Work-Life Balance vs. Higher Pay: What Your DOPE Personality Type Actually Wants

Here’s a question that sounds simple until you actually sit with it: if you could have more money or more life, which one would you pick?

Most of us have an instinctive answer. And then, about three seconds later, we start negotiating with ourselves. Well, it depends on how much more money. And what do you mean by more life, exactly? And does it count if the higher-paying job is still somewhat interesting? Before long the simple question has become a philosophical labyrinth and you’ve somehow convinced yourself that the answer is probably “both, ideally.”

Which – fair enough. But “both, ideally” is not a career strategy. At some point, most of us face a real choice between a role that pays more and one that fits better, or between a promotion that comes with serious lifestyle trade-offs and a quieter path that doesn’t. And the research suggests that Australians and Kiwis are increasingly clear on where they land.

Around 68% of New Zealanders say they’d choose work-life balance over a higher salary, and roughly one in four wouldn’t return to full-time office work for any pay rise on offer. These aren’t fringe opinions – they represent a genuine, ongoing cultural shift in what people in this part of the world want from their working lives. And Australia is tracking in a similar direction, particularly since the remote work experiment showed a lot of people what they’d been missing.

But here’s what the surveys don’t capture: why someone prioritises balance over pay – or pay over balance – is rarely random. It’s deeply personal. And it maps, more closely than you might expect, onto personality type.

This Isn’t a Values Judgement

Before we get into the DOPE breakdown, I want to say something clearly: neither choice is the right one. Choosing to optimise for income is not selling out. Choosing to optimise for lifestyle is not lacking ambition. The most successful career is the one that’s built around what you actually need to function well and feel like your working life is worthwhile – not the one that looks best in theory.

What I find endlessly interesting is that a lot of the dissatisfaction people feel in their careers comes not from making the wrong choice between pay and balance, but from making a choice that doesn’t actually match their wiring – often because they made it based on what they thought they should want rather than what they genuinely do.

So let’s look at what each DOPE type actually tends to want here – and what that means for the decisions in front of you.

Eagles: Pay Is Probably Keeping Score (But Don’t Let It Win by Default)

Let’s not dance around it: Eagles tend to care about money more than they sometimes let on. Not necessarily because they’re materialistic – though Eagles do enjoy the visible markers of success, let’s be honest – but because for many Eagles, financial reward is a measure. It’s one of the clearest, most objective ways to know whether you’re winning.

Eagles also tend to have a high tolerance for intensity. Long hours, high-pressure environments, complex problems – these things energise Eagles rather than draining them, at least for a while. And so the trade-off that would be immediately unacceptable to a Dove – “this role pays very well but the hours are brutal” – might genuinely feel like a reasonable deal to an Eagle, especially early in their career.

The strategic watch-out for Eagles is the long game. High-intensity, high-pay environments can run Eagles into the ground if there’s no recovery built in – not because Eagles can’t handle pressure, but because even Eagles have a ceiling, and they’re sometimes the last person in the room to notice they’ve hit it. The Eagles who sustain peak performance over a decades-long career tend to be the ones who’ve built in deliberate recovery – regular decompression, physical activity, relationships outside work that don’t require them to perform.

There’s also a subtler trap: Eagles who’ve built their identity primarily around income and achievement can find themselves genuinely lost when the external markers of success stop feeling like enough. If you’re an Eagle who’s hit the salary number you always wanted and it didn’t quite fill the thing you thought it would fill – that’s useful data. It might be telling you that what you actually need is impact rather than income, and those aren’t always the same thing.

The question for Eagles isn’t whether to pursue high-paying roles. Often, they should – it aligns with their strengths and their drive. The question is whether the version of success they’re chasing is actually theirs, or one they inherited from someone else’s expectations.

Owls: You Want Security First, Everything Else Second

For Owls, the pay-versus-balance question is often less about lifestyle preference and more about stability. Owls tend to feel most comfortable when they have a clear picture of where they stand – financially, professionally, structurally. Uncertainty is genuinely uncomfortable for an Owl in a way it might not be for a Peacock, for example, who can hold ambiguity with much more ease.

This means Owls often prioritise roles that offer reliable income, clear structures, good superannuation, and a degree of job security – even if the pay isn’t maximised and even if the lifestyle isn’t thrilling. There’s wisdom in this. An Owl in a stable, well-matched role with decent conditions and a manageable workload is often quietly very content, even if their Eagle colleague can’t understand why they haven’t pushed harder for the senior title.

The area where Owls sometimes get stuck is in staying in a role – or a sector – long past the point where it’s actually serving them, because the certainty of what they have feels safer than the risk of reaching for something better. Owls can underestimate their own market value, particularly if they’ve been in the same organisation for a long time and haven’t tested their skills externally in a while. The salary they’re being paid might feel “good enough” when compared to what they had before, without them ever checking whether it’s actually competitive.

