Find Your Flow
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- November 14, 2025
Professor Shivani Sharma on why work-life harmony should be the aim over hard lines of division
Your alarm goes off and you snooze without realising, and then before you know it, you’re in a mad rush to get up and out for your commute to work. At the other end of the day, you plan to get home, maybe do some light activity, digitally detox and achieve the perfect 7-8 hours of sleep. But traffic doesn’t work to your schedule, children don’t play ball with bedtime routines, and the laptop is still screen on at 10pm. Maybe some of this sounds familiar. And if it does, you’re not alone!
We live in a time where the phrase ‘work life balance’ is normalised. Through social media, this phrase and its sentiment is further amplified in highly curated content showing picture perfect projections of professionals balancing multiple spheres of life. Albeit slightly stereotyped, it’s not unusual to find examples of pre 9am yoga, wonderfully colourful breakfast tonics and meals, a hard stop on work at 5pm, the perfect social evening, and bed at the optimal hour. Whilst much of this content includes helpful lifestyle tips – who can argue with eat well, sleep well, stay active, de-compress – it can also create internal pressure as people seek to put a boundary between different dimensions of life. And if you’re unable to achieve this, you might question whether it’s because of your own issues with motivation, time management, willpower and so on.
From experience, amongst all this hype, I’ve found it’s better to watch and absorb with caution to avoid the potential harmful impacts of striving for someone else’s version of the flawless day. Research suggests that tech stress can be real after all – contributing to anxiety, work-life conflict, and wider parasocial impacts. So, what’s the alternative? Asking myself this very question, I analysed what it is that makes a good day in the life of me. The answer was not solid lines between dimensions of identity but rather integration. By focusing, intentionally, on career and life goals that are aligned and contribute to giving me a sense of fulfilment, work has stopped being work. Rather, it has become something that helps me express the way I seek to experience life.
Speaking to several highly successful women in the fields of health, art, and business for inspiration, the drive towards integration and flow i.e. moving naturally between things, was further cemented. Operating with self-insight, these women expressed several commonalities. They consciously sought to align work with a sense of meaning and purpose. Whilst they retained some non-negotiables, they also utilised fluidity to balance life demands often seamlessly to the outside world. Rather than compartmentalising identities, they sought an integrated sense of self, united by a core theme of values driving behaviour and actions. In doing so, they managed to find harmony through a dynamic blending of life roles, embracing ebbs and flows as they come. Importantly, over time, they learnt to notice internal signals, and either draw on existing or create new networks and mechanisms of support re-alignment as they go.
What can we take from this? Perhaps now, more than ever before, is the time to take a minute to pause, reflect, and tune in to this lived experience wisdom to appreciate what is or could drive your flow.
If this sounds appealing, here are 3 ways to get started:
Think about what motivates you; what you find purpose and meaning in within everyday work and life at large. Don’t worry about the perfect moment and setting to get started. Even 5 minutes thinking about this will help.
Consider the gap between what makes you feel fulfilled at work and your life roles.
Start small — find one area where you seek better connection. Focus on a manageable micro action that can help you rebalance. For example, I recently started trying the walking meeting — integrating my passion for productivity, connection, and wellness. It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Just something you can find time to do!
For some people, compartmentalising work and life is a helpful strategy. But if you find yourself in the space where this is tricky and are open to a guilt free integration, I invite you to focus on weaving in purpose as a unifying driver to find your synergy.
About the author
Shivani Sharma is a mother of two young children and Professor of Health Equity and Inclusion at Aston University. She is one of the youngest and very few female Asian professors working in UK academia.
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