Work Life Balance Is A Myth: The "See-Saw" Method
Show Notes
s "Work-Life Balance" actually making you miserable? If you feel like you are constantly failing to keep the scales level, it’s because you are chasing a myth. In this episode, we expose why the "50/50" split is a recipe for burnout and why you should aim for Harmony instead.
We dive deep into the concept of "Continuous Partial Attention"—that exhausted state where you are physically present with your family but mentally checking emails under the dinner table. You’ll learn why high performers need to "oscillate" rather than flatline, and how to use the "See-Saw Method" to ditch the guilt and get your focus back.
Plus, a special listen to the new podcast theme music written and recorded by Wade and Tan Fehr!
In This Episode:
(00:00) - The "Antique Scales" Trap: Why balance requires you to freeze like a statue
(02:40) - New Music Reveal: Shout-out to Wade & Tan Fehr
(04:51) - "Continuous Partial Attention": Why you are halfway everywhere
(07:14) - The See-Saw Method: Why life needs to move to be fun
(08:13) - Rhonda’s Real Life: Navigating "Sprint" vs. "Support" seasons
(13:32) - How the Paced App breaks the "Zombie State" (and the "Cousin's Lunch" dilemma)
(16:08) - The 3-Step Work-Life Harmony System
Resources Mentioned:
Concept: Continuous Partial Attention (Linda Stone)
Concept: Oscillation (Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz)
Music: New Theme Music by Wade and Tan Fehr
This Week's Challenge:
Identify your season. Are you in a Sprint Season (Work-Heavy) or a Support Season (Life-Heavy)? Name it, accept it, and pick your one "Non-Negotiable" anchor to protect this week.
🔗 CONNECT WITH RHONDA
Website: rhondalavoie.com
The Paced App: getpaced.app
Instagram: @rhonda.lavoie
Facebook: Rhonda Lavoie
TikTok: @rhonda.lavoie
Music for The Rhonda Lavoie Podcast written and recorded by Wade and Tan Fehr.
Transcript
[00:00:05] I want you to picture a set of scales. You know, the antique kind, the brass ones you see sitting on a banker's desk in a classic movie or if you're me, you have them on display like art. On the left side, you pile on your work, the emails, the meetings, the deadlines, and then on the right side, you pile your life, your kids, your partner, your health, your sanity.
[00:00:32] And we're told, you know, in magazines by gurus, by society, that the goal of life is to get that needle to point perfectly straight up and down dead center. We think if we work hard enough, we can get the scales perfectly level, 50% work, 50% life every single day. But let me ask you something, and I want you to be really honest with me.
[00:01:02] When was the last time those scales stood? Still? If you're like me, the answer is never because the moment you get them balanced. Your kid gets sick or a client calls with an emergency or the dishwasher breaks and the scale tips and what do you feel? You don't feel balanced. You feel like you failed. I used to chase the balance.
[00:01:32] I used to think if I just organized my day better, I could be 100% mom and 100% boss simultaneously, but all I ended up being was half in and half out of everything. Today we're gonna stop fighting gravity. We're going to stop trying to balance the scales, and instead we're going to learn how to ride the seesaw.
[00:02:01] Welcome back to The Rhonda Lavoie Podcast. I'm your host, Rhonda Lavoie. This is the place where we strip away the fluff. . We don't do Instagram perfect here. We do real life. We talk about the hiccups, the messy middle, the systems that keep us bouncing back faster.
[00:02:22] If you are an ambitious woman who loves her work, but loves her family even more, and you're exhausted from trying to keep everyone happy. You're in the right room. But before we dive in, did you notice something different today that new music?
[00:02:40] I have to give a huge shout out to Wade and Tan Fehr. They actually wrote and recorded that new theme specifically for this show, and I'm absolutely loving the new vibe. So thank you so much to you both. All right, let's get to work. Today we're tackling one of the biggest lies we've ever been sold. Work life balance.
