Work/life balance

Andre Zanardo, ID Executive Coach & Psychoanalyst (Jungian)



A great deal has been written about work/life balance and how essential it is for our overall health and wellbeing. But what is work/life balance?

Essentially it is developing and maintaining a meaningful balance between the factors of daily living, including healthy relationships, physical and psychological wellbeing, work that you enjoy and from which you derive satisfaction, spiritual development (eg religious belief, or self-reflective activity like meditation, yoga etc), financial stability/security, and free time. If any of these factors are left ‘undernourished’, there is likely to be deterioration in our general state of wellbeing.

Depending upon stage and circumstances of life, meaningful balance will mean the choice of greater emphasis on different factors at different times and because life presents us with a series of transitions, it is inevitable that imbalance will occur.

One example of an indicator of imbalance is excessive working hours that subsume the other factors of daily living and manifest as high stress levels, relationship difficulties or breakdown, declining physical and mental health (weight gain and its ongoing implications for our health, feelings of ‘emptiness’ and depression etc) and so on. The key is to address the imbalance before it becomes entrenched. Above all, we must recognise that developing and maintaining a meaningful balance between the factors of daily living is a matter of choice and we all have control over our work/life balance through the choices we make.

However, for most of us developing and maintaining work/life balance does not ‘come naturally’ and is a skill that has to be learned. At Integral Development we run residential Restoring Spirit and Balance workshops specifically for this purpose. The feedback from these workshops has been extremely positive, with participants reporting significant improvement in their work/life balance and the attendant benefits of improved general wellbeing.

The Restoring Spirit and Balance residential workshops are run by Dr. Ron Cacioppe (Integral Development Managing Director) and Andre Zanardo (Jungian psychoanalyst and yoga instructor) and can be tailored to suit the needs of your organisation.

For further information on the Integral Development Restoring Spirit and Balance residential workshops, contact the Integral Development office on 6304 8354 or call Andre on 0412 130 313.