hey my name is not joe and i don't work in a factory but i have a house no dog but a family i'm a professor and i'm an executive coach i'm an author a mother a sister a partner a daughter a friend i hold a license in psychotherapy and now i give a ted talk you can imagine that the question how do you get it all under one roof hits me quite often for a very long time i just struggled with my shoulders and i said hmm well i don't know i guess it just works
today i know that's a big lie combining different roles and tasks in our life is everything except coincidence it's not done with just leaning in as facebook ceo cheryl sandberg suggests she also says it's all about the right partner well he doesn't help if he walks away right it's a complex strategy it's a life principle which i call the tailor your life principle it actually consists of many different strategies that those people successfully apply who make it all work and what does successful mean in that context well it means they are doing all of those
things without feeling worn out without suffering from a bad conscience without permanently thinking about what they are missing in their lives without feeling sorry for themselves how do i know well a while ago i conducted an online survey i tried to find out what those happy work life balancers those champions in compatibility do differently from those who aren't satisfied with the combinations of their various obligations in life this group was a rather small group 40 actually out of 196 participants i also talked to some of those successful people people in leadership positions who had kids
or other care duties who had hobbies friends or were engaged in social projects i tried to find out whether what they do is somehow related to my own strategies and today i can say yeah that's the case so let me share some of the secrets secret number one if you want to get it all under one roof the first thing i can recommend throw away your work-life balance when i'm invited to talks usually people believe i'm the work-life balance queen they also believe that my life must be in a total equilibrium that i managed to
dedicate 50 of my lifetime to my private matters and fifty percent to my business duties well that's not the case but you know what i couldn't care less and you know why because i don't believe in that whole concept of work-life balance i actually think it's a total cheat now let me explain why according to the german airster blood one out of two germans are afraid to suffer from burn out in the near future six out of ten feel continuously it and a good work-life balance is a key criterion for many employees when they are
looking out for a new job however measures taken by companies to improve the work-life balance of their employees such as increased home office options or digital detox areas yoga and meditation sessions all great however they are by no means enough to really prevent people from feeling off balance and you know why because they're aiming at achieving a state that is a complete illusion what the hell is work-life balance let's look at that concept first of all it suggests two poles on the scale that from my point of view simply do not exist that is usually
those who work live right or have you ever had your hair done by a dead hairdresser well i haven't i haven't seen one alive due to the pandemic either but that's a different story anyway second question i have how can anyone actually decide what belongs into the pan of life and what belongs into the pan of work people who believe that life does not mean work obviously haven't had the fun yet to have kids in puberty old parents bored friends or trained for a marathon where does my tax declaration go i'm confused next what do
you think about this current definition of work-life balance as here in the cambridge dictionary it says the amount of time you spend doing your job as compared with the amount of time you spend with your family and doing things you enjoy according to this it is basically impossible to enjoy the time you spend your job to me that's simply not true sitting in my quiet office on an early monday morning after a packed weekend with my puberty kids it's absolutely recreational so dividing our life into two parts where one gets the role of the evil
and the other one of the good i don't think that makes sense at all i believe that a concept like this will even hinder us from being satisfied easily we are reviled as workaholics playing in the same league as drug addicts and sense that too much work is super unhealthy and automatically makes us unhappy yet one of the most robust findings out of the world happiness report from 2017 is that unemployment is destructive to people's well-being and this is true for people all over the world the employed evaluate the quality of their lives much more
highly on average than the unemployed individuals who are unemployed also report around 30 more negative feelings in their day-to-day lives so work actually is connected to enjoyment and the last thing i don't like about this common model of work-life balance is that the idea of a balance implies that the answer to satisfaction lies in an equal distribution consequently i could conclude that the more time i need for my work the more time i need to invest in my private duties honestly i did this for a very long time so i was working eight to nine
hours approximately a day afterwards i ran to the supermarket to buy some healthy food i cooked some dinner picked up my kids i played with them and then i hustled to my yoga class you know what on the surface my life really was all in balance however i really really felt exhausted it was only my decision to not balance out full working days with social or recreational pursuits or not work that much on a day that i wanted to have more time for myself that finally led to some kind of inner harmony so here's my
secret number two instead of balancing things out in your life to that eight eight eight recipe eight hours of sleep eight hours of business eight hours of private time try to find your personal mix replace the through a patchwork quote associate with patchwork maybe something like colorful dynamic maybe something like imperfect well yeah it's a mixture of different things and i think this is how we should see our lives actually the tasks that we do stand for the different patches and the good thing is patchwork quilt is anything else but perfect it's individual there's no
