This past weekend, I was on a business trip to Wilmington, NC and I did something that I have never done before – I brought my family.  Now, you may read the previous sentence and say “so what?” and you are right, so what?
Well,  for as long as I can remember, I have heard the statement that we need to “balance our lives”, much like, I guess, we need to balance our checkbooks.  While this statement sounds great in theory, I have had a very challenging time balancing in practice.  In fact, I have often spent more time trying to balance my life than I have living my life.  Three years ago, it occurred to me that instead of attempting to balance my life, what if I tried to integrate my life?  What if instead of trying to give my wife, my son, my work, my community, and oh yeah, God, equal amounts of time, what if I integrated all of the above?  What would that look like?

Back to the business trip – I think I may have had a glimpse of what integrated living looks like.  While we travelled separately and arrived at different times, I arranged for us to stay at a hotel with a suite that had plenty of room for the three of us.  While I worked, my wife and son shopped, visited museums, and swam in the pool.  When I returned from my work we hung out together, swam in the pool together, and of course, ate together.  In short, we had a blast!  Over the weekend, I didn’t balance, we lived and worked and played together – we integrated.

So, how did this happen, how were we able to integrate our weekend?  I used three simple steps:

1 – My wife, Kelly, and I conduct a calendar sync every weekend in preparation for the week ahead and we ask “where can we work together this week?”

2 – Solidify my work schedule to the max extent possible in order to have time, physical, and emotional boundaries in place.

3 – Ensure I set realistic expectations for Kelly on how my schedule may change – I am still working on this level of communication!

Being able to experience the joy of my son as he performed cannonball after cannonball into the pool with his toothy grin and aqua blue goggles made this attempt at integration well worth the effort.