May 02, 2008
I
magine, for a moment, a world in which a lawyer’s work and life are completely separate.
No, I’m serious. Pause and imagine it.
When I try to envision that world, I get deeply distressed. If work and life are separate, and if life has no part in work, what does that imply? Work = no life, and the absence of life = death. So, work = death.
Ouch.
I began thinking about this when someone recently questioned the name of my website and blog (and, for that matter, business): does “Life at the Bar” mean I focus on work/life balance? (An ironic question, since that’s a phrase that I truly dislike and find dangerously misleading.) But no, I focus on a much broader scope of topics, and I’ve never had a coaching engagement that’s centered on or been directed primarily toward work/life balance.
Or perhaps I’m a life coach for lawyers? There’s nothing wrong with that; life coaching can be a valuable service. But that isn’t what I’m about. I work with clients on business development, career strategy, leadership development, among other issues, and we typically address life coaching issues only to the extent that it affects my client’s professional life. In other words, if a client is going through a divorce, we may touch on how to stay focused on work when in the office, even when grief or anger threatens to overwhelm, but I’m not the coach to help with sorting through how to approach friends who stop calling because of their divided loyalty resulting from being friends with the divorcing spouses.
Instead, “Life at the Bar” derives from the concept that, to be effective advocates and counselors, we must be alive — fully present, focused, and all systems go — in practice. While there’s certainly a separation between professional and personal life, it strikes me as sad that work and life are viewed as being divisible, separate domains that must be balanced. And I begin to imagine conference rooms and courtrooms full of zombies citing legal maxims, just waiting to leave the office and return to life. Thank goodness that isn’t true for most lawyers!
I’m moving more and more toward the concept of WorkLife Integration. Integration means that, while professional life and personal life remain separate (as I would suggest they should), there’s life in work, and work and life go hand-in-hand. Work is endowed with passion and purpose and emotion and logic and humor and relationships and all the other things that make life lively.
Most importantly, no one has to spend hours at the office, slugging through the slew, waiting for 5 PM or 7 PM (or later) to begin living again during precious non-work hours, and no one has to attach an ill-fitting mask to survive. When work and life are integrated, we’re reasonably authentically who we are, whether at home or at work, and rewards flow in both places. Of course, there will be times when we’re eager to leave the professional focus at work and to turn to the personal focus at home, or vice versa, but there’s life in both places.
So. How integrated is your WorkLife?
If you haven't already done so, please consider signing up for the Life at the Bar blog's RSS feed. Or you might like to receive the posts by email or to subscribe to the weekly email newsletter Leadership Matters for Lawyers, and you'll see subscription forms for both in the middle column. I promise that I won't rent, sell, or otherwise provide your information to anyone else and that your email address will be used only as you request.
Thanks for visiting! (And don't worry... You'll only see this note the first 3 times you visit the blog.)
