eASTiNwEST / 小黃不是狗

According to wikipedia, the term “work life balance” was first heard in the 1970s in Britain. In the conventional terms, it refers to the balance between an individual’s work and private life. Most of us thought of it as the balance between the time we spent at work and on our private life. This includes myself.

But today, work life balance took on a whole new meaning for me. I was in a feedback session for my interpersonal skills with a co-workers. She shared with me that in a corporate environment, one has to stay alert and manage the impact of how one’s natural traits affect others. My first reaction to this statement was that a life like that is hypocrisy.

Then I thought about it and agreed with her, because the people in that environment would affect our performance gradings. And we all know that the higher we climb on the career ladder, the less it is about our technical competencies and more emphasis is placed on our people skills, such as influencing and leadership.

Therefore I came to the concolusion that to maintain work life balance, one has to know that s/he has to please everybody at work. But s/he doesn’t have to aim for being friends with every co-workers. This way, s/he can maintain the balance in life by being who they are and befriend those who they truly enjoy. Because after working hard to have good relationship with every colleagues on a day-to-day basis, we all need that break when we could simply say: I don’t like you, work mate! I will find my own mate that I like!

Nevertheless, I am not ruling out the very lucky situations where we make true friends that we work with, or where the workplace is relatively small and the family feeling is stronger. I merely think it is very unlikely when we work in a big organisation.

The whole thing reminded me of an acquaintance of mine who is a doctor. She once said she doesn’t try to be nice in her personal life because for the majority of her days, she has to be nice and sensitive to her patients and their families and friends. She simply doesn’t have the energy or inclination to do all she can to please everybody when she comes off her shifts.

Hmm… work life balance… now you might see it in a completely new light too!