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Nigel Marsh: How to Make Work-Life Balance Work

Certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day to day basis with a young family.

The reality of the society that we’re in is that there are thousansd and thousands and people of out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they working long hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.

We need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren’t going to solve this issue for us.

We have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance.

Wake up well rested after a good night’s sleep. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have breakfast with my wife and children. Have sex again. Drive the kids to school on the way to the office. Do three hours work. Play sport with a friend at lunch time. Do another three hours work. Meet some mates in the park for an early evening drink. Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids. Meditate for half an hour. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have sex again. Go to bed.

We need to be realistic. We can’t do it all in one day. We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our lives…

A day is too short. After I retire is too long.

We need to approach balance in a balanced way.

With the smallest investment in the right places you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think it can transform society because if enough people do it we can change society’s definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well-lived looks like.

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Geoffrey Hale

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Comments

7 responses to “Nigel Marsh: How to Make Work-Life Balance Work”

  1. Chere Doiron Avatar
    Chere Doiron

    Hi Geoff, I appreciate this video so much! I use TEDS a lot in my teaching. They are welldone and thoughtful. When you asked how I was doing? I am doing this, my life is being recreated again, but this time without force and this time with reduced fear. I have started a workshop called Creative Mapping: Unsticking Your Stuckness. I put it up on FB yesterday and now have enough participants for 3 sessions.

    Doing what Nigel suggested is so brave and so true to the human spirit, I think it enables the real spirit to shape us and our world as we were meant to live, with abundance beyond measure.

    Trudging the road of happy destiny,
    Chere

    Reply
  2. Ray Avatar
    Ray

    Very nice. The last quote is the best. I like this one too, at ~ 3:20:
    "It's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the types of lives that we want to lead."

    Reply
  3. Yadgyu Avatar
    Yadgyu

    For me, being a high-powered exec is more important than being a good parent.

    Things cost money. Staying at home doesn’t buy things. Going out there and making as much money as possible is the best thing to do. Everyone wants to live the good life. But the good life costs. So what if you can’t make it to the softball game or the ballet recital! If you are bringing home big bucks, you are doing more for your family than any amount of time will.

    A parent that doesn’t make a ton of money is shameful. Kids want iPhones, computers, jeans, sneakers, and other cool stuff. How can a kid be cool if mom or dad only works 40 hours a week but brings home diddley squat? I would rather work a ton of hours and make a ton of money than come home at the same time and sit in the house with a nagging wife and bratty children. A family has to understand that having things is more important than being together. Working less is not an option!

    Reply
    1. GeoffreyHale Avatar
      GeoffreyHale

      Yadgyu,

      Everyone wants to live a good life, not "the" good life; additionally, what we think we want is not necessarily what makes us happiest or most fulfilled. A definition of "good parent" comes back to what we truly value in life. It sounds like you value doing the right thing; our definitions of "the right thing" are different.

      What do you value above all else? What are you living for?

      If you could give your children anything in the world, what would that be?

      Reply
  4. Yadgyu Avatar
    Yadgyu

    If I could give my kids anything in the world, I would give them a sense of entitlement.

    This would allow them to see that the world is theirs for the taking and would force them to make as much money as possible. Nothing is really more important than money.

    Reply
    1. GeoffreyHale Avatar
      GeoffreyHale

      Yadgyu,

      You may be interested in reading the article from which I extracted the quotes for my most recent blog entry:
      The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright by Noreen Malone

      Cheers,
      Geoff

      Reply
  5. Basilia Zahniser Avatar
    Basilia Zahniser

    Yep this one is CLASSIC.I’m surprised this one wasn’t on here sooner.

    Reply

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