Work Life Balance by Dr. Niall Campbell

My friend Mike Gow asked me to write an article about that most ethereal of things – the holy grail of achieving optimal work life balance. I had written him a nice little article, which was succinct. It had actionable advice. It was, well, tidy. But I scrapped it. Why? Because it was a lie.

Well, it wasn’t a lie exactly, it was more that when I read it back it omitted a truth which I think is a necessary prerequisite to achieving a work life balance – you have to actually enjoy your work in order to get it to balance in your life! This is I think the elephant in the room when it comes to discussing work life balance in dentistry (or any profession for that matter).

Omission of a truth is, in my opinion, tantamount to dishonesty and so this is what I mean when I say that I looked at the first draft and thought it to be a lie.

What I have written instead therefore is a rambling tale that has turned into a bit of an essay. Reading time is about 15 – 20 minutes, so grab a coffee and strap in.

The new article is long winded, expansive, and above all else, messy.

But it is at least honest. And I hope you will be like me in always preferring an honest mess over a tidy lie.

So don’t worry about my tips for a better ‘work life balance’. Trust me, I have plenty and we will get to those in later articles. Instead for now I just want to tell you the story of John, by way of a preface.

So meet John, John owns a high street sandwich shop. Business is pretty good, as his place is a favourite of the local high school kids and many of the offices in the town. He has loyal workers and he likes being his own boss. His accountant tells him that if he wanted to, he could comfortably afford to lease and refurbish premium real estate in a nearby town and expand his operation. So all in all things seem to be going pretty good for John, don’t they?

There is, however, a big problem. John is very, very bored. Not the type of bored you get when waiting for your ride somewhere - a superficial, ‘scroll through your Facebook feed to kill time’ type of bored. This boredom is much deeper. In fact, this boredom is marrow deep.

Recently, when the alarm goes off John has been really struggling to get out of bed. His wife knows there is something wrong. She knows he is ‘psyching himself up’ for the day ahead, and knows that morning pleasantries are ill advised until John’s caffeine has been consumed, after which he will be his normal lovely self. When John walks up the deserted high street to open up the deli however, he feels like he is walking the green mile.

John makes a point of not working Saturdays and he is proud of the fact that he has trained his long-term manager to handle the busiest day of the week. ‘A little perk of being the boss’, he likes to tell himself. Instead of working on a Saturday, John likes to get out on the golf course with his friends, who are also local business owners.

After a particularly bad outing on the golf course, John is feeling enraged. His face is like thunder on the last few holes and his long-term golfing partners (like his long term life partner) know to give him space when he is like this.

John does however pride himself on being able to leave his frustrations with golf on the golf course itself, and normally the first sip of beer on the 19th hole over lunch with his friends sees his mood suitably restored. But not today.

He has downed his drink before the other guys have even made dents in theirs, which prompts one of his pals to say,

‘You just had a bad back nine John, don’t beat yourself up, it just wasn’t your day’

Instead of his typical calm response, John immediately blurts out - seemingly against his own will,

‘I’m just so #*=#ing bored!!”

This breaks the normally soporific atmosphere of the clubhouse, and a few old timers at a nearby table turn around briefly with raised eyebrows.

His playing partner Phil tries to clarify this ‘out of context’ remark; ‘Bored of the game John? Maybe take a break from golf for a few weeks. I guarantee you will be back on the fairways within a mont – “- ‘I’m not taking about golf Phil, I’m talking about life!!’ John exclaims.

John is nowhere near shouting, but his tone is definitely more strident than his golfing buddies are used to. In all the fifteen years they have regularly played together, they have never had a conversation like this. This is uncharted social territory.

Maybe it was the hellishly busy week at work, or the memory of the missed two foot putt on the 10th hole, or the disinhibiting effect of a full drink on an empty stomach, but whatever the cacophony of causative factors are, John can’t seem to stop himself saying what he now feels compelled to get off his chest.