If you’re an Owl reading this and you genuinely can’t remember the last time you looked at what the market is paying for your skills – go look. It’s a ten-minute exercise on SEEK or LinkedIn, and you might be surprised. Security is a legitimate thing to value. Underpayment dressed up as security is something different, and Owls deserve to know the difference.

On balance itself: Owls tend to value downtime, routine, and clear boundaries between work and not-work more than they often articulate. The ability to fully disengage from work at the end of the day – to not be always-on – matters to an Owl’s ability to do deep, quality work during the hours they are on. Roles that blur those boundaries tend to quietly erode Owl performance even when the Owl doesn’t realise it’s happening.

Peacocks: You Need Stimulation, and You’ll Pay for It Either Way

Peacocks are the type most likely to take a pay cut for a job that excites them – and then be completely surprised when, a year in, the excitement has worn off and they’re wondering why they’re earning less than they could be.

This isn’t a criticism. Peacocks are genuinely motivated by enthusiasm and connection, and a role that offers those things is worth real money to them. The problem is that Peacocks can sometimes make financial decisions in the glow of initial excitement without thinking carefully about whether the thing that excites them now will still excite them in eighteen months.

The Peacock’s honest answer to the pay-versus-balance question is usually: “neither, actually – I want interesting.” A high-paying but tedious role will make a Peacock miserable. A flexible but dull role will make them equally miserable. What Peacocks are really optimising for is stimulation, variety, people, and the sense that they’re doing something that matters and that others find impressive or valuable.

The practical move for Peacocks is to get more rigorous about the difference between “this sounds exciting in theory” and “this will still be exciting when it’s a regular Tuesday.” Before accepting a role primarily because it sounds great, Peacocks benefit from talking to people who actually do it – people who are past the honeymoon period – and asking honest questions about what an ordinary week looks like.

On the balance question specifically: Peacocks can handle intensity when they’re energised by the work, but they tend to crash hard when they’re performing in an environment they’ve stopped caring about. Burnout for a Peacock often doesn’t look like exhaustion – it looks like disengagement, which can be mistaken for laziness by managers who don’t understand the type.

Doves: Balance Isn’t a Preference for You – It’s a Requirement

Let’s be straight about this: for Doves, work-life balance isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a genuine operational need. Doves are deeply affected by their environment – they absorb the emotional climate of their workplace, they carry the weight of other people’s stress, and they give a lot of themselves in roles that require relational energy. Without adequate recovery time, Doves don’t just get tired. They get depleted in a way that affects everything – their performance, their relationships, their sense of themselves.

This means that the calculation a Dove is doing when they look at a higher-paying role with demanding hours is not “is the money worth the lifestyle trade-off?” It’s closer to “is the money worth the cost to my health and my relationships?” And for most Doves, the honest answer is no – not because they don’t value financial security, but because they’ve usually learned, sometimes painfully, what happens to them when they chronically neglect their own needs in service of a role.

The 68% of Kiwis who say they’d choose balance over pay are, I’d wager, disproportionately Doves. And they’re not wrong to feel that way.

The risk for Doves isn’t that they’ll chase money at the expense of balance – it’s that they’ll accept less than they deserve financially because they’re so relieved to have found a role with humane conditions that they don’t negotiate hard enough. Doves tend to undervalue themselves in salary conversations, particularly if the employer seems nice and the culture seems good. Good culture is not a substitute for fair pay. You can – and should – have both.

If you’re a Dove who hasn’t negotiated a salary in a while, or who accepted a role below market rate because the flexibility felt worth it: this is your reminder that fair pay and work-life balance are not mutually exclusive. SEEK salary insights, industry benchmarks, and a quiet conversation with a recruiter about current market rates are all worth your time before your next salary conversation.

The Bigger Picture

Here’s what I think the pay-versus-balance conversation is really about, underneath all the numbers and preferences.

It’s about what you’re actually building your working life around. And the honest answer to that question – the one that’s going to serve you better than whatever answer sounds most admirable in a job interview – comes from knowing yourself well enough to trust your own instincts about what you actually need.

Your DOPE type isn’t a cage. An Eagle can choose balance. A Dove can choose to pursue a higher-paying role that genuinely stretches them. But understanding your natural orientation – what energises you, what depletes you, what you’re likely to regret – gives you a much cleaner starting point for making decisions you’ll actually be happy with in three years.

A Good Starting Point

If you haven’t yet explored your personality type through the free DOPE Bird Personality Assessment at richardstep.com, it’s worth doing before your next career decision – including a salary negotiation or a job change. The self-awareness it builds is exactly the kind that helps you stop making decisions based on what you think you should want and start making them based on what you actually do.

And if you want to keep exploring, richardstep.com has a full range of self-tests that complement the DOPE framework nicely.

So – hand on heart – in the pay-versus-balance conversation, which one are you actually optimising for right now? And is that choice genuinely yours, or did you inherit it from somewhere?

Take the free DOPE Bird Personality Assessment and get clearer on what your career actually needs to work for your life.