Building Work / Life Balance

by | Nov 29, 2021 | Uncategorized

Get into Flow Building Work / Life Balance
In Progress
There’s a topic I want to touch on when we start discussing things like personal flow and business flow. As a founder of a business there have been many times where it consumed me, and yet it also gave me flexibility as well. I was able to attend a lot of the kids’ school events because the concept of being in an office 9am to 5pm was a bit moot. But something I did struggle with was the concept that always seems to get thrown around that we should have “work/life balance”. I never seemed to have it, and frankly I felt guilty over it.

Then an old mentor introduced me to the concept of the “Life Wheel” which I present below:

It depicts eight areas of life on the wheel as follows:
– Career
– Financial
– Recreational
– Community
– Life Partner
– Spiritual
– Physical
– Mental Genius (Learning)

That’s a lot to juggle if we are going to “balance” them all for that work/life balance goal. But as my mentor explained, it’s not about balancing all equally at any one point in time, it is about balancing them all out over a period of time. So, at a given moment we may be “out of balance” because we are overly focused on one area (e.g., career), but if we measure over a long period, they all get addressed. All of a sudden, this work/life balance thing seems more realistic.

And now we get to the funky part. As we set goals for ourselves, we can probably focus on no more than two to three segments at a time. And the conflict comes across the wheel. So, if we are setting goals the two to three segments probably need to be relatively adjacent. By way of example Financial and Spiritual are directly opposite each other. It is very hard to set large goals that we can achieve in each of these areas at the same time. More likely if we are setting high spiritual goals, we are more likely to achieve them if our other high goals at the same time are around Physical and Life Partner as they are adjacent.

And now we get to the even funkier part. Suppose we identify an area of our life that we are struggling with at a point of time. To find where to focus on how we might address and resolve it, come back on the wheel one to two segments, and look to improve that!! So, say we are struggling in our Career – Work is just hard and not flowing. Consider making improvements to your Mental Genius (learning / training) and Physical (diet and exercise). Improving these areas may just be the way to addressing your real problem area.

Pretty neat 😊