‘It’s the same thing - different day – I get up, go to work, check stock, prep for the lunchtime rush, oversee the lunchtime rush, prep for the after work rush, and on top of that I’m constantly putting out fires –HR concerns, the taxman, the council, and always the damned loans to think of. There’s always something. I’m always chasing my tail and I just get so sick of it. I swear to God sometimes I could hurl those, sandwiches across the room. Even though I’m stressed to my eyeballs I’m also simultaneously detached from and bored by, the whole damn thing – I feel like life is passing me by you know? I mean, don’t you ever feel like that Phil?“

Phil, a man of few words, is a flummoxed rabbit in the headlights. The most deep and meaningful conversation him and John have ever had was a discussion about who was the better ‘recovery shot’ player - Seve Ballesteros or Sergio Garcia.

Gary, the strongest golfer of the four and John’s closest friend in the group, sees Phil is out of his depth and decides to wade in and rescue the conversation. As a local bar owner Gary is adept at talking men down from high emotion,

‘I do John, I hear you’ Gary says. ‘I used to feel it a lot like that at the bar. You’re in a rut with your business - that’s all. I go into your store, and I think – this place is packed, it basically runs itself, maybe all that John needs is a new challenge. I mean, are you going to open that new place or what?

“I’m thinking about it Gary, definitely – the accountant says the time is right.”

“Well there you go then!” Gary says cheerfully “And the lease you are looking at is right beside all those new upscale shops and offices! Totally different clientele. You could design a new menu; start serving them decent coffee to boot! You would make a killing, and get out of this funk at the same time”.

Their lunch arrives and, seeing that John is perking up a bit, Gary skilfully takes the group into the ‘last orders’ portion of this particular conversation.

“Look John, you’re a great guy and a solid businessman, and you suck at golf, but two out of three ain’t bad!”

As the laughter tails off from this artfully crafted little Segway, Steve, the final member of the four-ball broaches the topic of whether or not Tiger Woods will ever truly get over his back injury. And with that, normal conversational service is resumed.

The First thing on the following Monday morning, John hops out of bed, gets ready and goes in quick succession to; a meeting with his accountant, a meeting with his bank manager and a meeting with the real estate agent, to sign a one year lease on the new store in the neighbouring town.

Within the week he has met up with a marketing and design company, and thrashed out a strategy to target the demographics Gary had mentioned. All the market research he gets back is promising, and shows that his and Gary’s instincts were right. If he aims this place at high-end customers and plays his cards right, he is going to make a killing.

He and his wife pick out some top end Italian Barista machines, and have a whale of a time on the coffee making course which comes included in the purchase of their shiny new devices. They are like young lovers again, falling over each other laughing as they learn the art of making a good cup of coffee.

He also learns how to make Ciabatta bread from scratch. John has decided that he won’t serve mere sandwiches in this new place, and maybe in time he can spruce up the menu at his anchor store without scaring off the regulars.

As the final touches are done to the ‘fit out’ of the new store and the sign (complete with crisp new branding and logo) gets hoisted up above the door, John feels like a new man.

Business is good from the get-go, so John doesn’t have time to come up for air. ‘Work life balance’ at this stage is a distant conceptualisation to him. If he had to draw a seesaw to demonstrate what it would look like he would say that ‘work’ on the one side is big a fat guy and ‘life’ on the other was like Pee Wee Herman. It’s all see and no saw. John doesn’t mind, because he knows from previous experience that things will even out after this initial period of hustle. Every morning when the alarm goes off he doesn’t really have time to think, he has things to do and he wants get them done. By the time he gets home he is exhausted from getting his new venture off the ground.

Business goes from steady to good to great, and the more he up-skills himself and the staff in the art of serving people good quality food on the go, the more money he makes.

He still makes his golf commitment whenever he can, but sometimes it’s just not feasible.

When he does make it out to the course he fills his friends in on the cut and thrust of getting a foothold in the new town’s marketplace, and they are all happy that although he is very busy indeed, he does seem to be back to his old self at least.

In short, John has got him mojo back.

After 6 months things steady out, and John is confident that he can take more of a back seat. He still has to chip in on the shop floor from time to time, but he can afford to hire two managers – one in each deli, and so he actually has more time running two shops than he ever did running one. He is even able to play golf twice a week, an unthinkable luxury just a few years before.

