The Art of Work-Life Balance with Debbie Millman

(dramatic music) Headspace Studio. Hello again. I'm Debbie Millman and I am your guest host this week. Welcome to Radio Headspace, and welcome to Friday. Today is my last day guest hosting, and I wanna thank you all so much for joining me on this journey. It has been so much fun exploring all the ways we can be intentional about designing work that works for us. I have been talking a lot about work, and while it's incredibly important to me, there is more to life. I have interests outside my career, I'm married, and it's not always easy balancing the professional and the personal. So today I'm going to talk a bit about my path towards work-life balance and share some of what I've learned along the way. And some of that might surprise you. I'm actually going to say something that I think is going to surprise you all. I don't believe in work-life balance. I believe that if you view your work as a calling then it's a labor of love rather than laborious. Your calling can become a life affirming engagement that can provide its own balance and spiritual nourishment. So if you pursue your life as one integrated whole then you're not going to have work in opposition to life. I live a very intentionally elastic life. It was a long time before I got married to someone while having the career that I currently have. And I very intentionally don't have children. Now, I know a lot of women that are married and have children and have very, very vibrant careers. So as you're thinking about your own work-life integration, I think it's important to become very mindful about the choices that you're making and only making choices that are supporting and honoring the goals that you have in your life. You know, everybody wants to think that they can have it all, but I have discovered that I personally couldn't have it all, and I chose to do the kind of work that I wanted to do as opposed to have the kind of family that other people thought was right for me. I'm a person that really loves to work. I love the idea of making something from nothing, whether that be a podcast, or a book, or a lesson plan, but sometimes I enjoy it so much that I can exhaust myself. And oftentimes when that happens, I will get sick. My body will say, "That's it. We're shutting down for a couple of days because you are abusing us." And so in order to avoid that burnout, I've had to put very, very strong boundaries around that space between the zone of working and feeling that it's effortless and timeless and you're just in that joy of making and doing, and where that then seeps into the danger zone, where that is the space between zone and burnout. And it's only with years of experience that you begin to...