Articles
If you had to guess, how many articles would you estimate that you have read in the last five years concerning work-life balance? Fifty, a hundred—more? Now let me pose a second, much more important question: has any one of these articles actually caused you to change your behavior in terms of setting your own behavioral boundaries?
To gain any semblance of balance in our lives, we need to acknowledge that we alone are responsible for making the choices that can create a satisfying and meaningful life. If we default in this important task, by failing to examine the work/life issue in light of our chosen values and beliefs, we run the serious risk of marching solely to the beat of demanding employers, harried clients, a materialistic culture, and our own fear-driven tendencies. If we are to live satisfying and authentic lives, we must, as the wisdom literature universally advises, take responsibility for consciously making our own choices, and then garnering the courage to live in accordance with them.
Lawyers’ Lives Are Often More Stressful Than We Anticipated
Many of us chose the legal path, at least in part, because we valued the idea of having substantial autonomy in carrying out our professional responsibilities. We envisioned ourselves moving along the trajectory established by our ancestors, achieving a satisfying life in which meaningful work would be complemented by nourishing relationships and enjoyable leisure. While we may have appreciated the demanding requirements of a lawyer’s life, we also imagined having sufficient time for needed reflection, spirited interactions with colleagues, and pleasurable companionship. Yet how many of us are living lives which resemble our dreams of yesteryear?
Very few of you reading this article will be shocked to learn that some attorneys work seventy-hour weeks. And who has time for a weekend of leisure? The closest many of us come to self-care is to indulge in an early morning workout at the gym, followed by a stressful 12-14 hour workday. Single parents and two career couples can suffer incrementally as they also attempt to juggle a patchwork of child-care arrangements that were unheard of in our parents’ time.
Demanding employers, burnt-out colleagues, fears about job security and the economic crisis, aging parents, stress-related health disorders, domestic disturbances (often based on the spoken or unspoken accusation “I have it worse than you”), irascible children experiencing the effects of their own pressured and over-scheduled lives—the list of “unbalancing” factors is limitless. The lives we have acquired are not so much full of meaning and satisfaction as they are overcrowded with suffocating demands, incessant conflicts, and ever-expanding responsibilities. In fact, the pace of our lives, rather than its meaningful content, is the most salient characteristic of our way of being in the world. It is small wonder that 44% of lawyers surveyed by the ABA said they would not recommend the profession to a young person (The New York Times, 1/06/08).
Self-reflection Helps Us Gain Perspective
What is to be done? We can continue our collective hand-wringing over the sad state of our professional and personal lives, or we can genuinely seek needed solutions by intentionally reordering our priorities, and acting accordingly. We must seek a counterpoint to the non-stop, narrowly-focused days of our unexamined lawyering and living.
That counterpoint is the crucially important human skill of self-reflection. Like those embarking on a coming-of-age initiation rite in certain other cultures, we must claim our life’s stake, perhaps separating from the pack for a time, seeking to more clearly define the beliefs and values which will guide us. If, for example, we claim to treasure and value family time, yet realize that we almost never arrive home before our children are asleep, we must definitively (and painfully) accept this as a value/behavior inconsistency before we consider any ameliorative action and chart a more acceptable course.
Honestly acknowledging the true condition of our current lives is the first step toward claiming the transformed lives that we say we want. The moment we earnestly begin exploring the possibility of living our lives differently, we begin to craft our authentic response to poet Mary Oliver’s evocative challenge: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Make Decisions Aligned With Your Values
When my first child was born, my husband and I had to manage two full-time lawyering jobs while raising a family. Until we were actually confronted with the reality of this family/work dilemma—the morning we ran for the train having left our fevered and screaming infant with a 20-year-old babysitter—we naively assumed that we could do it all if only we planned well. We eventually decided that I would seek a flexible work arrangement. My forward-thinking employer acceded to my request, and, three grown children later, we have never looked back. Though we absorbed a substantial financial hit, and quite possibly foreclosed the attainment of certain professional rewards, we accepted this as the quid pro quo for consciously seeking a more meaningful manner of living.
As all parents know, modern family life is inherently stressful, rife with conflicting schedules and needs. Yet we do not have to become unwitting victims of the extreme and unexamined busy-ness that plagues society as a whole. To bring these issues within the ambit of self-reflection, we might first become mindfully aware of the competing personal, family and professional demands that put so many claims on our time. Next, we can begin to sort the “wheat from the chaff,” and prioritize our time based on our values and beliefs. Finally, we can firmly but flexibly regulate our own behavior so that how we spend our time actually parallels our chosen values and beliefs. Whatever decisions we make regarding our priorities should be just that—decisions. If we allow the professional crisis du jour to consistently trump our vaguely desired but never sacrosanct boundaries, we will always be in a catch-up mode, never attaining the work-life balance that we seek.
Every lawyer can readily recite numerous “crash and burn” stories, whether personal or second-hand, that resulted from the ruinous clash of unmanaged personal, professional, and family demands. Sadly, the legal battlefield is too often strewn with disillusionment, alienation, broken relationships, and the shattered dreams of lawyers and their loved ones. What started out as a “storybook life” has been rendered desolate and despairing. Yet this need not be our fate.
The good news and the bad news in this area are identical: We are responsible—for restoring our balance by reducing the width of the chasm that exists between the life we dream of and the life we are presently living. If we honestly commit to showing up for each required segment of our transformation—self-knowledge, acceptance, and action, each in its own season—great things will come to pass as the impossible slowly becomes possible, and the unmanageable, manageable.
RESOURCES
Gregory C. Coffey and Maureen C. Kessler, The Reflective Counselor: Daily Meditations for Lawyers, published by the American Bar Association, 2008 (available for purchase on Amazon and the ABA website).
