Your Personal Life Affects Your Work Life, So Proceed With Caution

Whether you realize it or not, your activities outside of work impact your performance for better or for worse. If you don't believe me, spend the night partying and see how productive you are the next day! And it isn't just your sleep pattern. Unhealthy relationships impact your performance too, negatively. As do personal addictions.

Other things have a positive impact. Like having a good support system, and friends to commiserate with. The jury is out on the impact of marriage for both genders, as single women are more productive, but men with small children are also very productive (maybe they don't want to go home?). But a healthy relationship works wonders. I have seen that it won't keep you from discovering the learning curve, and having to climb it, but it will allow you to do so with a smile, and keep your small blunders in perspective.

I have a friend at work who is invaluable. She has life experience. And she listens to my work conundrums and provides helpful advice. However, I only met her when I started working in September. I worked at my job over the summer, two summers ago, and she and I never even said hi. And she admitted that she wasn't sure she liked me during my summer internship.

I know why that was the case. I didn't meet a lot of people, and I only got to know one fellow associate very well then. I spent that summer in a stupor of stress, as my personal life sucked up all my energy, and forced me to use all my "extra" energy to meet my jobs requirements. Why? Because I was in a sucky relationship. We fought continually. And I was terribly unhappy. It impacted everything. While work was my release, I was always stressed out when I got there from the fight I had at home either that morning or the night before. Thankfully I woke up to my relationship dysfunction. And everything in my life improved.

It is also true that if you have a really bad job it negatively impacts other areas of your life. We are unable to successfully partition parts of ourselves from others, and isolate the unhappiness. So if you have a great significant other and friends, and wonder why life still seems to suck, either you are living with a curse, or some other area of your life, job or otherwise, needs to change. And if you take the necessary steps, even if those steps are painful, you will wake up and feel like the clouds rolled away, and it's spring all over again. Even if it's winter, and cold, and foggy. Like I did.