[00:03:04] You've heard it. We've all heard that expression. It's constantly out there. We're going to throw that phrase into the trash right out the window. I'm going to give you a new word, a better word in my opinion. Harmony. So grab your coffee or your wine or your steering wheel. Let's get unFANCY. Let's get it done.
[00:03:29] Let's talk about why balance is actually making us miserable. I didn't have one big dramatic car crash moment when I realized this. It wasn't like a scene in a movie where the main character finally collapses on the floor from exhaustion. For me, it was this slow creeping realization. Over years of working as a real estate agent, I would wake up and think, okay, today is the day I'm going to live.
[00:04:01] Okay, today is the day I'm going to give equal time to everything, and by 10:00 AM I was already failing. The problem with the balance mindset is that it assumes every day looks the same. It assumes you have a limited amount of energy and you have to slice that pie exactly down the middle.
[00:04:25] But here's what actually happens when you try to do that. You end up sitting at the dinner table with your family physically present. But mentally you're checked out because you are thinking about an email or how to compile a contract, or maybe you're at work trying to write that contract, but you're scrolling Pinterest for school lunch ideas because you feel guilty about not being at home.
[00:04:51] There is actually a name for this state and it was coined by tech , uh, Linda Stone, and she calls it "continuous partial attention". It is not multitasking. It's worse. It's being in a constant state of high alert, scanning the horizon for the next thing that needs you.
[00:05:13] You are never fully in your work and you're never fully in your life. You are halfway everywhere. And when you live like that, you burn out. Not because you're doing too much work, but because your brain never gets to settle. I realized work life balance isn't just hard. It's a joke. It it's a unicorn, it's a fairytale.
[00:05:42] For people who don't have mortgages, messy kids or ambitious goals, and think about the physics of it. To keep a set of scales, perfectly level, what do you have to do? You have to freeze. You have to stop moving. You have to stand there, hold your breath, making sure not a single grain of sand shifts to the left or the right, and that is exactly what we do to ourselves.
[00:06:14] We micromanage our minutes, we police our thoughts. We try to be everything to everyone at the exact same time. And the irony, the great cosmic joke, trying to keep scales level takes so much energy that you have no energy left to actually enjoy the life you're so desperately trying to balance. You win the game of balance.
[00:06:42] But you lose your joy. You become a statue in your own life. Perfectly balanced and totally miserable. So I stopped. I decided to look for harmony instead. Harmony feels different. Balance feels like holding your breath and standing very still so you don't tip over. Harmony feels like music. Sometimes the drums are loud and sometimes the flute is loud, but they aren't fighting each other.
[00:07:14] They're flowing together. The visual that changed everything for me was the seesaw, or you might call it a teeter totter. Think about a playground seesaw. If a seesaw is perfectly balanced, flat level, nothing moving. Is it any fun? No, it's stagnant. Nothing's happening. For a seesaw to be fun, for it to work, it has to move.
[00:07:43] One side goes up, the other side goes down. Then you push and it switches. It is dynamic. I realize my life isn't a set of scales. It's a seesaw. I have seasons where I'm heavy on the work side, and I have seasons where I'm heavy on the life side. And as long as I keep the motion going, as long as I don't get stuck on one side forever, that is harmony.
[00:08:13] Let me give you a couple of real examples for my own life because I want you to see how this actually works when the rubber hits the road, as they say first. Let's look at a life heavy season. My main business is real estate. And if you know anything about real estate, you know it is seasonal. In Saskatchewan.
[00:08:35] The market goes crazy from April to September. That is go time, but winter, winter slows down and then there are family seasons. So last year my daughter Brielle was playing on the junior basketball team, and the school had a problem. They couldn't find a coach. They were scrambling a bit. Now the balance version of me would've said, I can't coach.
[00:08:59] I have to work. I have to keep the scales even. But the harmony version of me looked at the calendar. I saw that it was a life heavy season, so I stepped up. I became the assistant coach. Was it a time commitment? Yeah, absolutely. It took hours for my week. But here's the key. I didn't drop work altogether, and this is where people get scared.
