5 secrets to a healthy work-life that unlock your creative flow, connect you to your personal power and unleash a transformation of your life as you know it. Sounds like a tall order but stop and consider this: the Japanese invented the word karoshi to describe death by overwork. In the west, we call it work stress and it’s equally dangerous to our health.
Work stress describes the destructive physio-emotional responses that arise when the demands of a job are not aligned with the abilities or needs of the worker resulting in ill health and/or trauma.
There are 120,000 work stress-related deaths per year in the US, with 77% of professionals reporting they experienced burnout that significantly impacted their work and quality of life.
According to the Mayo Clinic, symptoms of work stress include:
- Developing a cynical attitude toward work
- Procrastination
- Irritability and impatience
- Sluggishness
- Difficulty concentrating
- Dissatisfaction with achievements
- Disillusionment
- Numbing through substance- or food abuse
- Changes in sleep patterns
- Unexplained headaches, stomach or bowel problems, etc.
Moving from misery to self-mastery
I help high achievers master their minds so they can have more hours in the day, more energy and peace of mind, more freedom, and fulfillment in all areas of their lives, without burning out.
In the process of co-creating with my clients, one never knows what I’ll be pulling out of the toolkit. My approach rests on Psychodynamic and Evolutionary Psychology, Eastern and Western Philosophy, Brain Science, Organizational Development, and Coaching with a clientele whose differences are vast in terms of age, occupation, gender, and ethnicity. Yet, they’ve tapped into something that is working for them.
Not too long ago I asked myself, what exactly is it that’s taken so many of them from misery to feeling great about their lives?
Discovering your niche
A great life depends on the quality of the fit between who we are and the environments in which we work and live. Otherwise, we feel like fish out of water!
Some of my clients switched companies or industries:
- One decided to stop blaming his work and finally bought a new home that he loves and shares with a previously estranged daughter, whom he deeply missed.
- Another, unhappy at work and afraid she would never want to live with another person is now happily settled on the other side of the country with a husband, a new job she loves, a promotion on top of that, and plans to make a baby, too.
- An executive left his uninspiring mid-level employment to join an exciting new venture team of high-level executives as their partner and CEO.
- One picked up his family and moved to New Zealand to practice his craft on the other side of the world.
And then – and this is important – there are the many others who, by taking action on the environment inside of themselves, fell in love with exactly where they are.
How I found my work-life balance
My father was a business owner who died at 42 years old. I was 15. The doctor said he died of a cerebral hemorrhage but, since I was grounded at the time for speaking truth to power again, I was pretty sure he died of me.
It was not until one day at the cemetery when I finally broke down with my mother about how it was ‘all my fault’, that I found out it was not me after all. In her shining moment as a mom, she said tenderly, “No honey, it wasn’t you. It was work.”
After my father died, no one knew what to do with me. There was a good program at Penn’s Graduate Hospital that would pitch in financially with my mother and have me out in a year and a half, so I did that.
My work history began in a hospital laboratory where I worked with blood and urine. I went from there to a cardiac catheter research lab where I worked with electrodes and oxygen monitors. My next job was at the USDA Biological Control Lab where I worked primarily with insects.
But I was always drawn to people, so one step at a time, one foot in front of the other, I got the education and experience needed to do the work I do now.
No surprise, given how little I could do to help my father with his work stress as a child. I knew nothing about it until it was all over.
5 secrets to work-life balance
In my own life and work with my clients, I discovered the common denominators to a healthy work-life balance which I distilled into 5 Steps:
- Grounding in the belief that a great life is possible—through a great environmental fit.
- Recognizing that fitness requires knowing who we are—the internal environment.
- Exploring out-of-the-box alternatives and possibilities—external environment.
- Acting on a new environmental vision—there is no success without action.
- Tackling the mind’s normal, natural resistance to change—so it doesn’t get in the way.
The American Institute of Stress emphasizes the person-environment fit and so do I when I say: a great life depends on a great fit between who we are and the environments in which we work and live, which is the first line of my new book Getting to G.R.E.A.T.: 5-Step Strategy for Work and Life…Based on Science and Stories.”
And, I wanted to put this message in a bottle (book) for as many people as I could because every time I help a child’s mom or dad – or anybody at all for that matter – I know that I am doing what I am here to do and will do for the rest of my life. Talk about a great person-environment fit!