Integration and a Balanced Life

Faced with daily reminders about the need for a balanced life (presumably home and work), it’s easy to dismiss the concept since it is rather nebulous – balance shmalance! What does having a balanced life mean anyway? Being a “recovering dismisser” of the value of a balanced life, defining what it means has helped my understanding – for me this is a goal as I am not yet fully recovered.

I have begun to think about a balanced life as one of integration. This paints a picture of combining disconnected parts into a whole, rather than thinking of home and work on different ends of a scale, separate and distinct, competing with each other. The scales picture actually reinforces separateness and therefore an imbalance; conversely, pulling disparate pieces together into an integrated whole helps me begin to “get it.”

Those of us that have struggled balancing home and work often get into a mode of what I call “extreme compartmentalization,” creating sometimes vastly different realities at home and work. One school of thought is that compartmentalization is a gender-specific talent (insert trait). Considering men and women as hunters and gatherers, hunters focus in on their targets individually, one at a time, where gatherers…well, gather…pull together…integrate. Regardless of gender, while compartmentalization may have its place, finding balance may not be one of them.

So how do we initiate a program (insert life) of integration rather than compartmentalization? I believe we must embrace the idea that we bring our whole selves (home and work) to work everyday and then return home with our whole selves (home and work) every night. However, this doesn’t mean we have personal phone calls all day at work or that we “Blackberry” all night at home. If we understand and appreciate that concept, we allow ourselves to be the same whole integrated person wherever we are – we have integrity.

Dictionary.com defines integrity as “the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished.” As Lou Tice described integrity in a recent installment of his Winner’s Circle Network newsletter, “Throughout history, every great philosopher and religious leader has tried to teach us the same lesson - the principle that integrity, or wholeness, is the natural order of things.”

So rather than think of our lives with competing scales that tip one direction or the other, consider integrating ourselves and our lives so that we give ourselves permission to be our whole, integrated, authentic selves, all day, everyday, everywhere. Perhaps then we will feel our “natural order” and our lives won’t seem out of balance.