His ‘work life balance’, like his bank balance, has never been better.

It is therefore with some confusion and frustration that John feels those old feelings of dissatisfaction, boredom and disenfranchisement creeping back in.

A year after the opening he and his wife throw a party at the Deli to celebrate the first anniversary of the store. Champagne flows and John is pleased to see a couple of photographers from local papers have taken up his invitation to snap the gathering for their respective rags.

Gary walks past, clinks his glass and gives him a wink that seems to say, ‘I told you this would get you out of your funk!’

John goes out to take in a bit of night air. He is pleased to find the balcony tables empty. Gary’s daughter, who is a fairly intense little 7 year old (and very sharp for her age), comes running onto the balcony, flushed from playing with the other kids inside. Some parents think she is a bit precocious, but John quite likes her. He knows she is just a chip off the old block– quick witted, honest, direct, and not keen to suffer fools – just like her old man.

Still out of breath she says, “Do you play golf with my daddy?” (There’s no ‘hello how do you dos’ with this kid).

“Yes Susie, most weekends”

“And this is your shop isn’t it?”

‘Yep”

“But what do you do?

“Well, I own this shop Susie, and I own another one”

“But what do you do?” Clearly Susie has been learning about people’s jobs at school and so she needs get an answer that she is satisfied with. Owning a shop just isn’t going to cut it.

‘What a weird kid’ John thinks. Gary once told him about how Susie needed to know how things worked,

“I mean I’ll leave her playing with a toy and I come back like, 5 minutes later, and it is completely dismantled! She unstoppable!”

Not wanting to deny her line of questioning, John patiently answers her as best he can.

“Well Susie, I’m sort of like the boss of the two stores”

“Yes I know, but what do you do? I mean my daddy is the boss of the bar, so he makes sure people get drinks, but what do you do?”

“Well we don’t sell drinks here like your daddy, but we do sell a lot of Ciabatta rolls”

“What’s a ciabatta roll?”

“It’s a kind of fancy sandwich”

“Oh, ok, so you make sandwiches for people”

“Well, I don’t actually make them myself all that much anymore, but I guess, yeah, I sell sandwiches to people.”

“So you sell sandwiches to people every day?”

“Yep, 7 days a week”

“Do you like selling sandwiches?”

This simple little reductive question brings her to the crux of her curiosity. She stands there, her flushed and intense little face, looking up at him. No interrogative agenda, no ulterior motive. Just an incandescent and earnest little girl, wanting to make sense of the world.

Wanting nothing but an honest answer.

“No Susie, I definitely do not like selling sandwiches”. John says.

“Oh.”

Her little face is puzzled – completely devoid of judgement. More to herself than to John she says,

“Then why do you do it every day?”

She hears the clatter of a toy in the distance that sounds much too intact for her taste, and so she runs off, Leaving John alone at his own party.

John walks down the fire escape that is attached to the balcony, drives his brand new Mercedes round the corner to the adjacent dark and deserted alleyway, and bursts into tears.

So a little bit of homework before the next time we meet. How would you define your ‘work’? What is the reductive phrasing you could put around your average day in dentistry, be it orthodontics, oral surgery, prosthodontics, general dentistry or whatever? How would you explain it in a few sentences so that a 7 year old of above average intelligence like Susie could understand?

This might seem like a fairly pointless task but trust me, there is a great clarifying beauty in being ruthlessly reductive with the way you ‘frame’ what it is that lies at the heart of how you make your living. We will call this your,

‘Axis statement’
If you feel like your job is much too complex and comprehensive to ever possibly be boiled down to simple sentence, then how about this,

My name is Elon Musk. I made lots of money making it possible for people to send money to each other over the Internet through a thing called PayPal. I sold my company for a lot of money and now I use that money to hire very smart people to try to figure out how to make really good batteries that you can put in cars or in your house so we can sell them. I also hire smart people to try to figure out how to send rockets into space. People who want to put stuff into space hire our rockets, and I am using the money we make from loaning our rockets to other people to make giant rockets that one day we can use to put a bunch of people on mars so they can live there.

