Life in Balance
Placing balance and balance creation at the center stage of my professional work and at the core of my business, naturally, I pay attention to the way the word is showing up in the public discourse. In a world usually defined by duality and contrasting ideas, balance is typically represented as the calibrating force between different elements and points of interest.
A great example of this is the concept of work-life balance, where work and life are often treated as if they were two separate things in opposition to each other. Misleading if you ask me when the fact is that work is one of several dimensions coexisting as one: Your life!
I personally like to view things from a more holistic perspective. Fundamentally, I believe that, at some deeper level, everything is connected. That we are all part of the same common quantity, sharing the same pool of resources, information, and energy. Consequently, as a coach, I always consider people and issues as part of a larger context and story, I just prefer to pay attention to what can unite rather than what drives apart.
As a result of this worldview, one of my favorite coaching tools is the Wheel of Life. The Wheel of Life is a graphic representation of your life broken into eight different areas. The specific areas typically vary from model to model, but the principal idea is to work with life as a whole while acknowledging that the way you approach and prioritize one area will naturally influence the other parts.
I typically use the Wheel of Life at the beginning of a coaching course while first getting to know a new client. It is one of my props when asking: Where are you now? and when looking into someone’s current state of balance.
You can’t change what you are not aware of. Taking this kind of birds-eye-perspective of your whole life can allow you to take a step back and view the sum of all areas. When life is busy, or all your energy is focused on a special project, it's all too easy to find yourself off balance, not paying enough attention to other important areas of your life. While you need to have drive and focus if you're going to get things done, taking this too far can lead to frustration and intense stress.
Asking the client to assess their current level of satisfaction in each of the eight areas, I sometimes suggest that the client thinks of the score as their personal capital invested into each area. When looking at the areas next to each other, it is not only possible to compare the scores of each area but also consider the possibility of “reallocating funds” from some areas and reinvesting them into others. Hereby quantifying concepts that may otherwise be hard to measure and redesign.
For example, I often come across clients who find themselves overinvesting their focus and attention in one or two areas (i.e., Friends & Family and Career) at the expense of others (Development and Health & Fitness). This sometimes leads to exploring ways to create greater alignment between the client's core values as a person and the way time and energy are being distributed across the different areas and broken into different kinds of goals.
By applying this perspective on life, balance and its creation become a matter of integration. The word integration stems from the Latin integrare which means “making whole” and “the act of bringing together the parts of a whole.” Instead of focusing on single parts separately from other parts of your life, balance creation is about uniting them in ways that are meaningful to you. It is about prioritizing the things that add real value to your life in the way that feels right as you move through life.
As you enter into the new year, you might want to spend a little time thinking about how you wish to transition into the next phase. So, I’ll leave you with these questions to ask yourself…
What is your current state of balance?
What do you want to create more of for yourself?
What would you like to bring with you into the new year?
What is no longer serving you and could perhaps be adjusted or left behind?
Wishing you all a happy and healthy holiday season!
Warmest Wishes,
Sille