How Creating a Personal Vision Helped Me Achieve Work-Life Balance
Russell Ford
For The Complete Lawyer
Volume 1, Number 4, 2005
Under The "Traditional" Definition, Work-Life Balance Is Next To Impossible For Anyone Practicing In The Legal Profession Today
"Balance," as a word, indicates an equality of distribution. That is when one traditionally thinks of work-life balance, one automatically assumes that there must be an equal distribution of time between work and life, i.e., non-work. Under this "traditional" definition, work-life balance is next to impossible for anyone practicing in the legal profession today. The demands of the legal profession - billable hours, client development, court or other government body-imposed deadlines - coupled with the advancements of technology - cell phones, PDAs, remote email devices - mean that an attorney is always at work even when he is not at the office.
Client expectations in this new age demand that an attorney always be available. Work expectations brought on by increased pay and increased competition for clients demand longer hours, more efficient hours, and more "networking" activities outside the office. This is the new legal practice and the framework in which an attorney must search for work-life balance. "Good luck!" you might say. But my personal experience is that it is possible, it is wonderful, and it is one goal worth achieving. So read on, fellow traveler, and start the journey with me.
Work-Life Balance Is About Knowing What Is Important To You, What Makes You Tick And Why
Step One: Lose the "traditional" definition. You must rid yourself of the notion that work-life balance is about quantity because it absolutely is not and cannot be about quantity. Work-life balance is about quality. If it were about quantity, then becoming an attorney would never have fit into the equation for my career. I would have kept on teaching, had my summers free to work at camps in shorts and t-shirts, and inspired the youths of tomorrow to become lawyers so they could be frustrated by work-life balance and all those other things that frustrate lawyers and compel them to write and read articles just like this.
No, work-life balance is about more than just spending equal time with loved ones and yourself as you do at work. Work-life balance is about knowing what is important to you, what makes you tick and why, and how to maximize both work and non-work activities to help you do all of those things that make you a happier you.
Without Figuring Out Your Personal Vision, You Cannot Achieve Work-Life Balance
Step Two: Now that you've lost the traditional notion of work-life balance, you are ready to learn more about you. First you must create a Personal Vision. You absolutely cannot skip this step! Without figuring out your Personal Vision, you cannot achieve work-life balance. So what is a Personal Vision you ask? A Personal Vision is your definition of "joy," i.e., if money, family, friends, and other influencing factors were equal, it is the oasis for work and life that you have created in your mind. It is the scene you play in your mind when you dream of what the "perfect life" would be if you could do anything you wanted to do and live the way you wanted to live. You start with that scene and you work backwards from there discovering what it is about that scene that makes you see it as the "perfect life."
Developing your Personal Vision requires you to look deeper into your "Dasein"1 (Dasein is a German noun invented by Western philosopher, Martin Heidegger. It is just the way we are.) As Heidegger stated, Dasein is "always already comporting itself towards being as if it knows what being is." Every living being has to be concerned about its being. Being is not a given; only death is. The individual's comportment toward being is important in continuing being, avoiding death. In essence, once you understand that only death is inevitable, you understand that your being is limited and in order to fully develop your being, you must do that which you were born to do; that which best enlists your skills, talents, and values.
For me, the first step in that process was enlisting the help of a myriad of books, articles, essays, and internet websites whose content was aimed at finding the perfect job and understanding yourself from different dimensions and perspectives. For reference I offer some of my favorites: Don't Waste Your Talent by Bob McDonald and Don Hutcheson (See the Book Review in this issue of TCL); What Can You Do With a Law Degree? A Lawyers' Guide to Career Alternatives Inside, Outside & Around the Law by Deborah Arron; The Pathfinder : How to Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success by Nicholas Lore; What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles and Zen and the Art of Making a Living by Laurence G. Boldt . However, the ability of these books to bring me to where I needed to be was limited by my own inhibitions, fears, and stubbornness.
It wasn't until I became truly frustrated, when work was mind-numbingly painful and when that pain carried over into my family life (I was withdrawn, uneasy, and miserable to be with), that I knew I needed more than these books could offer. Again, not because these are not truly wonderful books; no, the limits of these books were imposed by me and I needed something different to get me past that hump.
