50MINUTES - Find Your Work-Life Balance: Stop your work from taking over your life

It is impossible to find good balance if you do not know what is likely to push you over the edge. The first thing to do therefore involves taking a moment to reflect on what drives you to act in life and on your values, your driving force and your limits.

Advertisements, magazines, constant information, the internet, the difficulty of choosing (which stems from our consumer society), social, professional and familial pressure, etc. This is the scene surrounding us. It is difficult to know what we really want in this context! Yet this is the heart of the matter: determining what we need in order to be happy.

Do you know which values drive you to act? In order to get a clear idea of this, take a pencil and simply circle a figure between 1 and 6 (from most important to least important) in each line of the table below but watch out, each figure can only be circled once. Forget all outside pressures and only consider what truly counts for you, in order to establish a mental hierarchy of these elements.

Other values can be added to those listed here, such as participating in a sports team, getting involved in a humanitarian project or association, discovering other cultures, etc. You should also be aware that the classification that you are going to obtain here is far from unchangeable. Our values develop over our lives: adjustments will be necessary over time in order to continually find balance.

Now redo this same exercise to indicate the positioning of your values in your current daily life. Which value takes up the most space?

Now, compare each point in the first and second table. The first corresponds to the values which you should be prioritising to feel good. The second illustrates the place that these different areas currently occupy in your day to day life. If there are significant differences between the two, you are in an unbalanced situation, and you must use much more energy to keep moving forward. You must therefore put a strategy in place to reduce this gap as much as possible, or you risk falling apart.

To do this, the starting point is to identify what really drives you, your true motivation and the meaning that you want your life to have. This general meaning has already been hinted at through the responses you gave regarding your priorities.

What do you want to be when you grow up?. This is the question that we were all asked as children, and the question that we surprise ourselves by asking younger generations, as if our future job is the only thing that is likely to bring us happiness and fulfilment.

Take a step back: do you think that you have followed the path that you had imagined? Ask yourself this question, without limiting yourself to the professional side of your life. Use the values listed in the table above to quickly carry out a brief assessment of your life path. Have you made choices that are in keeping with your wants and abilities? If this is the case, then you are undoubtedly not far from discovering your driving force, the fundamental element that gives you the energy to move forward in the right direction and that makes you happy. All you have to do is find the common feature of your different life choices. Is it sharing? Commitment? Love? The need to understand? The desire to create?

If you are still searching for the driving force in your life, keep in mind that what you do every day does not necessarily define you! Maybe you are at odds with the values that you believe in and, consequently, your view of your motivation is undoubtedly obscured. It is up to you to focus on the values that you placed at the top of your list; these priorities that you set are part of your source of energy. Based on these, you will be able to find the ideal which you must reach for to find happiness.

Finding the meaning of your life will give you the confidence you need to feel more in harmony with yourself. Once your driving force has been identified, you will be able to rearrange your life so that it is not pushed back into second place. You will be able to give direction to everything you do as, unlike values whose importance varies constantly, your fundamental source of energy should not change.