I tried for years to keep my life and work

separate. I'm so glad I stopped.

Updated by Amanda Machado Apr 24, 2017, 8:00am EDT

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When I was 26 years old and living in South Africa, I was offered a job that required me to live
in the United States. It should have been good news. I had hoped for this job offer for months.
But there was a problem: I did not want to leave my partner, whom I had met in South Africa
eight months before.

For weeks, I worried about my decision. I wanted to tell my new potential boss about my
romantic relationship and ask if I could work from South Africa to stay with him. But many
friends thought this would be incredibly risky, even somewhat laughable. They argued that
admitting a deep commitment to a romantic relationship would make me look uncommitted to
the work. It would imply to my boss that I was foolish. Many thought it could lead to me losing
the offer altogether.

But I decided not to take their advice. I called my new boss and told him what was going on: I
felt deeply committed to both my partner in South Africa and this job, and I was pleading for a
way to have both.

His response? He chuckled a bit and said, Everybody whos been in love knows how that goes.
Lets try it out and see if we can make it work.

I was shocked. (Later, I would find out that my boss had gotten engaged just before we had this
conversation, so I may have simply caught him in a particularly romantic stage of his life.)

Throughout my 20s, I had internalized the message that it was irrelevant and even
unprofessional to speak about your personal life at work. Over the years, I had observed
friends and family members hide pregnancies from colleagues, skip college reunions or other
celebrations because of conflicting work responsibilities, deny the importance of a family
obligation to continue showing up for a time-sensitive project, and generally lie about their
personal life in order to be available at all times for their job.

But eventually I learned that our personal and career goals dont have to be in conflict. In fact,
when we acknowledge both, not only do our personal lives become happier but our professional
lives become more successful.

How I stopped pretending my personal life didnt matter at work

In South Africa, I worked at LEAP Science and Maths Schools, a nonprofit that championed
the idea that personal growth was professional growth, and vice versa. During meetings with my
boss, he would not only talk about my work but also show a level of care toward my personal
development.

As a freelancer, I was upfront with him about personal factors that affected my level of
involvement with his organization: my romantic relationship, my fear of working far from my
family, my desire to make time in my work schedule for my own writing. We would navigate
through those concerns together. The relative ease with which we managed these conversations
made me question: Why in the past had I thought this wasnt possible?

As part of my work for LEAP, I was mentored by a woman named Marguerite Callaway, who
runs an international leadership development company that defines effective leadership as
one that acknowledges that people are an organization's most important asset and reintroduces
ethics and values into a leadership role.

Her training aimed to shift our professional focus from career achievements to overall life goals.
During our first session, she asked us to write our core values and then use them to write a life
mission statement on the overall purpose of our lifes work. She believed this big-picture clarity
about our personal intentions would ultimately guide our more concrete professional goal setting,
instead of the other way around.

Through our mentorship, she asked these crucial questions: What do you value most right
now? and What kind of person are you trying to grow into becoming? Through answering
those larger questions, I could more easily navigate the smaller, daily obstacles of my
professional life: when to tolerate a corporate position in exchange for necessary skills and
experience, when to consider a loved ones concern about your professional path and when to
ignore their influence, and how to find avenues for meaningful work or a sense of community
when a day job wasnt providing that kind of fulfillment.

Marguerite didnt view personal and professional desires as necessarily conflicting. Instead, she
argued that by acknowledging the full range of my desires, I could figure out the healthiest
priority to move me forward right now. Instead of telling me as many others implied in the
past that I had to choose which kind of professional I wanted to be, Marguerite helped me
figure out what version of myself each moment of my professional life required.

This is not the same as idealistically believing someone can have it all. Instead its about being,
as she told me Jungian psychologist Jean Shinoda Bolen called it, a woman in between who
could shift gears and go from one facet of herself to another.

Marguerites mentorship alleviated much of my anxiety by normalizing the idea that committed
professionals could still deeply value many things at once. Hearing a woman who had several
prestigious credentials and accomplishment to her name validate these ideas convinced me
that they could replace what Id thought professionalism had to be.
Fortunately, several studies suggest that businesses succeed more when leaders adopt similar
ways of working. In an article for Fast Company, writer Mark Crowley explained how the
founders of Google built their company culture around caring for employees well-being.

