How to Find Balance Between Work and Personal Life

AVAlexander Volchek

How do you find a balance between work and your personal life? It's interesting: this question seems so simple, so basic. How do you do it? At the very beginning of the video, I want to offer a starting point. Allow for the possibility that throughout your life, however long you live—seventy years, ninety, thirty—your work and personal life will be out of balance. Always out of balance, always something not quite right. I suggest taking that question, posing it to yourself, and exploring it within your own system. I'm not suggesting you live in that state. I'm suggesting you pose the question and see it clearly, so that after some time, in the context of your life, you clearly know whether you actually have this problem or not. The first thing to do is treat every event in the same way. Allow for the idea that every event has equal importance and equal priority. People readily inflate the importance of certain events. They say, “This is important.” At the same time, they diminish the significance and importance of others: “This is so-so.” For example: “It matters whether my child gets into school. It matters how long my commute is. It matters how much money I earn at work.”

“It matters what my boss thinks of me. It doesn't matter what I do every evening. It doesn't matter what my relationship with my parents is like. It doesn't matter how I treat other people. My health doesn't matter.” People decide what's important and unimportant according to their lives. Everyone does it differently. Someone will say, “No, Alexander, we've identified everything correctly. We've assigned importance and unimportance correctly.” The most important thing is not to look for what's better and what's worse. There's an interesting paradox: once some time has passed—five, ten, fifteen years of life—we can all easily look back and see how unimportant certain events or actions were. Everyone has this in their life: how utterly unimportant something was. Or the opposite: we say how important it was, how important it was to attend those lectures at college, for example. Why didn't I go? Or how much importance I attached to my worries about finding my first job or my relationship with my boss, even though none of it changed anything. Everyone, absolutely everyone, has memories like this. A great many of them. To enter a state of truly broad perception, of this kind of expansion and growth—and you still have a long life ahead, decades, again, decades.

I'm asking you to develop this awareness not to make a change for a week or a month, but to make a change for the whole of your life ahead. To keep changing throughout your life, keep changing. So these realizations and reflections after the fact shift into a way of being where you don't feel that something was done right or wrong, where you experience any event simply as an event in life. You know that everything that happened happened as it was meant to, and didn't need to happen differently. It's remarkable how, in searching for a balance between work and personal life, people always look for something in time. They say, “Work less, work more, spend more time with family, spend less time with family, do more things with family and spend that time, do fewer things with family and spend that time, focus on personal development or don't focus on personal development. Sit in meditation for an hour, sit in meditation for two hours, go to the gym for three hours, read books or draw for two hours every day.” People look for balance in time. First, though, they need to look for balance in the importance they give to events and in understanding that everything happening in life is meant to happen.

Fundamentally, everything has equal priority. Please don't turn this into an argument. Don't. If you've just broken a finger or have a fever of 104°F (40°C), of course taking care of your health right here and now is important. Don't take this into strange territory. The question is: if you've chosen growth, if you truly want to expand your life, do you want to find that key to freedom? Do you want this powerful personal growth? That growth and expansion of you, of the events happening in your life and the number of them, lie in neutralizing importance. What you consider unimportant: neutral. What you consider extremely important: neutral. For some reason, people think that a neutral attitude removes our feelings, our emotions, our creativity, as if everything becomes black and white. But importance and unimportance are what's black and white. When we remove importance and unimportance, life becomes colorful. It has many colors. Those two camps disappear from our minds. Yet again, our system registers this quite differently. As soon as we hear it, we immediately find a self-serving justification: this is all nonsense; it can't be that way.

And immediately we give some particular action priority. To work through this instead of getting caught in those arguments, the task is to observe it. Observing takes a great deal of work. Everyone says, “Observing is easy. You just look. Why wouldn't you do something so simple?” Try observing this for at least a few months. Certainly not for just two minutes. Observing for several months means constantly remaining in this state, making it a habit. It won't make you hard. It won't make you cruel. It won't make you a black-and-white person. It will make you even more alive than you are now and broaden your perception, which is guaranteed to lead to expansion: expansion of your personality, your life, your being, true expansion as a human being. And that is freedom.