Videos on Work-Life Balance with Roger Reece

Value and Meaning in the Workplace
Being able to derive happiness from the work you do is a skill. Gaining a sense of satisfaction from solving problems, building relationships with clients over time, getting energized by the interactions you have throughout the day: these are some of the secrets to enjoying the time you spend at work - regardless of whether the job is what you ultimately want it to be, or the working conditions are all that you'd like. Some people are very good at this skill. Others have a really hard time with it. If things aren't lined up perfectly, some people just don't know how to have fun. But learning how to enjoy yourself at work could have a big impact on your health. Think of it another way: If you can learn to love what you do for a living, it means you're getting paid to do what you love! Isn't that fun?

Enjoying Your Work
Learn how to enjoy your work. Some people love their work - and others clearly do not. The interesting thing is that two people can work in the same environment, with the same set of circumstances, and each can come away feeling very differently about the experience. What this shows is that it's not the job or the circumstances that make all the difference in what you get out of your work - it's about how you process it personally.

People who are able to walk through life with a sense of appreciation know that life is a choice - in terms of the small, daily decisions we make as well as in a larger sense. And every choice is a package: each decision comes with its own set of advantages and drawbacks. But so many of us end up sabotaging our own choices: we make things harder for ourselves by refusing to commit ourselves to the full package of good and bad that comes with everything we do. But those who learn how to live with the package are more empowered and purposeful in their actions, and enjoy their work more, because whatever comes their way, they have already made a conscious decision to own.

Work-Life Balance: Manage Your States
Manage your states to do what matters most. The fact is, most of us do not know how to manage our own state - our mood, motivation, resourcefulness and energy: our state of mind. In other words, if we find ourselves feeling burned-out, frustrated or overwhelmed, we either don't know or don't have the skills to transition ourselves into a more resourceful state. Very often, in fact, we do all the wrong things - behaving in ways that actually exacerbate our less-resourceful states. If we are to have any hope of managing our priorities, we must learn to manage our states. Our success in managing our time in order to do what matters most to us depends on our ability to marshal motivation and battle procrastination - both of which are inherently tied to our state at any given moment.

Meaning & Value in the Workplace
What is the meaning of work? There are plenty of people in the workforce today who have lost the meaning of work. Some even hate their jobs. They approach the workday with resignation and apathy. But when you let apathy take over in one area of your life, it's very hard to keep the apathy from bleeding through into everything else.

The way you approach your work - the value you are able or not able to gain from what you do - is not something you can effectively separate from the rest of your time. The secret of finding a true passion for your work is that the people who have found this know that they can't just depend on the job to deliver that sense of fulfillment to them. The way a person relates to his or her work will for the most part mirror how they approach any other area of their life. The way to get the most out of your work, your family, your relationships, and your ambitions is the same: anchored by a sense of having made a conscious choice in whatever you are doing, and rooted in a commitment to find and cultivate value in everything you encounter.

Deadlines, Worry and Procrastination
Fight procrastination and worry by setting personal deadlines. Procrastination, in simple terms, is saying, "I'm not going to do it now." But the difference between procrastination and prioritization, in terms of bringing balance to your life, comes from taking the next step from there: to make a personal commitment as to when, specifically, you are going to do it, and to schedule that commitment in an organized system you can rely on.

The only deadlines many people have are the ones imposed on them by others. But the key to productivity lies in setting your own personal deadlines. In particular, this means thinking about deadlines more than just in terms of the final due-date for completion of a project - but as a way of maintaining momentum, by breaking your project up into as many discrete chunks as possible and setting mini-deadlines for each one. These deadlines are milestones of a project's progress, and serve to keep your 'worry-curve' under control: you maintain enough positive stress to keep moving on your work, but never experience the incapacitating spikes of extreme anxiety that brew over major impending deadlines for which you feel unprepared.

Finding Meaning in Work and Life
The importance of finding meaning in what you do: It's certainly possible, when work and life in general are busy but predictable, to run on autopilot for any number of weeks, months, even years. But going through the motions without meaning, without purpose, without a sense of direction in your work and your routine, over time leads you into what Viktor Frankl, in his book Man's Search for Meaning, called 'The Existential Vacuum': the loss of the feeling that life is meaningful. Without a central feeling of purpose, what you do each day can seem pointless and unfulfilling; and when unexpected hardships come, or even when the busyness slows down, it is very easy to fall into despair. Your own, individual meaning in life - what we think of as 'self-actualization' - is achieved by learning to experience value in everyday life: in your work, in your family, in your relationships and even in difficult situations.

Don’t Get Overwhelmed. Ask for Help.
Working as a team means learning to ask for help. Sometimes when we're overworked, it can just seem simpler to buckle down and do it all ourselves, rather than deal with the potential awkwardness of asking for help, followed by the hassle of getting someone else up to speed on what you are doing. But sharing the workload is essential for teams to function properly - both for preventing burnout as well as for cross-training. Not asking for help leads to 'silos of information' at the workplace; and not getting the help you need inevitably leads to feelings of resentment towards coworkers. Situations like these are what leave you feeling either burned-out or disengaged from your job.