No matter how fancy your CT machine is, you are not Elon Musk. You are not trying to make the human race a multi-planetary species, so get over yourself and write (or articulate to yourself in your head) an axis statement.

It is called the ‘Axis statement’ because it is the statement around which all of your other professional tasks ostensibly rotate.

For example, the sprinter Usain Bolts’ axis statement would be something like,

‘I run very fast in races against other people’

Every other task that Usain Bolt performs, from a press conference, to an intense strength and conditioning session, in some shape or form, exists in servitude to his axis statement. Does he enjoy these other tasks? Not necessarily, but that is not important. He knows that they are necessary tasks that allow him to perform his axis task, and he approaches them as such. Whether he enjoys them or not is moot.

Does Usain Bolt enjoy running very fast in races against other people?

Watch his face when he is crossing the finish line and I think you will get a fairly emphatic answer of ‘yes’ to that question.

Whilst it doesn’t matter if Usain Bolt enjoys the more peripheral components of being a sprinter, it is however crucial that he connects positively with his axis statement.

Is passion for running the reason why Usain Bolt runs like a cheetah? Not entirely, he is clearly a phenomenally gifted natural athlete, but if he didn’t actually enjoy running very fast, it would make achieving his true potential very effortful. If Usain Bolt had hated running, even if he thought it was ‘just ok’, his obvious phenomenal natural ability alone would have made him brilliant, but not necessarily world beating. Without true passion for, or connection to, his ‘axis statement’, He would probably never have achieved his true potential.

This is what the author Ken Robinson calls living in your ‘element’

‘The element’ is the point of intersection between aptitude and passion.

John can clearly make a decent sandwich and can run a decent business. It isn’t however his passion, and therefore aptitude will be able to get him so far but no farther. He might even go on to be objectively very successful in a conventional way. He could be the owner of the next ‘Pret-a-Manger’ or sort of high-end ‘Subway’ franchise, but it won’t make any difference. All this success in the eyes of others; the growing business, the nice houses and cars, will never be able to make him feel like he is doing something that he is supposed to be doing. No amount of success would cover up the honest mess in his heart of hearts, the truth of the matter that left him sobbing in his car when he could have been inside celebrating. The cold hard truth exposed to him by a child was that he didn’t want to do this anymore.

Now dear reader, I know you probably feel like we are veering dangerously close to wishy-washy stuff, but this is a necessary pragmatic assessment of what it means to be genuinely successful, and it is very important to have an internally consistent view of what success looks like to you.

I once heard an interview with the millionaire founder of CD Baby, Derek Sivers. He was asked to,

Give the name of the person he considered to be truly successful.

His answer is as subversive as it is wise, and he comes across as a guy who doesn’t indulge in wishy-washy conceptualisations of things.

He stated in the interview that whilst his mind had automatically suggested Richard Branson as an obvious answer, he actually couldn’t answer this question without first knowing the motives of the person he was talking about.

For example had Richard Branson’s personal definition of success, (and his hearts burning desire to boot) been to live a life of solitude in a cabin in the woods, but that he never got round to it (on account of being constantly derailed by the act of setting up one hugely profitable business after another) then he would have to be deemed a failure by his own metric of success.

If you believe that an important component to a happy and balanced life is to actually truly connect the axis of your work, then you must understand that this is only possible by having your axis statement line up with your talents, and your interests.

There are plenty of very capable dentists who display great aptitude for the skilled and difficult tasks we routinely perform. There is however a dissonance between this aptitude and the dentists true interests, their true passions. Sometimes dentists try and ‘up skill’ our way out of this.

When you read the story of John perhaps you have the dispassionate perspective to know that if he didn’t like making sandwiches then he probably wasn’t going to enjoy making ciabatta rolls, and that he was simply getting himself deeper into something that he didn’t want to do.

So why do so many dentists who don’t really like drilling teeth start learning how to place implants in the hope that this will be more to their liking?

