After decades of promoting work-life balance, stress and burnout are still rampant, if not growing, in our organizations. Have our efforts to create work-life balance failed?
In this episode, Cathy talks about how our ways of thinking about work-life balance and quality time, which came into widespread use in the 1980’s, not only failed to fix the problem, but in many ways, made it worse. She explores:
- The central problem with how most of us think about the struggle between work and personal life and the debilitating stress it creates.
- How our well-meaning advice on solving the work-life balance issue has actually exacerbated the problem.
- Her own experience with burnout, her process of recovery, and what she needed to unlearn to begin to forge a healthy relationship with work.
- A shift in perspective and a way forward for leaders that puts the responsibility for the problem where it belongs – within a complex relationship between the individual, the culture, and the organizations in which they work.
- Finally, she proposes that as we debate the future of work and what it will look like, we need to put personal and collective well-being at the center of the conversation.
You can find an adapted transcript of this episode on my blog, Field Notes.
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