past year and a half.

The new hires originate home loans and process them, among other duties.

"We're finding that the talent pool -- the level of talent and experience -- is much better than we've ever had," Schmidt said.

Mortgage servicing companies -- those that collect payments for the lenders that originated them -- are also hiring as lower mortgage rates fuel mortgage refinance applications.

Marina Walsh, associate vice president of industry analysis at the Mortgage Bankers Association, said servicers "are just scrambling for workers."

The nuclear power industry, meanwhile, doesn't seem to have noticed the economic downturn. It is adding thousands of jobs as it gears up to build as many as 26 new nuclear power plants in the next decade.

Corporations such as Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Company and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy are hiring engineers and adding other workers as they expand manufacturing facilities, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group. (GE Hitachi is a partnership between General Electric Co. and Tokyo-based Hitachi Ltd.)

Engineers of all kinds are in demand and are facing a rock-bottom jobless rate of about 3 percent, according to Gilliam of the Adecco Group North America. That compares with a nationwide unemployment rate of 8.1 percent last month.

Adecco is trying to fill about 1,200 engineering jobs, Gilliam said. They include product engineers who test the next generation of computer equipment, he said.

Other bright spots in an otherwise dismal labor market:

-- Pharmacists: An aging U.S. population is taking more medicine and pharmacists are taking more time helping patients with chronic diseases manage their dosages, said Douglas Scheckelhoff of the American Society of Health System Pharmacists.

There is a 6 percent shortage of hospital pharmacists, Scheckelhoff said, while many drug stores are also looking to hire new pharmacists and pharmacist technicians, he said.

-- Nurses: Hospitals also need more nurses to care for the aging population and to replace those nearing retirement, said Cheryl Peterson, director of nursing practice and policy at the American Nurses Association. Hospitals added 7,000 jobs of all kinds last month, even as the economy overall shed 651,000.

-- Veterinarians: "There's a tremendous demand" for veterinarians, particularly to serve livestock growers in rural areas, said Dr. Ron DeHaven, chief executive officer of the American Veterinary Medical Association. The government is also short of veterinarians needed to inspect slaughterhouses and undertake other food safety measures, he said. The Labor Department projects that the number of veterinary jobs will grow by 35 percent by 2016, DeHaven said.

Some companies are benefiting from the recession as shoppers shift to lower-priced stores. The economy has lost more than 600,000 retail jobs since the slowdown began, but discount retailer Family Dollar Stores Inc. is hiring.

The company plans to hire new workers for 200 stores it expects to open this year, said spokesman Josh Braverman, and will also add employees at some of its nine distribution centers. Family Dollar saw its sales at stores open at least a year rise by 6.4 percent in the three months ending in February.

Other companies prospering amid the economic gloom include liquidators -- firms that sell the assets of troubled businesses.

Bill Angrick, chief executive of Washington, D.C.-based Liquidity Services Inc., which operates the Web site Liquidation.com, said his company expects record profits for the first quarter. Among the items his company liquidates are vehicles and networking and communications equipment.

Julie Davis, a spokeswoman for the firm, said it has openings for at least 10 people in its sales, marketing, operations and finance departments.

"We are absolutely in hiring mode," she said. The company employs about 700 people worldwide.

AP Business Writers Jeannine Aversa and Daniel Lovering contributed to this report.

(Source: Yahoo Finance!)

Why Money Isn't a Motivator

To make today's unpopular government bailouts more palatable, the Obama administration has mandated caps on executive compensation. But given what science tells us about the way the mind works, proposed limits on pay--even if merited--risk being self-defeating.

Studies have shown that our level of satisfaction depends not on our absolute salaries, but on how much we're paid relative to our peers, and so salary increases are judged relative to what we've become accustomed to. Using salary as a motivator ensures only that financial incentives grow exponentially to obscene levels while they, at the same time, become less and less effective.

