How to make work-life balance work - Nigel Marsh

Key Takeaways

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] what I thought I would do is I would start with a a simple request uh I'd like all of you to to pause for a moment you wretched weaklings H and take stock of your miserable existence now that was the advice that St Benedict gave his rather startled followers uh in the fifth century uh and it was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40 up until that moment I had been that classic corporate Warrior I was eating too much I was drinking too much I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family uh and I decided that I would try and turn my life around in particular I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work life balance so I I stepped back from the workforce and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children but all I learned about work life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work not a very useful skill uh especially when the when the money runs out um so I went back to work and I've spent these seven years since struggling with studying and writing about work life balance and I have four observations I'd like to share with you uh today the first is if Society is to make any progress on this issue we need an honest debate but the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about about work life balance all the discussions about flexi time or dress down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family now the first step in Sol any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in and the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet screaming desperation where they work long hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like it's my contention that going to work on a Friday in jeans and t-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue the second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us we should stop looking outside it's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead if you don't design your life someone else will design it for you and you may just not like their idea of balance it's particularly important this isn't on the worldwide web is it I'm about to get fired it's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial Corporation now I'm not talking here just about the bad companies the the abattoirs of the human soul as I call them I'm talking about all companies because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you as they can get away with it's in their nature it's in their DNA it's what they do even the good well-intentioned companies on the one hand putting child care facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened on the other hand it's a nightmare that just means you spend more time at the bloody office we we have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life the third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance before I went back to work after my year at home I I sat down and I wrote out a detailed stepbystep description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to and it went like this wake up well rested after a good night's sleep have sex walk the dog have breakfast with my wife and children have sex [Music] again Drive the kids to school on the way to the office do three hours work play sport with a friend at lunchtime do another three hours work meet some mates in the pub 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 [Applause] bed how often do you think I had that day uh we we need to be realistic you can't do it all in one day we need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life but we need to elongate it without falling into the Trap of the I'll have a life when I retire when my kids have left home when my wife has divorced me my health is failing I've got no mates or interests left a day is too short after our retire is too long there's got to be a middle way a fourth observation we need to approach balance in a balanced way a friend came to see me last year and she doesn't mind me telling the story a friend came to see me last year and said Nigel I've read your book and I realized that my life is completely out of balance it's totally dominated by work I work 10 hours a day I commute 2 hours a day all my relationships have failed there's nothing in my life apart from my work so I've decided to get a grip and sort it out so I joined a gym now I don't mean to mock but being a fit 10-hour a day office rat isn't more balanced it's more [Music] fit lovely though physical exercise may be there are other parts to life there's the intellectual side there's the emotional side there's the spiritual side and to be balanced I believe we have to attend to all of those areas not just do 50 stomach crunches now that can be daunting cuz people say bloody hell mate I haven't got time to get fit you want me to go to church and call my mother and I understand I I truly understand how that can be daunting but an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me A New Perspective my wife who was somewhere in the audience uh today called me up at the office and said Nigel you need to pick our younger son up Harry from school she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening so I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school Gates we walked down to the local park messed around on the swings played some silly games I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe and we shared a pizza for tea then walked down the hill to our home uh and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas I then read him a chapter of R DARS James and the Giant Peach I then put him to bed tucked him in gave him a kiss on his forehead and said good night mate and walked out of his bedroom as I was walking out of his bedroom he said dad I went yes mate he went dad this has been the best day of my life ever I hadn't done anything hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a PlayStation now my point is the small things matter being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life 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 and that I think is an idea worth spreading