Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Work-Life Balance


As a mother of 2 young children who decided to ditch a stable and relatively comfortable corporate career and domestic helper to wash, cook, clean and look after my own family and kids at home, I absolutely agree with Nigel that we should not leave the quality of our life in the hands of incompatible jobs, other people and the government. We should stop looking to others for answers and to look inside for the type of balanced lives we each want to lead that fulfills our spiritual, mental, financial and physical needs.

As Nigel shares, we need to take stock of how much and what we really need rather than "working long hard hours at jobs they (we) hate, to earn enough money to buy things they(we) don't need to impress people that they(we) don't like".

His concluding point that "small things matter" and "approaching balance in a balanced way" is particularly important. Seeking a balance is not about making radical and dramatic changes to our current way of life. It is about making the smallest investments in the right places to improve the quality of our life and transform society's simplistic definition of success that "the person who dies with the most money wins" to a more "balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like".