A Career Coach Is Trained To Get You To Think In Ways You've Never Thought Before
That's when I enlisted the services of a career coach. Someone who was trained in listening, understanding, and coaching, i.e., asking the right questions at the right time to get you to think in ways you've never thought before. Someone who had helped others find their Personal Visions and someone who had found their own. The first step I took with my coach was taking an assessment called The Highlands Ability Battery. The Highlands Ability Battery is designed to ferret out your innate abilities; those abilities that you are born with and that come naturally to you. This was a truly eye-opening experience for me. For the first time, I understood the difference between my innate abilities and the skills I had developed over time. I also understood what abilities I was utilizing, what abilities I wasn't, and what abilities my inner-self absolutely needed to use in order for me to feel fulfilled. Finally, I also understood that no one job or career will ever meet all of my abilities and skills. That is why you must develop the Personal Vision. So that you can find the position that meets most of your needs and leaves time for "life" activities that can fulfill the rest of them. Voilá - Work-life balance!
Utilizing the results of my Highlands Ability Battery, my Coach and I embarked on developing a Personal Vision through a series of meetings, discussions, and activities. These sessions were designed to look at my skills and my abilities and to help me figure out what in my work environment fit with my abilities and skills and what in my work-life was a disconnect. This then led to the creation of an Ideal Job Grid, which takes into account your abilities, skills, interests, personal style, family influences, and goals, and then places those items in table format that are essential to you. I mention the Ideal Job Grid because it is an absolutely invaluable tool. Every job posting you read, every interview you attend, and every person you meet for an informational interview about a particular field or position, can then be placed up against your Ideal Job Grid to determine whether that career matches enough of your needs to make you truly joyful in that position. It is amazing when you first do it.
I Was Unfulfilled Entirely Because I Had Not Explored The "Right" Position For Me, Not Because I Worked At Bad Firms Or In The Wrong City
Let me interject a story here for illustration. This process took me several years during which time I attended many interviews both in and out of the legal profession in different cities and states. All the while I was looking aimlessly for a new position because I wanted to be fulfilled. Let's be clear on one issue, I was unfulfilled entirely because I had not explored the "right" position for me not because I worked at bad firms or in the wrong city. I was just doing the wrong things in terms of what I needed to be doing to be happy.
Some interviews, prior to the Ideal Job Grid, gave me great hope and excitement, which later I understood simply to be excitement about being considered for a position and the possibility of something different. It wasn't really different, it was just a new firm with new faces, but it was the same activities that weren't the right fit for me. However, once I had developed my Ideal Job Grid with my coach, I was armed with a tool that allowed me to temper my excitement of the new with the reality of my life. That is, I was able to look at a job offer and say that a particular position simply did not meet enough of what I was looking for to truly fit with my needs - i.e., that position was not going to make me happy.
In The End, The Choice For Me Was Made Clear By My Personal Vision
The Personal Vision is what led me into my current position. I had been an immigration Attorney since I graduated law school in 1999, which included stops at three different firms in two different cities in the hopes of finding happiness. When that didn't happen, I realized that I couldn't make another move until I "knew" what it was that would make me happy and what it was that would allow me to achieve the work-life balance I desired. I ended up doing a lot of pro bono work outside of immigration in my last tour of duty to determine if, by supplementing my practice with other interests, I could maintain a better balance. But this still was not enough for me.
In the end, I aggressively pursued three very different options all of which struck different aspects of my Ideal Job Grid - the summary version of my Personal Vision. All three made solid offers but, in the end, the choice for me was made clear by my Personal Vision. The firm where I work now fits quite neatly with that vision and because of that it is an environment that I thrive in and that fosters work-life balance. Do I still work the same hours? Yes. I am not sure you can ever escape long hours. They come with the territory and the new way of doing business today. But these hours move quickly now and are filled with more quality and more energy.
For me, ultimately, my Personal Vision led me to leave a big firm and to leave immigration. Well, not entirely. You see, it wasn't really immigration that bothered me, it was doing all-immigration, all-the-time. So now, my primary practice area is education, which, fits nicely with my former career as a teacher. I also work on employment and immigration matters, because the education industry is fertile in these areas of practice. I work with four amazing attorneys who love what they do and bring an entirely different kind of energy to work. That energy is new and refreshing. When you work with people who love what they do and when your job matches with your Personal Vision, the quality of your work skyrockets. The quality of your life, also, skyrockets - how can it not? You are doing a job that fulfills your abilities, skills, interests, and goals. By definition, you are building and completing your Dasein. When your job is this fulfilling, it can't help but spill over into your life away from work. When you are no longer exhausted at the end of the day because you are not fighting with yourself to do things, you have tremendous energy left for your non-work life. Furthermore, having clarity at work provides you with clarity about what you need in your non-work life to fulfill that portion of your Dasein.
Creating a Personal Vision allows you to "see" your authentic self and allows you to move into a career that more fully comports with your vision of your authentic self. Having a career that better fulfills the authentic self allows you to have a life outside of work that more completely fulfills your vision of authentic self because you have more clarity, more understanding, and more energy to pursue more quality interests outside of work.