[00:09:27] They think prioritizing family means quitting their job. No, it just means prioritizing critical tasks over noncritical ones . During the basketball season, I let the low impact stuff slide. I wasn't redesigning my website. I wasn't taking three hour coffee meetings.
[00:09:44] That didn't go anywhere. I focused on the tasks that moved the needle to keep the money flowing, and I cut the rest. Was my work output a hundred percent? No, it was maybe 60%, but my mom output was at a hundred percent, and because I accepted that season. I didn't feel guilty. I enjoyed the games. I enjoyed the practices.
[00:10:09] I was fully present because I knew the work tasks I did do. Were the important ones. Now let's flip the seesaw. Let's talk about a work heavy season. Right now I'm in the thick of one. Uh, as many of you probably know, I'm developing the Paced App. Deciding to build an app while working as a real estate agent is well, is a lot.
[00:10:37] It's essentially adding a second full-time job to my plate. I knew going into this that the seesaw was going to tip heavy on the work side. Logically, something had to give. I couldn't coach basketball, sell houses, build an app, and bake cookies all at the same time.
[00:10:55] So I had a conversation with my family, and I wanna be clear, this wasn't some formal family meeting where we sit around a boardroom table with an agenda. We were actually in the car. I think we were going to an activity. It was super casual. I just said to them, listen, you guys, I am entering a busy season.
[00:11:14] I'm going to be building something that is going to be amazing for our future, but it means for the next few months, my attention is going to be split. I'm going to be physically here, but sometimes my brain might be solving problems elsewhere. I framed it as a, a short-term pain for a long-term gain.
[00:11:34] But, and this is the biggest but of the episode, even in a work heavy season, you cannot let the life side hit the ground and break your legs. You have to keep a little bit of weight on it. So we established what I'll call our non-negotiables. For me, the anchor is supper.
[00:11:57] And look, it's not always a gourmet meal. Sometimes it's messy. But we made a pact that we have supper together every day. No phones, no business talk. The noise of the world stops for 30 minutes and we just connect. It's the one time a day where I'm not Rhonda, the agent, or Rhonda, the app developer. I'm just mom.
[00:12:19] And the other thing we do. Is we do meal planning together. I know that sounds kind of boring, but honestly it's become a little ritual and we love it. We sit down usually on the weekend and we figure out the week ahead. Everyone gets a say. We plan the tacos, we plan the leftovers, and crucially, we plan some fun stuff too.
[00:12:46] We literally write in movie night or game night or pool party, into that calendar. And because it's in the calendar, it's real, it protects that time. It stops work from creeping into every single crack of the day, because I know these blocks are there. I can work 12 hours a day on the app without guilt because I know I'm not neglecting them.
[00:13:12] I'm just riding the seesaw. We just talked about that continuous partial attention, that state where you're physically present but mentally checked out. You know the drill. You are having family movie night and you're sitting on the couch, but you're a scrolling Instagram, you aren't fully in either place.
[00:13:32] That zombie state. Is the enemy of harmony. That is literally why I'm building the Paced App. Paced is a pattern interrupt. It is the wall that sits between you and that unconscious checking out. It's very simple. On the free version, you pick your top three distracting apps, the ones that suck you in. You get a standard 30 minute session to use them and you go nuts, use the full 30 minutes.
[00:14:04] But when the 30 minutes is up, Paced locks the door and you go into a one hour cool down. Now you have a choice. You wait. You let the full hour countdown, which forces you to do something else, or you move. We call it walk to unlock. If you want back in early, you have to take steps. Walking reduces that one hour timer significantly faster than just sitting there.
[00:14:31] Why did I build it this way? To break the trance. When the screen locks, you have to decide, do I actually wanna go for a walk just to see what my cousin ate for lunch? Or should I put the phone down and get back to the movie?
[00:14:46] It gives your brain back so you can actually be 100% where you are. I wanna back this up with one more piece of science, because I love it when the experts prove our gut instincts are right. There's a concept called oscillation. It comes from performance Psychologists, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz,
[00:15:10] they studied world class athletes and they found that high performance isn't a flat line. It's a pulse, it's a rhythm. Your heartbeats and rests your lungs. Inhale and exhale. We sleep, we wake. Nature oscillates. The research shows that human beings are not designed to be balanced in a flat line. We are designed to expend high energy and then recover. High focus, then deep rest. So, when you try to do 50/50 every day, you're fighting your own biology.