He wrote, Upending traditional leadership theory, which directs organizations to squeeze as

much out of people while paying them as little as possible, Google holds an authentic reverence
for its employees, and seeks to not just appeal to their uber-developed minds in motivating
performance, but also to their very human hearts.

Last year, I began doing freelance work for an organization the Teaching Well that roots its
educational reform work in similar ideas: When schools prioritize teachers personal well-being,
the teachers perform better. The organization provides teachers with individual mentoring
entirely focused on tools and resources for navigating the socio-emotional elements of their work
and balancing their work with their personal lives.

When you can sit with someone long enough to find out what makes them healthy and thriving
in their personal life, you are also able to tap into whats going to be best for your professional
relationship, Teaching Well founder Kelly Knoche told me. Instead of thinking of mentoring
employees in these areas as an extra add-on, we should think of it as a means of being more
efficient in accomplishing the work youre already trying to do.

Compartmentalizing work and life had never made sense to me and it doesnt make
sense to a lot of other people either

Working first with Marguerite and then with the Teaching Well made me realize that
compartmentalizing my personal and professional lives had always felt unnatural. Since I was
young, my life goals had little to do with specific career achievements and more to do with more
general personal desires. In school, I once did an exercise where we had to write three dreams we
had for the future. While friends wrote, Become an astronaut, Win a Nobel Prize, and,
Make six figures a year, I wrote, Travel, Be in love, and, Be useful. I had never wanted
to single-mindedly focus on a career but instead had always thought of my goals more
holistically.

As a young professional, then, I struggled with the intense specificity many jobs required. When
applying for jobs, I couldnt relate to postings that said an organization searched for someone
obsessed with their field. In job interviews, anytime I mentioned balance, it seemed to be
misinterpreted as a lack of commitment. But if I was honest with myself, I didnt want to be
obsessed with any one aspect of my life. I wanted to be equally passionate and devoted to my
work as to everything else. I wanted to be professionally successful but also personally happy;
productive and useful yet not overexerted; responsible and financially practical while not
neglectful of my family, friends, and ethical beliefs.

But before working in South Africa, finding others who viewed professional decisions through
that lens was difficult. The casual career advice I would receive generally left me feeling as if
personal questions did not matter. Advice instead seemed hyperfocused on external output: What
will you produce? What kind of money will be made? What concrete skills will you learn? How
far can you advance?

When I began my freelance career, almost all the career advice articles I found also focused on
these externalities: how to build marketing skills, how to negotiate prices, how to network, how
to manage time most efficiently.

But it didnt help to only hear about the external practicalities of advancing in my career without
also hearing advice on how these practicalities would be internally relevant: What will be
personally fruitful about a freelance career? How will this work affect my relationships? How do
you emotionally handle the strain of working with clients who dont share your values? How will
this kind of work personally make me grow? Career advice was ineffective when it didnt take
into account these other important priorities in my life.

When I speak with other millennials about what they seek from career mentors, I have heard
many express the same concern. A friend of mine who runs a tech startup in San Francisco told
me: Of course, there are parts of mentorship that must be tactical, that deal only with how to get
a specific result in your field. But in terms of the bigger-picture questions of my career, any
advice has to be in the context about who I am as a person, and what I value. My work is not
separate from other parts of my life. Its all an expression of what Im trying to bring into the
world and what Im trying to create.

Surveys suggest were not alone: A 2012 New Impact survey found that 58 percent of young
workers claimed they would even take a 15 percent pay cut to work for an organization that
shared their values.

A college friend of mine who works as a writer and actress in New York told me about a negative
experience she had earlier in her career, when she paid for a mentor to advise her on writing and
marketing her script. Her mentor advised her to abandon the avant-garde and
intellectual/political nature of her writing, telling her in an email, Produced playwrights are
not writing plays like this. ... You have to write something with a track record in terms of content,
a commercial story with an existing audience.

As someone who valued producing radical work, my friend realized this womans advice
couldnt apply. This woman was a Tony Award-winning producer ... but the career she created
for herself is not necessarily one that I wanted, she told me. I realized that even if I had as
many TV credits and awards as this woman had, though that would obviously make me more
financially secure, I actually dont know if that would make me happier.

