Nigel Marsh on Work-Life Balance

Just wanted to alert Business EQ readers about this wonderful (and short!) talk about work-life balance given by Nigel Marsh as a Ted Talk last May.

Marsh, the author of Fat, Forty, and Fired, as well as Overpaid and Underlaid, says he began his quest for balance when he discovered at 40 that "I had become the classic corporate warrior. I was eating too much, drinking too much, working too hard, and I was neglecting the family." After staying home a year with his family and then spending seven years researching and writing about work-life balance, he has come up with four axioms about the state of the concept.

First, he says, "we need honest debate" about the issue. "Certain jobs and careers are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged with a young family," he notes.

Second, we have to take responsibility ourselves for creating work-life balance in our own lives -- not leave it up to governments and corporations.

Third, we need to change our time frame for work-life balance, from trying to cram everything into one day to looking at something more long-term.

And fourth, "we need to approach balance in a balanced way."

You can hear more about these ideas on the talk itself -- it's just 10 minutes long. But I'll leave you with a quote from Marsh that really resonated with me:

"Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think it can transform society."