Resilience and your work life balance

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From time to time, the challenges of balancing home and a busy work life can start to have an impact on your overall health and wellbeing. This presents a problem, not just for you and your team, but for the productivity of your business.

Making sure you’re able to find the right balance between competing demands of home and work, and supporting your team to do the same, can often be tricky to achieve. Below are some suggestions to help you and your team achieve a better work-life balance and help maintain your resilience.

Understand your current position

Work-life balance means different things to different people at different stages of their lives. Jobs and careers, children and other dependents, leisure pursuits and impending retirement will each assume a different level of importance as you move through your working life. Understanding your own needs and priorities is the first step to improving the balance.

What needs to change?

• What are the three most important things in your life at the moment?
• To what extent does the time you spend on them reflect their importance?
• What types of tasks are on your ‘To Do’ list? Are they your priorities or someone else's?
• What wastes your time? Could you do anything to stop it happening?
• What pressures are you under at the moment? Can you prioritise them?
• Could anyone help you with any of these tasks?
• What would you rather be doing?
• What can you change to help you achieve what you'd rather be doing?

Maintaining the balance

The list of suggestions to maintain a balance is extensive! Although most of them are common sense, some are often over-looked and often succumb to outside influences. Here are a few of them:

• Don't over-commit yourself
• Delegate tasks where possible
• Make a list, or plan, and stick to it
• When you identify a problem, talk to someone about a possible solution
• Focus on critical tasks
• Don’t take work home unless absolutely necessary
• Don’t miss meals to save time
• Plan a holiday

Your wellbeing is down to you to protect

By introducing some rules to running your daily life, and being consistent in encouraging the same behaviours within your team, you could start to achieve more of a balance and make improvements:

• Make daily schedules
• Don't be a perfectionist
• Learn to say “No!”
• Learn to prioritise
• Decide what’s important to you
• Accept help if it’s offered
• Plan ahead
• Combine several activities