by Michael P. Haubrich, CFP What would you consider to be your most valuable asset? Typical things that come to mind may include your home, savings and pension. Given the number of working years left before traditional retirement, I would say that your career should be listed among your most valuable assets.
Look at it this way, if you’re in your mid-thirties you’ve still got many years of working life remaining before traditional retirement. Even if you are in your early fifties, your career could represent more value than the total of all your financial assets. Your career is the engine that drives your financial machine. It produces the income and provides you with the resources to invest, save, and build toward your retirement.
If you consider your “career asset” as the sum total of your time plus talent plus potential, it should be managed to maximize its long-term return just as you would manage other asset returns. Your career asset return is made up of not only the current salary you are paid, but the satisfaction you receive by doing what really energizes you. That is much harder to quantify but no less of an important consideration in managing your career asset. By not balancing your work and life objectives you run the risk of suffering job burnout — reduced productivity, stress related health issues and a lessening number of work years prior to retirement.
By taking steps to ensure an appropriate work-life balance, you’re helping to manage this asset in a way that will maximize your investment in your time, your talent, and your potential. Managing the balance will also help ensure that you remain in the work force longer than if this delicate balance is not maintained.
So how do you manage your work-life balance to protect your career asset? In her book, Work+Life, author Cali Williams Yost, outlines a three-step process that constantly moves you toward optimum balance. The process she advocates involves a combination of introspection, planning, and action. Backed by case histories and anecdotal stories designed to encourage and motivate you to achieving balance, Yost also includes exercises designed to stretch your thinking about your career as an asset.
Step one serves to challenge the way we think about work and life and dispel some of the common misconceptions we hold as fact such as believing that only our managers or human resources has the ability to resolve work-life conflicts. In fact, individuals willing to work through the process are the best positioned to create a work-life fit that will help ensure long-term satisfaction and sustainability.
In step two, Williams focuses on identifying real or perceived roadblocks that can derail a person from achieving productive balance. Fear, resistance to change, and in-the-box thinking are all factors that have the potential to prevent an individual from effectively managing their career asset. In Work+Life, Williams shares stories of others who have dealt with these challenges and offers suggestions for how to overcome them.
After doing a lot of the self-work in the earlier steps, step three centers on creating the actual roadmap and business case to help you manage your career in a way that this asset provides the work-life balance you need to be the most productive.
The outcome of achieving work-life balance doesn’t mean that you have to leave your current job and sacrifice everything you’ve worked for to-date. It’s important to recognizing your career as an asset in your life portfolio. Effectively managing it may ultimately mean changing jobs, but there are many options and alternatives to such a drastic step that could help you achieve the balance you need and allow you to work—and earn—with higher levels of satisfaction for a longer period of time than you would otherwise.
Michael P. Haubrich, CFP is President of Financial Service Group, Inc., a Registered Investment Advisory Firm in Racine. Website address www.toyourwealth.com.