My wife Michelle often reminds me that the key to life is balance.  Typically I acknowledge with “Yes, I know” but I think there is more to it than simply balancing the items on your list to allocate time to business, family and fun.

I believe that it is not how we balance our time that leads to success and happiness but more specifically, what we are balancing.

Turn back the clock three years.  My idea of balance used to be adding more of the important things like family, relationships and fun to the other side of the scale to offset the weight of the “work” that was always keeping that side of the teeter-totter firmly on the ground.

I don’t know why it took me so long to figure out that no matter what I did, work was always winning out.  Somehow I believed that it was possible to simply add more to the other side and eventually things would balance out. Funny thing – they never did.

Then the light bulb came on and I realized that the solution was not adding things on the important side, but eliminating things from the “not so important” side.  My original logic, had it actually worked, would have only broke the seesaw in the middle bringing both sides crashing to the ground.

I have a new theory now and it actually seems to be working.  Now some of you may disagree but it makes sense to me.  I have heard many say that we need to keep our work and personal lives separate.  I disagree.  I actually think this makes the challenge more difficult.  Now understand both my wife and I are self employed so this may not work for you but it is definitely worth considering.

Let me start by saying that there is definitely a need to totally unplug from work every once and a while to simply recharge your batteries and clear your mind.  But for the most part, it is unrealistic to think that your work and personal lives can be separate.

So if you buy into my logic so far, here is how it works.  The key to balance is to keep the amount of things you are balancing at a limit that you can control.  The more control you have, the closer all those things are to the middle of the plank that they all rest upon.

Think of it like this – we all remember when we were kids and were on the teeter-totter (or seesaw), right?  If you were on one end, it took an equal or greater weight on the opposite end to move up and down.  In other words, 100% or greater to your weight to balance.  When the weight is close to the center, it takes less movement to bring it into balance.

My point – I have now removed those heavy objects that were all the way out at the end, those objects that required a lot of added weight on the other side to bring things into balance.  Now I have control over most of my list, and my life, and it takes less movement on my part to keep things balanced.

Yes, I still deal with the occasional lopsided crash, but all in all I hit the ground much less than before.

So my question for you today is this – “Is your life filled with things that hang on the far ends of your control or are most of them close to your core set of priorities allowing you to keep them in balance?”
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Barry Smith    7/1/13   photo by author   © Building What Matters 2013