The knowledge that you are not doing what it is that you could be doing also starts to bleed in to the rest of your life. And this is why I think work life balance can be difficult if you are not connected to the axis of your work. The holidays, the rounds of golf, the shopping trips, the nights out with friends, they all have a shadow. Perhaps you have felt this shadow lurking on a Sunday night when you are out for dinner. It’s a dark little voice from your sub-conscious that whispers in your ear during a break in the conversation –

‘Yeah, its great fun now, what a lovely restaurant, what great company, the wine is worth the price tag, but don’t forget, back to work tomorrow, don’t ever forget that…’

What others call the Sunday night blues I now see as a silent shout from your sub conscious that you are not doing whatever it is that you are supposed to be doing.

If it isn’t already painfully obvious then John is my avatar in this story. I suspect other people who read it also connected with what he was going through.

I didn’t have an insistent little 7-year old to corner me with the fact that I didn’t like drilling teeth anymore, if ever. Instead I had Pablo Picasso.

I was on holidays in Antibes on the Cote d’Azur and outwardly things were going great, I was on a nice European trip, I was working 3 days a week in a private practice in Australia which was nicely paying or everything. Nice friends, nice house, nice weather, nice hobbies, nice everything. Nice nice nice. But I was dreading going back to work. I was thinking how different my hours spent at work were from my happy hours away from it, with all my engaging hobbies and interesting friends, and I was thinking of how much of a dichotomous yuppie I was. All these thoughts were rolling around my head as me and my girlfriend walked into the Musee Picasso. (Antibes is the beautiful little town where Picasso lived and produced some of his most famous work). We rounded the first corner of displays and a quote from the man himself was emblazoned across an infographic in French and English. Here is what it said.

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.

He may as well have drawn a cubist picture of himself with a speech bubble coming out of his mouth saying ‘FAO of Niall, don’t be a dentist anymore, merci’.

I bought a little picture with this written on it at the gift shop, and placed it on my bathroom mirror. I looked at it for the first few days when I got back from my holiday. I actually remember being angry with him!

‘It’s alright for you’, I would say to myself as I furiously brushed my teeth’ (we are such hypocrites with the modified bass technique at times aren’t we?) ‘Making a living drawing sketches of bulls and stuff, we can’t all be that indulgent, we can’t all be so up our own asses - some of us have got to actually go out and be useful to society’

I was having an argument with myself that I knew I was going to lose, and poor old Pablo just happened to get in the cross fire.

After I moved past chastising a dead painter in my mind I took a more productive tack and decided to try and disprove the following hypothesis;

‘It doesn’t matter what you do, work will always be work. It’s not really possible to fully connect with your job in a way that competes with how you connect to other aspects of your life, like fun, friends and family’.

‘Passion for your job is an illusion’, I kept telling myself ‘so it’s better to have a very comfortable life with a way that allows you to earn a good living, in relatively few hours in the week, and on your own terms’.

This is what I thought, but I set out to prove myself wrong. Shortly after the return from the trip I was watching a program with Stephen Fry on as a guest and he said, “Make your work more fun than fun”.

Again, I thought this mythical, impossible, unrealistic stupid, offensive, indulgent, quixotic and polyannish. I thought all these things, and my ire moved from Pablo to Stephen. But I owe both men an apology.

Because I was wrong. My hypothesis was wrong. I am only a sample size of one, but I can honestly say now that my work is more fun than fun. Just over a year ago I moved away permanently from dentistry, and now I work as a communications manager at a luxury rehab in Thailand. I oversee creative content production of a talented marketing team and also work as an international liaison, speaking at conferences and in the media. I get paid to do things I would do for free.

I cannot begin to express how different the change is on a Sunday night. In fact I don’t even distinguish between weekends and weekdays now, I work when the urge takes me and the urge takes me often. I had to stop myself from writing this article whilst I was on another holiday recently - I actually wanted to go to my room and do this amongst some other work related tasks, more than I wanted to sit on a Cabana by the pool! This is where work life balance really does become important, and I am by no means repudiating the concept. The irony that I had to work in a rehab to realise I had workaholic tendencies have also not been lost on me!

