Choosing How to Carry Your Load:
Achieving Work Life Balance
By: Emily D., MSEJ Writer
The balance of work and life—the fine line between where your professional self ends and your personal life begins—is a challenge that all working adults have. With military life, you are faced with navigating the changing tides of work life balance, often in a new city, with a new job, and new expectations within your family. The working world has been focused on creating balance for employees, but for military spouses the search for balance can often times seem overwhelming as the pressures of work and family can be magnified amongst the uncertainties of military life that force you to adapt on a moment’s notice.
Work life balance can be found by:
Moving Away from the Mindset of 50/50:
For most, balance means achieving the ultimate perfection of giving equal shares of your attention to both your work and personal life. In the attempt of achieving balance, we often feel a constant struggle over what area of life is fighting for the middle ground.
Give 100% in the current moment during each part of your day, and accept that at times your perfect balance may look like a 60/40 split, but that is ok because in the next moment, it will shift back to a more equal distribution.
For a military spouse, your balance will often look like a swinging pendulum caught between your career and military life, but at some point that pendulum will no longer be swinging or at least not as wildly.
Creating a Support System:
Your zip code will change, your friends will relocate, and the make up of your own family will evolve overtime.
Create a system of support within your community. As a military family, it can become easy to get into the mindset of self-reliance,