Is Your 'Career-Life' the Tail Wagging the Dog?

Career coach Julie Cohen supports and advises her clients on a variety of career management issues from leadership development to career advancement.

Several years into her coaching business, Julie discovered that her clients’ work-life balance was the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

“It was the issue that people wanted solutions for,” Cohen said. 

Inspired by this chorus of inquiring voices, she created an innovative coaching approach designed to recharge individuals who feel their life is off kilter. Putting her concept down in black and white resulted in “Your Work, Your Life Your Way: 7 Keys to Work-Life Balance,” a book chock full of useful tools and techniques.

So what causes our personal planet to go so much out of orbit? Cohen said that many trends in the workplace today cause a big bang in the work-life cosmos.

“In the last few years, due to the recession, employers are asking workers to do more, and some workers are even being asked to do two or three jobs,” Cohen said.

Technology is a double-edged sword; it can sharpen the quality of your work, but at the same time it cuts in to your free time. Before you know it, you are working all the time.

“If your boss emails you late at night, he or she might expect you to respond immediately. While this may seem like an unreasonable expectation, many employees feel they have no choice,” Cohen said.

According to Cohen, women tend to be overly responsive to a storm of demands and have difficulty saying “no.”

“If you say yes to everything, it has repercussions,” she said. “Your satisfaction level decreases.”

Conflicting pressures to perform at high levels at work and a deep desire to spend quality time with family can cause major stress or morph into a full blown crisis. The struggle for work-life balance often takes a toll during major life transitions such as becoming a parent, going through a divorce or confronting an unanticipated personal challenge.

For many people, this period of transition “is like a house of falling cards. They feel like they can’t go on anymore,” Cohen said.

So what’s the solution? Cohen said she believes that it’s not up to your employer to make things work for you, it’s about making choices that fall in line with your values and priorities. 

One of Cohen’s clients worked in a culture where no one left before 7 p.m. every day, and the client was afraid to be the first one to leave early. Cohen suggested the client test out leaving at 6 p.m.; nothing happened to jeopardize her client’s job.

Cohen suggests looking carefully at your organization’s culture and some trial-and-error experimentation.  If leaving at 6 p.m. rather than 7 p.m. is operationally unacceptable, Cohen  said, “Ask yourself how important this is and does this fit with where you are in your life now?”

Cohen’s “7 Keys to Work-Life Balance” is not a quick fix.  She offers over 30 exercises that teach you how to be your own coach. Each key in the book includes field work and specific techniques.

By putting a brightly lit magnifying glass to your current situation and evaluating what’s working and what’s not working, Cohen provides tools that guide you through a process for implementing changes.  There is also a workbook available to help you chronicle and complete the exercises.

Cohen has recently developed a workshop that incorporates the “7 Keys approach” for presentation to groups and organizations. For more information about Cohen’s books and workshop programs, visit www.7keystoworklifebalance.com.

On balance, Cohen said, “If we are constantly expecting to achieve work-life balance, we are only adding to our stress.” 

Cohen suggests that you think of work-life balance as a journey—a life trip that requires constant evaluation of your needs and wants, and requires that you take deliberate steps to create change.