The Upside of “Doing It All”
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given”
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We spend so much time talking about how it’s hard to do everything. There’s no shortage of books teaching you how to do it all or lamenting the fact that you can’t do it all. In fact, I just bought one the other day called “I Know How She Does It.” We often think about how our work is at conflict with the other life roles that we star in (and sometimes they are). However, today I want to discuss how holding multiple roles can actually be a good thing.
Have you ever stopped to think about how being a mom makes you a better employee? What about how being an employee helps you be a better friend, community member, or wife? In this post, my goal is to introduce you to the positive side of holding multiple roles, explain the process of this positive spillover, and encourage you to change your mindset around the interaction between work and life.
When your engagement and experiences in one role (e.g., work) help you to improve the quality of your life in another role (e.g., family), you are experiencing work-life enrichment (Greenhaus & Powell, 2006). The way this works is that by engaging in one role, you are able to accumulate resources that then allow you to perform better in another role. You might be thinking, are we really going to talk about resources again? And the answer is a big, resounding YES! Resources are what allow you to meet the multiple demands that you face from your various roles. Without time, energy, money, etc. you wouldn’t be able to successfully perform as an employee, wife, mother, friend, or community member. I know I keep emphasizing the importance of resources, but they are SO important, and we need to mindfully seek out and utilize our resources if we want to achieve (which I know we all do) our elegantly balanced life.
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The model of work-life enrichment includes five categories of resources: skills and perspectives, psychological and physical resources, social-capital resources, flexibility, and material resources. Let’s break them each down and look at some tangible examples.
1) Skills & Perspectives
Obviously, this category consists of two types of resources. Skills can include cognitive, interpersonal, coping, or multitasking skills. Knowledge and wisdom that you gain from one role or the other also falls under this category. Perspectives, on the other hand, involve the way that you perceive the world around you or handle situations. The idea behind this type of resource is that engaging in more than one role helps to expand one’s worldview (Greenhaus & Powell, 2006).
So what does this actually look like? Here’s an example. As a mother, I had to learn how to multitask pretty quickly after my first child was born. These multitasking skills came in very handy in helping our household function successfully. But I don’t leave those multitasking skills at home when I hop in my car to commute to work – I take them with me and apply them to my work as a professor and researcher. Learning how to multitask at home has allowed me to utilize those skills at work to be more productive. These multitasking skills can also have an indirect effect on my performance at work. If I am multitasking away at home and able to meet my goals in my family role, I’m going to feel really good about myself and be in a good mood on my way to work. This positive mood will then help me to perform better at work. Make sense?
2) Psychological and Physical Resources
Resources such as self-efficacy, self-esteem, optimism, hope, and physical health fall under this category. We usually work on our physical health during our personal time. However, it’s easy to see how increased physical fitness could help us be more successful in other roles. Maybe it allows you to have more energy to play with your kids. Maybe it allows you to successfully do a physically demanding job. Or maybe it just makes your feel really good and that positive feeling helps you to engage better in every aspect of your life.
3) Social-Capital Resources
Social capital is a resource because having strong interpersonal relationships can often make it easier to accomplish our goals. Because our social networks often span our different life roles, it’s easy to see how social capital can have a positive impact on those different roles. For example, when I first got hired at Baylor my family and I didn’t know anything about Waco, the school districts, pediatricians, neighborhoods, etc. We also didn’t have a huge social network here. The only network we did have were my work colleagues. They graciously provided information and advice about all the things from pediatricians to restaurants we needed to try. This helped me to successfully meet the demands I was facing in my family life, but wouldn’t have been possible if I wasn’t engaged in more than one role.
4) Flexibility
Flexibility refers to the extent to which you have control over the timing, pace, and location at which you meet your role demands. Some of us have flexible jobs where we can work from home and choose the hours we want to work. Having this type of flexibility at work allows you to perform better in your other roles because you are able to more fully engage in those roles as needed. Because I have a flexible job, I am able to pick up my kids at 3pm or stay home with them when they are sick. In other words, I’m able to effectively perform in my role as a mother because my role as an employee is flexible. On the flip side, we can also have greater flexibility in our other roles. For example, if your spouse has a flexible job, he is able to step in and help meet some of the family demands allowing you to focus more and perform more effectively at work.
5) Material Resources
Finally, our roles can enrich each other through material resources (i.e., money or gifts). The easiest example of this is that your job allows you to earn an income that then allows you to effectively engage in your roles outside of work such as put food on your table, buy your children’s school supplies, or take that dream vacation. However, it can go the other way too. Maybe you received a beautiful, chic suit as a gift from a friend and when you wear that suit to work you show up as the most confident version of you which enhances your performance at work. In my first year as a doctoral student, I asked for pink office supplies for Christmas and my mom delivered. Her gift of pens, post-its, staples, and notebooks allowed me to perform effectively at work and added a dash of joy since it was all pink!
I hope that by walking you through these different resources and how they can be generated in one role and utilized in another role helps you to start to see the positive side of doing more than one thing. I truly believe that simply being aware of the positive impact my different roles can have on each other helps me start to search for the positive in my life, which snowballs into a positive mindset toward everything I do.
However, I want to make sure you don’t walk away from this today thinking, “Okay, I really should be doing it all.” Let me stop you right there, no you shouldn’t. To truly get the most enrichment out of our different life roles, we need to make sure we are playing the right roles. Take time to reflect on your roles. Which ones generate the most resources? Are there any roles that not only don’t generate resources, but that just drain your resources? In other words, are you hanging out with friends or volunteering for committees that simply don’t light you up? If so, it might be time to step out of the spotlight for those roles. When we’re clear on the essential roles we want to hold and clear on the priorities within those roles (for help with this, you can check out this post - Elegant Balance Foundations and this post - Intentionally Balanced: How to Create a Life Plan), we can truly harness the power of work-life enrichment.
Is a better work-life balance one of your goals this year?
I’ve created a workbook just for you!
If you’re interested in creating a work-life balance characterized by simplicity, joy, and beauty, why don’t you start by checking out my Elegant Balance Workbook? In it, I help you define what work-life balance looks like for you and share some tips on creating that balance. I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it – Balance doesn’t happen by accident. What are you waiting for? Let’s pursue our Elegant Balance together!
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We spend a great deal of time at work. Like Annie Dillard once said, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” I encourage you to look around your office and see what steps you can take to add simple luxuries to your workday because in the grand scheme of things, they will add up and lead to a luxurious life!