THE QUARTERLY PUBLICATION OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF OSTEOPATHIC PEDIATRICIANS
Summer 2016 Issue
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Editor's Corner
Work-life Balance: The Power and Misnomer of Words
By Robert G. Locke, DO, MPH, FACOP
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Robert G. Locke, DO, MPH, FACOP |
Work-Life Balance – It doesn’t have to be that way.
Words are powerful and can falsely frame a situation, creating a lose-lose situation from what in reality is a “win-win” or at least “better-win-than-most.” For new graduates and residents in training, there is no stronger example of this than “work-life” balance. Automatically juxtaposing “work” against “life” suggests there must be a conflict between “work” and “life” and that more “work” or any “work” diminishes “life.”
Is that true? Can't physicians enjoy work and have a meaningful life at work and have an enjoyable meaningful life outside of work? Who said that "life" outside of "work" did not involve effort and that the paid-work of being a physician, did not bring happiness and value to “life”?
In my observations, students, residents and attending physicians who are happy productive physicians, parents, lovers, friends, athletes and non-guilty intermittent Netflix binge-watchers do not view work and life as two totally separate and competing events, but two valuable complementary overlapping events. If we viewed it as an equation, life would equal the synergism of home/non-physician activities + physician-related activities.
Here are a few lessons learned from highly successful physicians with wonderful home-personal-family lives:
- Accept reality’s restrictions.
- It is not always going to be easy and it is not always going to work, but if it works 80-90% of the time, that is successful.
- If you want children – now is an excellent time.
- It will discombobulate your life and mess up your (and everyone you work with's) schedules. But there is far greater flexibility and support in training programs than later in life. Even though my university’s residency directors have mini-seizures whenever we present the data, 27 years of age is the optimal chance of having a successful pregnancy. Go for it.
- You are not alone.
- Ask a farmer, artist, struggling musician, lawyer, PhD graduate student, stateside spouse of deployed overseas soldier or the housekeeper who cleans the floors in your clinic or hospital at night about work-life balance.
- Being a physician is a great gig.
- Being a physician-astronaut may be the coolest job not on earth. On terra firma, being a physician is a great gig. We get to make a difference in people’s lives, do intellectually and physically challenging skilled work, positively contribute to society and are financially rewarded better than 95% of other professions. Rewarding work can make you happy in all aspects of life.
- There is not equality for female physicians.
- Women always carry disproportionate responsibilities of parenting. It is not unique to medicine. Planning to deal with this ahead of time in the physician-workplace or home workplace is essential.
- One size does not fit all.
- There is increasing flexibility and opportunities to manage your work environment, especially if working for a larger employer or not restricted to location. Asking can create opportunities.
- Maybe you cannot have it all, but you can have many things that matter to you.
The common threads: (1) ignoring the mythical pursuit that physician-related activities and non-physician-related activities are mutually exclusive events competing for success - happiness; (2) setting realistic goals; (3) accepting bumps in the road; (4) if others, often with greater financial and environment challenges, can pull it off, we can too; and (5) intermittently actively favoring life or work allows for greater long-term synergy.
Our happiness may in fact have nothing to do with finding balance but much rather, as John Irving writes, with finding a way of life we love and having the courage to live it. – Dr. Andreas Schingshackl |
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life. – Alain de Botton |
We are successful physicians because we make good decisions and ultimately do what is needed. I am in balance, because my work and life do not compete with each other, they are synergistic. – Dr. Tessie W. October |
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