Balance vs. Harmony

Is there a difference between balance and harmony when it comes to work/life balance?

This month I’m focusing on founder/CEO wellness. Founders need to take care of themselves in order to avoid or at least mitigate burn-out.  It’s so easy to get so involved in and on your business that you forget that one of your greatest assets is yourself.  

One way to tackle it is to really define a work-life balance.  But let’s look at this whole work-life balance for a moment.  Should it be a balance?  Or is it something else?

I recently moderated a speaker panel for The State of Women’s international women's summit, Amplifying Her Voice. The panelists were all working moms and included entrepreneurs as well as corporate employees.  We were discussing how to balance being a mom, having a career, your relationship with your partner and keeping it all together. What was interesting was that the word "harmony" came up at one point as an alternative to balance.  What’s the difference? 

Balance

Balance leans more toward the need to be doing one or another, allocating our time and attention so that we feel we have served all well. I think of it as two pies.  One is made up of work, one is made up of your personal life.  You serve up a balance of slices between the two.  Some days the slice of work is bigger and some days the slice of personal life is bigger. They both fit on the plate but they are distinctly different.

In the speaker panel, one woman who was a corporate employee and working mom felt it was truly a balance and she did not integrate her family life into her work life at all but carefully balanced both experiences together.  There was really no way to integrate family in her corporate life - and that makes total sense. 

I’m always so in awe of women who can pull off the corporate work-life balance.  They impress me with their ability to bounce between the two personas and give their all in both places.  That was not me and that’s why accidentally falling into entrepreneurship was such a blessing for me. If you are currently working in a corporate environment and are embracing the work-life balance scenario, I’d love to hear how you do it.

Harmony

Now I mentioned that the word “harmony” came up during the panel discussions. I was really intrigued by this.  How does harmony differ from balance? Harmony allows us to take the holistic approach that we are not just entrepreneurs and founders. We're not just moms. We are not just our partner's partner.  Harmony lends itself to integrating all the facets of your life together to add up to the whole you.  Harmony allows you to NOT compartmentalize all the parts of your life but integrate them unapologetically.  It’s allowing your family to be involved and around your business and letting your kids see how hard you work and what being successful takes as well as how failures happen and how you recover from those.  

Take that pie scenario I mentioned earlier, with harmony, it’s less a pie and more of a, well, soup.  All your ingredients go in one pot.  You may not taste all of them at one time, but they mix together to create a really wonderful dish.

When you’re an entrepreneur, you most likely have the flexibility to allow for harmony over balance.  That’s why many of us opted for this lifestyle and career path.  However, the pandemic forced us all to bring our family and work lives together for both corporate employees as well as entrepreneurs.  We all had our kids or pets “visit” our zoom calls and I think it was a good thing. Perhaps this has paved a little more of the way for all of us to have a little harmony between our personal and work lives.

How can we juggle the multiple roles we play?  I’m all for harmony.  I’m all for being our authentic whole selves and being able to enjoy our lives as a whole.

Listen to the words of Liane Moriarty, who says: “To be real is not to compromise…to be real is to be imperfect. Being real means knowing who and what you are. It means being the best version of who you can be, not being someone else’s ideal or better or deserving person or doing the work of someone who is less than perfect.”  So why the need to feel you have to balance? 

Creating content about our different parts of ourselves (or at least our intersections) helps us tune our relationships to a higher frequency and feel more grounded and whole. My single-mom life includes 4 sons, a dog, a cat and a boutique consulting business so finding harmony can be tricky. Being in constant motion is just part of the game.  But being my authentic self is part of what I can offer as a consultant.  And my authentic self includes all of me - my professional me and my personal me.

Maya Angelou once said “You are not your job…you are not your business, your relationships, and your dreams. You are also not your religion or your politics. If our aim is to be autonomous beings — to have agency — then we have to include ourselves as much as our very bodies to be authentic, whole, and complete beings.”

How do you feel about being a whole, harmonious work/life person?