7 personal battles to reconcile professional and family life
Reconciliation is the true glass ceiling of mothers today. The great risk of the conflict between work and personal life is caer in victimhood and guilt: feel victim of the system, the company, society ... It is to think that as things are, there is no choice but to fail in one of the two areas or give up one of them. Victimization in the denial of personal abilities and the beginning of what can end in a depression.
After advising for 25 years senior executives of more than 400 companies from almost fifty countries, Luis Huete, IESE professor and guest professor of Harvard and Thunderbird, and author of the book Build your dream, is aimed at people with ambition with an interesting recipe for Manage your dreams effectively.
Huete proposes an integrated strategy to achieve success in the personal and professional field. The starting premise is clear: success is more lasting if personal dreams and work dreams are managed simultaneously.
Do you live or work? 7 battles to achieve personal and professional balance
1. Desires both personal achievement and professional success
We must ambition the two achievements and at the same time. Not one when the other is achieved. It is easier to succeed professionally than personally. However, without human quality, not much is achieved in personal relationships. On the other hand, we all know people with a strong personal imbalance who have had professional success. The intimate satisfaction that personal achievement gives is more intense and more stable than the professional one. Therefore, the real human challenge is to reconcile achievement in both facets. The smartest way to achieve this is to make personal achievement the priority over professional achievement.
2. Intelligently feed emotional needs
There are four basic desires (emotional needs) that move the behavior of people and that you have to feed on a daily basis.
The first is that you have to feed the desire for security, certainty, comfort, control. But this does not mean avoiding difficulties. You have to learn to live without fear, know how to face risks etc.
The second desire is the need for variety. It is the desire for change, surprise, challenge. Boredom and apathy are some warning mechanisms of this emotional need. To do this, you have to set objectives and challenges, aspire to be more cultured, have an interest in things.
The third need to be nourished is the singularity, of highlighting. It is a legitimate desire like others, but it can be managed in an unintelligent way, for example, by being derogatory, criticizing others, etc.
The fourth desire is the connection, of sharing, of being accepted. People who learn to live without fear, to challenge themselves, to value their role in life and to feel close to others, end up producing enormous energy in their lives. It is not a good idea to make the measure of personal success be: the money that is earned, the position that is occupied, the relationships that are achieved or the image one has. When people are emotionally fed poorly in their workplaces or in their personal lives, two results are produced: on the one hand, what is done is rejected internally, work or family, or both and that in turn provokes a reaction of personal frustration.
3. Personal growth
It is the secret to making valuable contributions in professional activities and personal environments. The professional and personal success is in doing things that are valued by others and that increase the demand that one would have in the market to make them. Well, to make valuable contributions, the key lies in personal development.
4. Defense mechanisms to manage conflicts
Well-managed conflicts are always a lever for personal improvement and, therefore, for a medium-term contribution. It is a fallacy to think so much that the work-life balance will be exempt from major conflicts and that any defense mechanism is in itself beneficial. The conflicts between personal and professional life have to be managed with mature defense mechanisms, tricks that people use to move that focus away from us. The following ten mature defense mechanisms are:
Know yourself better (What facet of my character is the one that is spoiling things?);
To reason (break up the big snowball);
Anticipate and anticipate;
Move the focus conflict: healthy leisure (to avoid getting to the bad stress area you have to relax);
Reduce the emotional load and de-dramatize;
Sense of humor (know how to laugh at yourself);
Altruism and spirit of service (seek the good of others);
Asceticism (as an attempt to exchange immediate pleasure for a later gratification of a higher order;
Give meaning and purpose to the conflict (Any circumstance can be positive, you can learn something, things happen for the good of one);
Control the focus, the interpretation and acting (conflicts are a source of personal improvement).
5. Discipline to improve relationships
There are three levels of relationships to which one can aspire. From worse to better are the following:
Level 1: when that relationship is purely to receive what one wants. The relationship is maintained as long as it serves my purposes.
Level 2: when reciprocity is expected. It is given to receive. Fairness is expected and if there is not, the relationship breaks down.
Level 3: when a party agrees to serve the needs of the other party without necessarily expecting anything in return. At a higher level of relationship, the satisfactions can be found.
6. Focus on the day to day without waiting for a stroke of luck.
The best lever to change the course of events are the decisions that are taken from this moment on the reconciliation between work and life. The fallacy with which we can deceive ourselves is that we have to sacrifice the present to opt for a better future that will come in the form of a natural process. You can not think that it's time to crush yourself, leave your skin for a few years, sacrifice what you need in the short term and all this for a somewhat vague idea of reward for the future.
Generating an attractive future consists of visualizing the content of that future. Each one has to ask a series of future questions: What do I want to achieve in my personal life? What contributions of value can contribute in my personal life as in the professional? What reward in life would I like to receive?
7. Achieve more inner and outer abundance
It is a great falsehood to think that there is little that people can do to achieve more abundances in their lives. The three variables that initiate the system of personal progress are: "how do I think and what do I believe"; "how do I look at reality" and "how do I subjectively interpret the things around me". One of the conflicts between personal and work life is not having time for everything. Therefore, we must achieve greater productivity in the use of time (eliminate, simplify and combine). We must create in both areas a similar number, in number and intensity, fond and rewarding memories.