So one simple question. Read your axis statement to yourself. Do you like doing that all the time? Do you actually like being a dentist?

1 - If the answer is Yes – then congratulations! Join me next time for how we can improve your work life balance to make you absolutely ‘knock it out of the park’ going forward. 2 - If the answer is that you aren’t sure anymore – then I will help you through that also, so keep reading. Agnosticism should really only be a temporary state. The waiter doesn’t mind giving you a few minutes to make your mind up as to what you want for starter and main, but he isn’t exactly happy if you say, ‘I’m not sure and I won’t be sure for an indefinite amount of time, do you mind if I just sit here for as long as it takes to decide?’

The decision to either stick with dentistry and make the best out of it or change careers is of course a much bigger decision than whether you want Seabass or the Veal, but it’s not the biggest decision the world has ever seen. So, (and I mean this from as lovingly as I can) get over yourself. Don’t sit through the whole dinner service of life, humming and haaing, make a commitment to either give your best to the noble field of dentistry (and get the best out of it in return) or give your significant resources of ‘intelligence work ethic and skill’ to another field. (more on this later).

If you are agonising with this decision here is a statement that will weirdly make it easier.

Nobody Cares.
That’s not meant to be hurtful, it’s just something I have found out from experience and the experiences of people I know and have worked with.

When I was moving away from dentistry I decided to dovetail in a few days of my private psychotherapy practice just to test the waters, which meant dropping a commitment to a practice principal. I play a pretty straight bat and gave him the whole schtick about not wanting to really be a dentist anymore.

‘I’m sorry to hear that but if you don’t want to do it you don’t want to do it.’ He was a nice enough bloke and he wasn’t being harsh, it just didn’t massively alter the facts of his life – he would need to advertise for a new dentist and because it was a good practice he knew he wouldn’t struggle. We sorted out the HR stuff and that was that.

A friend of mine was training in Max Fax and told his supervising consultant that he wished to switch to Psychiatry. He wrote a mammoth text message explaining his entire thought process (He showed it to me, it was so long it made this blog post look like a meme). So he agonised over this message and sent it out. Next morning his phone goes beep; ‘Ok no problem’.

Again, this consultant thought highly of my friend, He genuinely wished him all the best and wanted him to be happy in his work. It’s just that his life would go on. We had both been dreading this change and had amped it up to this big thing in our heads, but I felt (and I’m sure my pal would say the same) having someone reflect back to you that they were too busy with their own lives to give you career change a lot of cognitive real estate was a strangely liberating experience.

I do not say this to hurt you or make you feel unimportant, I’m saying it to empower you to see that you are free to make this decision, one way or the other. Do you know another set of people who don’t care what you do as long as you are happy?

Your kids.
So stop using them as an excuse to stay in a job you don’t like (if this is the case). I work with addicts in a luxury rehab, may of them come from very wealthy families, where they wanted for nothing except their parent’s attention.

A large part of what we do is therefore, for want of a better word. ‘reparenting’.

So my advice to you would be

Spend half as much money on your kids and twice as much time.

3 - If the answer is No – then join me next time for a discussion of how you can get the hell out of a profession you don’t want to be in. You are just taking up a spot for someone who might actually want to be doing what it is that you are doing, and are also probably missing out on a lifetime of fun, influence, personal growth and maybe even a small fortune. Once you are in a better place in that regard then you can think about work life balance. But not before, because the equation as it stands cannot balance. Also don’t worry about the golden handcuffs. There are very practical ways around that, and I will show you how.


I used to think Picasso’s works were overrated scribbles, derivative pieces of rubbish. What an idiot I was. I now see that all he was after was the true essence of the thing. He was of course a master and therefore capable of drawing more comprehensively and realistically, but his true work always sought to get down to the axis of the thing, and nothing more. He certainly helped me drill down to mine.

Dr Niall Campbell B.D.S. M.F.D.S Dip. Clin Hyp PG Dip Psych qualified from Queens University dental school in Belfast