For 70 years Queen Elizabeth attended countless ceremonies and parades spending thousands of hours standing straight, with balance.

She said:

One must plant their feet like this. Always keep them in parallel. Make sure your weight is evenly distributed. That’s all there is to it.

Shivam, but what does that have to do with work-life balance?

Well, everything.

Here is a popular myth about work life balance that I think you might have remembered reading about what the Queen said.

Work life balance is all about 50-50. 50% focus on work and 50% focus on life.

Well, you and I both know thats not how the world works. And trying to achieve a 50-50 split is not only a futile effort but also one that will make you sadder. It will take away all the excitement that you have for life and for work.

And we don’t want to be salty people now, do we?

Look, life is uneven, it’s unpredictable. So how can our strategy to deal with it be so “rigid”?

Harvard’s Jeff Karp puts it like this:

I realized that if we start to look at everything in life…like everything is on a pendulum, and you start to step back and visualize that, I think it can be incredibly empowering.

This “pendulum life” is something we have to work with.

The pendulum simply keeps swinging. Sometimes dramatically and sometimes barely. There are weeks when work consumes all our day and goes on well into the nights too.

Your calendar might literally look like a game of tetris. But then there are also times when life wants it all, a sick parent maybe, a kid who needs attention or maybe all we need is simply a little bit of time to breathe.

The swing is natural, its supposed to happen.

And that is exactly what Queen’s advice secretly teaches us. Balance is not about freezing ourselves into a 50-50 state of mind.

It’s about distributing our weight evenly. And the definition of even would change based on where you are standing. Cement floor, slope of a hill, climbing a mountain.

The trick here is being aware of the pendulum. Acknowledge when the pendulum is swinging wide towards work, and when towards life.

Lean into it but also be prepared for the pendulum to swing back to the other end too.

For years my own resistance towards acknowledging the pendulum has caused unnecessary stress affecting life and work. Just by understanding this and focusing on the rhythm we can have the balance we need and truly want.

Balance is not about being still with one thing.

It’s about the sway and a pendulum doesn’t apologize for moving.

Neither should you.