The Balancing Act
The Emerging leaders from our Sage Project (ages 25-55) often found it hard to establish the right balance between love and work in their own demanding mid-life world. One Emerging Sage leader shared the story of being a busy administrator of a community project who was also trying to find time for his family. This sage leader expressed the opinion that his family derived some benefits from his civic work, but the trade-off he described seemed less than convincing:
“Last night I came home pretty worthless and exhausted. My daughter asked if we could go shoot some hoops and I said, “OK, in just a minute.” Next thing I know, I’ve dozed off. That’s an example of not having anything left on some days for my family. Also, in a leadership position in the department it’s very hard to walk away and have an extended vacation. We take a number of nickel and dime vacations but haven’t done a long trip in a while. So, family life suffers a bit. On the flip side, my kids have met a number of people or had experiences they wouldn’t otherwise get. For example, they are very comfortable saying hello to the superintendent of schools.”
A second Emerging Sage leader told a story that is all too common for men and women who chose to enter the political arena:
“There is some sacrifice at times, if only because of the need to juggle everything and also be a father. Right now, as I’m running a campaign in addition to all of the other things I have going on, so I sometimes I don’t always get to see my kids before they go to bed. I tell myself that it is just temporary, but my wife reminds me there will be something next month, so it is never temporary. But if I am able to help grow our community it will make things better for my kids as well. So, it is a win/win situation.”
For some of the Emerging Sage leaders there is an option, but it is often painful. We see the struggle about work/life balance playing out in the decision that some sage leaders make to get “out of the rat race” of civic engagement and spend more time with their children and family. For these men and women, there was often no balance to be found between work or civic engagement and love (time with family). They had to choose one over the other.
If a Sage leader decides not to opt out of her civic commitments, and if she is equally committed to quality Generative One time with her family, what can be done to reconcile those sacrifices and trade-offs? A coach might enter at this point and offer some options. We observed that clients usually can do so in one of three ways.
First, they might consider their project work to be a model for their children and hope that the children will be proud of their efforts and will emulate them during their own adult years. Second, some of our Emerging Sage leaders believed that their civic work would ultimately be of benefit to their children, thus making their outside caregiving simply an extension of their caregiving inside the family. Third, some of these leaders took a more tangible step; they immediately involved their children in their civic projects.
Many years ago, Sigmund Freud offered a simple but profound observation that the two ingredients of a happy and successful life are love and work. But Freud failed to mention that it isn’t always easy to balance the demands inherent in both love and work—especially when love has to do with raising children and work has to do with finding time and energy to successfully engage in a project.
We can respectfully ask Sigmund to step aside while we provide some coaching assistance—inviting our client to engage in some polarity management (Johnson, 1996). We encourage our client to spend sufficient time in identifying the benefits of both love and work before turning to the downside of each. Thoughtful consideration of both side of a polarity can lead to a higher level resolution of the polarity or to a novel solution that enables benefits from both sides to be realized.
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