[00:15:48] You're trying to flatline, and we all know what a flat line on a heart monitor means, means you're dead. Embracing the seesaw, the up, the down, the busy season, the slow season is actually the most natural, healthy way for a human to operate. Okay?
[00:16:08] We've talked about the feeling, we talked about the science. Now let's get to the system. How do we actually do this? If you are feeling overwhelmed right now, I want you to try the work life harmony system. It's three steps. It's unfancy, but it works. Step one, identify your season.
[00:16:32] Stop looking at your life as day-to-day struggle and look at the big picture. Ask yourself, what season am I in right now? Are you in a sprint season? Maybe it's year end at the office, or a busy spring market in real estate, or are you in a support season? Maybe you have a newborn or an aging parent who needs help, or it's just July and the kids are home from school.
[00:17:00] Just naming it changes everything. When I admit I'm in a work heavy season with the app, the guilt disappears. I stop trying to bake four dozen homemade cupcakes for the school fundraiser because that's not the season.
[00:17:16] Now step two, be 100% where you are. This is the antidote to that partial attention problem. If you're at work, be at work, grind, go hard, don't apologize for it, but when you cross the threshold into your life time, be there. It is better to spend the 30 minutes with your kids totally focused eye contact phones away playing a game than it is to spend hours with them while you're scrolling instagram or half listening. Harmony isn't about the amount of time, it's the quality of your presence. Step three, protect the non-negotiables. This is probably the most crucial part. Even if the seesaw is high up on the work side, you need an anchor to keep you from flying off into space.
[00:18:13] Identify one or two things that happen no matter what on this other side. For my family, it's that daily supper and that weekly meal planning. Maybe for you it's Friday night pizza, or Sunday morning church, or a 20 minute walk with your spouse. Pick the thing that keeps you connected. Put a circle around it.
[00:18:37] Guard it with your life. You can work 14 hours a day and still feel connected to your family if you protect that sacred pocket of time. And I must say that when the seesaws the other way, you also need to do the same thing. So when you're that a hundred percent family time, you need to put a circle around those work activities that are non-negotiable.
[00:18:57] For me, when I was doing, uh, the basketball coaching, I needed to make sure that the essentials were being done in my business.. Obviously I still need to have an income coming in knowing that because I'm heavy into the basketball season that the income may drop. I still knew that I had to get some of those tasks done, so I had the non-negotiables, you know, the, uh, tasks that needed to be done to ensure I was still engaging with clients.
[00:19:23] The social media pieces that were crucial to, you know, generating business for, for real estate. You need to make sure you have those anchored as well. Okay. One last thing before we go, and this might be the most important part. Don't beat yourself up when you wobble.
[00:19:44] You are going to mess this up. You're going to have a day where you're short with everyone because you're stressed out about work, or you're going to have a day where you ignore emails and binge watch Netflix. That doesn't mean the system is broken.
[00:19:58] It just means that you're human. We aren't aiming for perfect. We're just aiming for awareness. When you realize the seesaw has hit the ground, don't sit in the guilt of it. Just say, oh, whoops. You know, bit of a hiccup here, and just push off the ground. The goal isn't to never fail. The goal is to bounce back faster. All right, that's what I've got for you this week.
[00:20:26] Thank you for hanging out with me. I really do appreciate it. Remember, this is The Rhonda Lavoie Podcast, and this is where we focus on getting it done and keeping it real. If today's conversation was helpful, the easiest way to make sure you don't miss the next one is to hit follow or subscribe. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
[00:20:45] You can find the show notes and the full transcript for this episode over at rhondalavoie.com. And hey, if you're interested in the Paced App, my project is all about helping you take back your time at your pace. You can follow the journey or join the wait list at getpaced.app. Until next time, get it done and keep it real.
