Your life's work is not balance. It's influence.

There are many sources of information on how to balance life and work, as if being paid for something automatically meant being less alive while you do it.  Work involves effort that gets results, and life involves staying alive, which often involves making money, which means doing work.

What you are doing at work - right now, in the job for which you earn money - is your life's work. It's the work you do with your breath and your thought and your time and your effort. It's a big part of who you are and how you are and even how you relate to friends or family.  Your life's work is your work. And despite the best efforts at contracting out and delegating, you can't make more of your life to make up for the life you give to your work.

As human beings, we all come with a built in program for our life's work. We are all highly sensitive to our connectedness to other people (whether or not we see that as a benefit). Our life's work is to have influence on the people around us, either directly (by making change happen in them) or indirectly (by changing circumstances, environments or stuff so that change happens in other people). We are all in the business of influence, and our life is not so much traded for that influence as lived through the building and exchange of influence. We are the influence we experience - as givers and as receivers.

It's time to stop balancing life against non-life. Instead, wonder how to have the influence you want to have, so that your life's work has the impact that you want to have. Think of it as doing your part of the contract you have with life - that mysterious concept that created you and sustains you and will one day end your work. The influence you have on your clients, customers, co-workers, communities, employees, supervisors and bosses is the work you are doing with your life.

You are also doing your life's work when you go home and change people's lives there. Your life's work is what changes in others because they have some connection with you. How's yours coming?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The hypnotic contract

Under what conditions would you allow someone else to tell you what to think?   If you have watched a stage hypnotist, you have seen what looks like one person exercising remarkable control over the thoughts and actions of another. It is fascinating, in part, because we have all seen it happen in real life. Suddenly someone we know seems to be relying on someone else to do the thinking.  Even if the influence is good, it is a little frightening. The secret is that there are no magic words.  In order to lead someone into hypnosis, that person has to be willing to go there. Often the people you see on stage are more than willing. For whatever reasons, they are enthusiastic about giving up self control and allowing someone else to take charge. They know that there are limits to what can happen on stage and they are only agreeing to give up control within those limits. What you see in hypnosis is an agreement between two people. Like all agreements between human beings, it stretches as far...
Read more

Good with people

What do you think of when you hear the phrase "good with people?" When a wine is good with steak, it means that both the steak and the wine taste better when enjoyed together. If you are 'good with people' that could mean that both you and they perform better when you work together. "Good with people" should not be confused with charm or grace. Many famous leaders have, in the absence of any obvious charm or eloquence, managed to get people to produce at high levels. Some introverts fail to be influential; some extraverts fail to be effective. The most useful criteria for "good with people" is the performance that results when an individual is working with others: does the sum exceed the total of the parts? Or would they all have been better working from separate cubicles? We are entering the season of networking: it's a perfect time to observe the difference between the people who are working the room and the people who are making the room w...
Read more

The fine line between observations, suggestions and commands

I have been watching Tony Robbins this week in the documentary called " I Am Not Your Guru ." You can read a nicely ambivalent review in the Financial Times here.   I think the ambivalence is built into the process, which might be surprising given the loud celebration that characterizes the Date with Destiny in the film. For those of us whose work has evolved from NLP, there are lessons to be learned from modelling the most famous and successful practitioner of NLP (Robbins has far surpassed all the founders by all measures of success). Because he does so much so well, Robbins lets us see how fine the line is between observing and suggesting. Let me explain. Robbins frames his "interventions" both with the exercises and performances we do not see in the film and with his invitations. The film opens with an intervention with a young man who says he is suicidal; it is only later that we see Robbins say he is looking for someone who is suicidal to work with. Since...
Read more