How to Strike a Balance between Professional and Personal Life?

There is a fine line between behaving with your family or friends at home and then interacting with your coworkers the next day, but most people take this line too seriously. In the current era of corporate advancement and new career opportunities, majority of the

population in busy cities occupy a large part of their day working tirelessly in their office cubicles in hopes to get one step closer to a promotion. So where does this hunger for success come from? Since our childhoods, our mentors and teachers have attempted to lead us to a single path and that path is to win and conquer whatever our eyes set upon. Academic institutes throughout the entire globe encourage students to study hard, get good grades, and then compete in the corporate world as soon as they pass out. Such severe rules and regulations mould an individual into a robot, who fails to see that life isn’t just about compiling reports or hiding behind their computer screens. We have been trained to behave in a way that is followed by company executives or top managers, and eventually it builds a mask that hides our true faces. At times we wear the same mask in our homes at the end of the day. One approach to break this habit of building walls between our professional and personal lives is to value our personal life as well by spending time with family and friends as it helps us relieve stress and feel regenerated enough to work better tomorrow, planning out personal activities, for instance, focusing on our hobbies, going to the movies with friends, or even eating dinner with family (and not bringing our laptops at the table!) would help us in giving each activity an equal amount of time and attention. Even in the workplace, people lock up their personalities and talents in order to give off an idealistic employee appearance. What they don’t realize is that their personal experiences and skills can actually be beneficial for the productivity of the company. For e.g., an accountant who although is good at entering financial records, but also loves to do creative writing in his personal life could help when companies are coming up with persuasive logos and catch phrases for their upcoming product. This shows you that balancing your work life and the life you have at home can save you from turning into a prodigy of strict work ethics and helps build you into the person that makes you, the real you!