When I began my freelance writing career, perhaps I never actively sought advice from formal
career mentors because of a deep-seated skepticism that their advice would also not apply to me.
Instead of pointers for how to navigate the system, I wanted more insight on how to find work
I could be proud of. Instead of learning how to create a financially lucrative career, I wanted to
learn how to survive while creating a personally meaningful one.
To be clear, I am not advocating for a romanticized notion of a professional life, in which people
never do work that doesnt personally fulfill them, or refuse to accept work that doesnt align
perfectly with every area of their lives. But I do believe that the best kind of mentoring helps
young people balance the necessary evils of professional life with a validation of their personal
realities.

Now I try to be guided less by the professional goals I want to accomplish, and more by the
person I want to become

Looking back on the decision I made about love and work at 26, you can argue that in some
ways, it hardly mattered: The relationship I committed to back then has now ended, and I moved
on from that job to other work.

But for me, that decision symbolized the first crucial step in attempting to live an authentic
professional life. My professional experiences in South Africa may not necessarily have helped
me advance in my field or given me insight on the ins and outs of my industry. But they gave me
something that ended up being far more beneficial: They taught me how to stop resisting myself,
and instead honor and embrace all the unique and, yes, often competing desires I wanted
out of my life, while also being responsible and committed in my work.

These days, I dont experience the same self-doubt and panic about my career (or at least, not
nearly as often). I focus less on the daily minutiae of professional life and more on the big-
picture ideas of my own sense of purpose. I focus less on career advancement and more on my
own personal and professional growth. I worry less about my job and instead reflect more on my
lifes work.

As Im ending my 20s, I find I continue to be guided less by the specific career goals I want to
accomplish than by the kind of person I want to be. I hope I can continue finding work that helps
keep me on that path.

Amanda Machado is a writer, editor, content strategist, and facilitator who works with
publications and nonprofits around the world.

This article is taken from

http://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/4/24/15264144/work-life-priorities-balance
Summary Analysis
Work has been a very important matter for as long as we can remember. Most of the time,
we dont really work for a company with the shared beliefs and the same common goal. Because
of this, we often put up a mask in front of our co-workers to better fit the working environment
that we are in. This problem can also make us differentiate our work life with our personal life.
Because in our personal live, we often gravitate to other people which shared the same beliefs
and have the same way of thinking with us.
This problem was brought up in an article written by Amanda Machado, a writer from
Vox who works independently. In her article I tried for years to keep my life and work separate.
Im so glad I stopped , she puts a heavy emphasis that the work life and the personal life should
not be separated and also that its better to join a company that shares the same beliefs and have
the same common goals. I personally agree with the writer.
First, I would like to address that work cannot be separated with the personal life. The
writer does an excellent job at portraying the situation with a compelling story. In addition to the
example which was given by the writer, this claim actually have some facts to back it up. Some
study suggest that company which employs workers who are very passionate about the field of
work does better than their counterpart. Other than the study that I had mentioned, this way of
working is also recommended by some experts such as Margueritte Callaway who owns an
international leadership company and Teaching Well founder Kelly Knoche just to name a few.
Secondly, working in a place which doesnt have the same drive as you can be mentally
taxing. The writer gives this statement an example that we can closely relate. The write stated
that she is often seen as a worker with a lack of commitment when she works in a company
which doesnt have the same ideals with her. This can be considered false because working in a
company without the same intention is similar to hopping on a train which would go to a
different destination than where you wanted to go. To back this claim up, the 2015 Impact survey
found that 85% of workers are willing to get a 15% pay cut to work in a company that suites
them better. This shows us the importance to work in a company that suites you.
To sum it up, I completely agree with the writer that work and life should not be kept
separate. This is because the work and life couldnt be kept separate because work and life are
intertwined in a lot of ways. Another supportive idea is that working in a company that doesnt
share the same beliefs with you are mentally taxing.
As a word of advice from the writer, she wants us to focus on bettering our self and set
work goals that are gravitated to our beliefs in life. This will make us more open-minded and in
the end, those goals will shape us to the person we had always wanted to be.
Gian Axel Tunggaldinata/16016154