Abstract
We are all actors in this drama called life. The different hats we wear often place us into conflicting roles that demand our energy, talent, time, and physical presence.
Finding balance in the various roles is not a passive activity. It requires an investment of time and energy. In order to achieve balance in your life, you must identify the component parts. Many times we find ourselves in the role of juggler, trying to keep as many balls in the air as possible without ever getting them all into balance. Often we do not itemize the number of elements that go into our lives. I like to group these elements into three major categories: family/friends, professional life, and leisure time. Attempting to give balanced weight to each part of each category becomes a daunting task. In fact, when I wrote down the aspects of a professional life, I ruefully realized it was impossible within a day or week's time to give an appropriate and satisfying apportionment to each aspect. Instead, I assumed the role of an unrealistic juggler, throwing many problems in the air and hoping they would stay long enough for me to solve the ones that I had in my hand. Attempting to throw too many balls in the air, I often dropped several. I suspect your professional list has similar parts to mine: surgeon, orthopædic physician, CEO or administrator, medical legal consultant, editor, author, researcher, and paper signer.
A professional life is demanding, fulfilling, and insatiable. Often we work 10- or 14-hour days, creating a continuous and forceful pull of energy into this category away from the other two. Working parents all realize that the positive strokes and pleasures one gets from the work environment many times outweigh the hassle and negative aspects of family life. Getting an eight-year-old off to school in the morning or returning home in the evening to deal with the moods of a teenage child often make us spend more time and energy at work. Our hedonistic other self is always looking to maximize pleasure and decrease pain. Part of achieving balance in one's life is being cognizant that one cannot devote 80% of one's time to medicine and still have a life that includes the other crucial aspects of family, friends, and leisure. To combat this, I built in a “professional firewall” to protect myself from my all-encompassing work activities. Part of my firewall was to make commitments to friends/family and leisure time which were inextricable. Setting these activities as a priority above professional demands is important if our lives are to be rich and multidimensional.
The nascence of a career is filled with the uncertainty and fear about whether your successes and goals can be achieved. For me, this translated into throwing enormous amounts of time into my professional life and blinding myself to other areas. One example of a “professional firewall” for which I am very grateful was when Judy returned to graduate school and we decided it was appropriate for me to try to get the children off to school two mornings a week. The initial short-term angst I had from this soon disappeared when I realized that my day still ended at 6:30 PM whether I started my clinic at 9:30 AM or 8:30 AM. I also realized that surgery scheduling was not inviolate, and I could get on the schedule at 9:30 AM or 1 PM. This small effort shifted the balance of energy, making me realize to a small degree what was required to connect with my family.
An interesting, informative, thought-provoking, and maybe conflict-producing exercise is to sit down with your significant other and make parallel lists of the important categories in your lives. Doing this some evening over good brandy or cognac makes the exercise more entertaining than conflict-producing. You need to decide what you feel should be the weight of each item in your inventory. Once you have decided your priorities, then share your list. How you divide your time truly affects the others in your life.
Different perceptions of how time is to be spent is frequently a major underlying conflict in a surgeon's life. More often than not, professional time is primary. We put ourselves in the position of trying to carve out time from our professional life to fulfill our needs and desires with family/friends and leisure time. I recently changed offices and in so doing realized that my walls gave a good indication of my priorities. I do not have a framed copy of my current CV or an embossed version of my most recent research paper hanging on my wall. Dominating the copies of my AAOS and AOFAS certificates are pictures of my grandchildren, other family members, my '55 Thunderbird, and my friends. Look at your wall, mentally eliminate the activities or people behind each specific wall hanging, and determine what their loss would mean to your life.
Over the years, I have shifted the demands of my life by giving weight, energy and time to those most important elements. It is a shared enterprise, taking time with others to determine the true core parts of life. It was not a one-time process, but I found this to be an experience which needed continous revising and updating.
Balance does not mean equal energy to all components of your life at all times. It does mean allocation of time to give your life and those around you a sense of fullness, contentment and diversity. You must learn from the past and let it go, look to the future but not live in it, grab the the common moments in the present, receive pleasure from them, and make them your own.