master plan however i think there are three things that you need to consider before you start suing first of all you need to know one color patchwork quilt is not a patchwork quilt which means that you should at least integrate a couple of different patches and if you look at what makes people happy besides a paid job it's deep relationships and frequently time for yourself you can spend that time with creative hobbies with sports i don't care as sigmund freud already said love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness and i think you also
need some time for yourself second you should be aware that you can't make a silk purse out of a south ear what does that mean well actually you have to look at your goals you have to look at what you want to achieve and that needs to be coherent with your current life design so if you want to stand there on your 70th birthday and you want your kids to tell nice stories about how you spend time with them you certainly need to integrate a patch like this in your current life design now if you
want to integrate a new patch into your life either because you are getting a child or you're climbing into the leadership position or you do have to do some care work then you will certainly have to sort out one patch one or the other or at least decrease some of them in size so what does that mean the third rule is our day only has 24 hours 168 hours a week and that's the framework you need to stick to and that's what immediately takes me to the third secret of people who make it all work
and that's the aspect that they have learned how to prioritize you know when i received the invitation to this ted talk two days ago no joke one hour before midnight thursday night actually i had a completely full calendar but after quickly checking to talk to you and reflect upon how that talk would be in line with my future plans with my values my passion i decided to cancel everything else and prepare for the talk to be here tonight means that i cannot be with my family and this is because i'm not harry potter so you
can only do one thing at a time and that means you need to take decisions so if anyone on monday asked me how did you manage to do that tech talk i will say by decision taking so here it is taking wise decisions is one secret that people really do who get it all under one roof i just live by the rule you can't have it all at once but many things one after the other getting many things under one roof means taking wise decisions and how to get those wise decisions by introspection naturally so
you really have to find out what do you want in your life be true to yourself each time something new will come in each time you feel overburdened clarify for yourself which of those tasks do deserve your priority because they're in line with your personal goals and that should also make it much easier for you to focus on the things that you do and that's the next secret that successful people do who get it all under one roof it's concentration or focus if they have decided to do something they will really concentrate on that mind
wandering multitasking that's not their thing so practically they will stick with one aspect that they do they won't give up quickly they will just stay in the moment if they play with their kids maybe only one hour a day they will not on the talk on the phone they will not check their emails if they are in a video conference no they commit impulse control they will certainly just stay there and focus the last secret hint that i can share with you today is that successful people who make it all work take responsibility in my
coaching practice i deal with a lot of people who are very unhappy with the designs of their lives there is the manager who feels that he never finds enough time for his family because his job won't allow him to leave his office early there's the part-time worker who tells me that she can't climb the career ladder because she has small kids some of them feel that they suffer from a poor work-life balance because their company doesn't allow for enough flexibility or their partner doesn't support them enough listening to them i frequently get the impression that
they are not the designers of their own quilt but simply the owners all these people do is find reasons for why their life isn't the way they want so by giving other people a certain kind of responsibility of their life design yet when talking to them a bit longer i often find out that the problem is a completely different one they simply do not live the life that they want to live they live the life which they believe is expected of them and that's very often related to what they saw their parents do a research
study conducted by yona lupu showed that even though many individuals consciously aspired to have a more balanced life many continued to reproduce in ethos of hard work and sacrificing family life this suggests that our beliefs formed during our childhood shape our later choices and we often end up in reproducing the status quo even if it's against our own deep desires in other words the barriers to spend our lifetime like we want to spend it often do not lie in organizations or society but within ourselves we consciously or unconsciously repeat what our parents did or we
do the very opposite and we are very unhappy with it yet we can only make significant changes in the direction of the lives that we want to live by finding out whether there is a gap between our unconscious ambitions and our conscious expectations and beliefs this means if you want to feel balanced in your life you first have to be true to yourself what does really matter to you how would you your life to be in a second step ask yourself what can you do to come contribute to come closer to the design that you
want for today simply remember the one and only designer of your patchwork quilt that is you so throw away the balance get a needle and a thread and tailor your life to fly according to your own instructions you