It's also been well established that such external motivators decrease our internal motivation. Working for the carrot displaces the human need for purposeful achievement, and it comes at a huge cost--both in results and in satisfaction. When people are totally engaged in their work, the neurotransmitter dopamine is released, which sharpens focus and increases performance while creating a profound sense of wellbeing. We are motivated by the work itself, not the reward.

By holding out a big compensation package as a motivator, we attract less-than-stellar performers and inevitably run out of money to motivate them. But when we cap their salaries, we not only focus attention on compensation, we virtually ensure we end up with executives that can't get jobs elsewhere.

Besides, most Americans still see a half-million dollars as excessive relative to their own incomes. We need to move away from the issue of money altogether, and the way to do that is to change the story we tell ourselves; a story that focuses on monetary rewards as the primary goal of work decreases both our motivation and performance.

But scientists have shown that our stories can be fundamentally changed by a crisis. The current financial meltdown gives us a chance to create a better narrative, one that's not just about the accumulation of wealth, but about community and public service.

If we replace the emphasis on financial rewards, capped or otherwise, with the significance of the work to be done and its importance to our country, we would see the American spirit of service rise to levels not seen since World War II. Back then, "dollar-a-year" men took government jobs because it was the right thing to do and our country was in need. Today, this same spirit is needed to get us back on track.

As studies of transformational leadership have shown, the example should start at the top. Think of the impact it would have if President Obama announced he would take a salary of a dollar a year until the economy turned around. The rest of the White House staff and perhaps even well-heeled members of Congress could join in. CEOs of bailed-out companies would quickly fall in line.

Studies of the brain show that when leaders seize the opportunity of a crisis to tell a new story that's a better fit with the times, it can change the way the rest of us think and behave. We eagerly claim the message as our own and willingly make whatever sacrifices are needed. During the Great Depression and World War II, our leaders told new stories powerful enough to recharge the can-do spirit America is known for.

The times may have changed, but our brains will respond to the same stimuli now as they did then. Forcing executives or citizens to blindly accept certain circumstances is not going to work, because neither extremely high salaries nor salary caps will properly motivate us to work ourselves out of the recession.

(Source: Charles S. Jacobs, Forbes.com, Mon, Mar 9 09:30 AM)

The seven characteristics of a powerful visions

"The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet." - Theodore Hesburgh

Vision is central to effective leadership. A leader’s vision is his passion. Leaders are constantly striving for the achievement of their vision. Leaders adopt challenging visions, driven by passion… this inspires others to commit to the journey… they inspire others to volunteer their energies to make it happen. Consider the following…

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If a leader is to inspire and enlist others to their cause, they will need an effective vision. This means leaders must be clear about “What is a vision?” and “What makes a vision effective?” Burt Nanus in his book “Visionary Leadership” defines vision as:

“… a realistic, credible, attractive future for your organization. It is your articulation of a destination toward which your organization should aim, a future that in important ways is better, more successful, or more desirable for your organization than is the present.”

So how do you know if your vision is effective? Burt Nanus provides the following characteristics of powerful visions:

Appropriateness: “They are appropriate for the organization and the times. They fit in terms of the organization’s history, culture and values, are consistent with the organization’s present situation, and provide a realistic and informed a assessment of what is attainable in the future.”

Challenging: “They set standards of excellence and reflect high ideals.”

Set Direction: “They clarify purpose and direction. They are persuasive and credible in defining what the organization wants to make happen… They provide agendas that create focus and hold out hope and promise of a better tomorrow.”

Inspirational: “They inspire enthusiasm and encourage commitment. They widen the leader’s support base by reflecting the needs and aspirations of many stakeholders…”

Understandable: “They are well articulated and easily understood. They are unambiguous enough to serve as a guide to strategy and action and to be internalized by those whose efforts are needed to turn the vision into reality”

Unique: “They reflect the uniqueness of the organization, its distinctive competence, what it stands for, and what it is able to achieve”

Ambitious: “They are ambitious. The represent undisputed progress and expand the organizations horizons.”

Review your company and team vision:

1. Does your vision exhibit the characteristics of a powerful vision as described above?
2. What change do you need to make to ensure your vision is more powerful?