One of the phrases I enjoy hearing least is the phrase “work-life balance”. What I don’t appreciate about it is that it implies that you are either alive or…at work (and therefore possibly dead).

However, I do appreciate that it puts the words work and life in the same sentence. I have a different view of this idea as it relates to alignment in life.

Let’s imagine a wheel as a metaphor that represents our life. On that wheel is included all of our relationships, roles and responsibilities each existing in equal sections. Just as a wheel on a car will wobble if it isn’t balanced, if we don’t experience specific aspects of our life as balanced or aligned in a that allows us to experience regular episodes of joy and peace, our wheel of life becomes imbalanced and we essentially wobble just like the maligned wheel on a car.

What I propose is that leadership is less about having an even split between work and “living” and more about our work being aligned with our life purpose, as would any of our other roles in life. When our work is not aligned with our life purpose and balanced on our wheel with our other roles we begin to feel the effects of this as a loss of energy and an imbalance. And this effects our ability to be in full creative expression across all of those areas of life that are important to us.