Evaluating Your Life Roles

When exploring your career options, it’s important to keep in mind that your work is just one role of many in your life. How the many roles of your life interact and demand your time and attention will have a significant impact on your career.

Our roles, and the amount of time and energy they require, change and shift throughout our life spans. When we are young, our life roles may consist mostly of being a child and a student. However, in mid-life, our roles may include being a spouse or partner, caring for parents and children, working, being an active citizen, caring for our home, participating in hobbies and other leisure activities, and more!

This can lead us to the perennial question of how we can manage work-life “balance.” It’s helpful to realize that some seasons of our life require that some of our life roles receive more time and attention than others. A useful activity is to reflect on our current life roles and the proportion of time they currently require, and then identify how we might shift the amount of time those roles are taking to reflect our values and priorities.

I created a guided activity to help you do just that! You can download this short activity to help you evaluate your life roles.

Please share what you learned from completing this activity in the comments below!