Transcriber: Nelia Losada Reviewer: Diba Szamosi
Wasn't Bred fantastic?
I thought that was just really terrific,
but it has left me feeling slightly
technologically challenged,
because I haven't got any satellite videos.
(Laughter)
Truth to be told, I haven't got any slides either.
What I thought I would do is I would start
with a simple request.
I'd like all of you to pause for a moment,
you wretched weaklings,
and take stock of your miserable existence.
(Laughter)
That was the advice that Saint Benedict gave
his rather startled followers in the fifth century.
It was the advice that I decided to follow myself
when I turned 40.
Up until that moment,
I had been a classic corporate warrior.
I was eating too much, I was drinking too much,
I was working too hard
and I was neglecting my family.
And I decided that I would try and turn my life around.
In particular, I decided I would try to address
the thorny issue of work-life balance.
So, I stepped back from the workforce
and I spent a year at home with my wife
and four young children.
But all I learnt about work-life balance from that year
was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life
when I didn't have any work.
(Laughter)
Not a very useful skill,
especially when the money runs out.
So I went back to work and I have spent
these seven years since struggling with,
studying and writing about work-life balance.
I have four observations I would like to share with you today.
The first is, if society is to make any progress on this issue,
we need a honest debate.
But the trouble is so many people talk
so much rubbish about work-life balance.
All the discussions about flexi-time
or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave
only serve to mask the core issue,
which is that certain job and career choices
are fundamentally incompatible
with being meaningfully engaged
on a day-to-day basis with a young family.
The first step in solving any problem
is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in.
And the reality of the society that we are in
is there are thousands and thousands of people out there
leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation
where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate,
to enable them to buy things they don't need,
to impress people they don't like.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
It is my contention that going to work on a Friday in jeans and T-shirt
isn't really getting into the nub of the issue.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
The second observation I'd like to make
is really to face the truth
that governments and corporations
aren't going to solve this issue for us.
We should stop looking outside.
It is up to us as individuals
to take control and responsibility for the type of lives
that we want to lead.
If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you,
and you may just not like their idea of balance.
It is particularly important --
this isn't in the World Wide Web, is it? I am about to get fired.
It is particularly important that you never put the quality of your life
in the hands of a commercial corporation.
I am not talking here just about the bad companies,
the 'abattoirs of the human soul' as I call them,
(Laughter)
I am talking about all companies,
because commercial companies are inherently desgined
to get as much out of you
as they can get away with.
It's in their nature, it's in their DNA, it's what they do
even the good, well-intentioned companies.
On the one hand, putting childcare facilities in the workplace
is wonderful and enlightened.
On the other hand, it is a nightmare that just means
you spend more time at the bloody office.
We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing
the boundaries that we want in our life.
The third observation is we have to be careful
with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance.
Before I went back to work after my year at home,
I sat down and I wrote out
a detailed, step-by-step description
of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to.
And it went like this:
Wake up well rested after a good night's sleep.
Have sex.
(Laughter)
Walk the dog.
Have breakfast with my wife and children.
Have sex again.
(Laughter)
Drive the kids to school on the way to the office.
Do three hours' work.
Play sport with a friend at lunchtime.
Do another three hours' work.
Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink.
Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids.
Meditate for half an hour.
Have sex.
Walk the dog.
Have sex again.
(Laughter)
Go to bed.
(Applause)
How often do you think I have that day?
(Laughter)
We need to be realistic.
You can't do it all in one day.
We need to elongate the time frame
upon which we judge the balance in our life
but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap
of the "I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home,
when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing,
I have got no mates or interests left."
(Laughter)
A day is too short, "after a retire" is too long.
It has got to be a middle way.
The fourth observation:
we need to approach balance in a balanced way.
A friend came to see me last year --
she doesn't mind me telling the story.
A friend came to see me last year and said
"Nigel, I've read your book and I have realised my life is completely out of balance.
It is totally dominated by work.
I work 10 hours a day, I commute 2 hours a day.
All my relationships have failed.
There is nothing in my life apart from my work.
So I have decided to get a grip and sort it out.
So I have joined the gym."
(Laughter)
Now, I don't mean to mock
but being a fit, ten-hour-a-day office rat
isn't more balanced, it is more fit.
(Laughter)
Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life.
There is the intellectual side, there is the emotional side,
there is the spiritual side.
And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas.
Not just do 50 stomach crunches.
That can be daunting, because people say
"Bloody hell, mate, I haven't got time to get fit
and you want me to go to church and call my mother."
And I understand, I truly understand how that can be daunting.
But an incident that happened a couple of years ago
gave me a new perspective.
My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today,
called me up at the office and said
"Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son up, Harry, from school."
She had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening.
So I left work an hour early that afternoon
and picked Harry up at the school gates.
We walked down to the local park,
messed around on the swings, played some silly games.
I then walked him up the hill to the local café
and we shared a pizza for tea.
Then, walked down the hill to our home
and I gave him a bath and put him in his Batman pijamas.
I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach".
I then put him to bed, tucked him in,
gave him a kiss on his forehead and said "Goodnight, mate."
And walked out of his bedroom.
As I was walking out of his bedroom,
he said, "Dad?", I went "Yes, mate?"
he went, "Dad, this has been the best day of my life.
Ever."
I hadn't done anything.
I hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation.
Now, my point is the small things matter.
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
because if enough people do it,
we can change society's definition of success
away from the moronically simplistic notion
that the person with the most money when he dies wins,
to a more thoughtful and balanced definition
of what a life well-lived looks like.
And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading.
(Applause)