Creating Life Balance

Creating Life Balance

The key to keeping your balance is knowing when you’ve lost it.  
Anonymous 

Mike Johnson’s story is unfortunately too familiar.  He’d been elevated to the CEO position after years of hard work, thinking to himself that some point soon his fast-paced lifestyle would eventually ease up.  It didn’t.  In fact, the demands of his professional life, coupled with his personal responsibilities, only increased.   His sixty-hour work schedule turned into seventy.  His kids were teenagers instead of toddlers and now had busy, demanding schedules of their own.  Both he and his spouse were struggling to balance their careers along with the needs of their family.  That balance had been off quilter for some time. 

When the team at LEADon® met Mike, he was on the verge of a personal and professional breakdown.  Not only was his marriage challenging but he also found himself more detached than ever from family and friends.  His doctor had urged him to lose weight and spend some time focusing on his health since his latest lab results were troubling.  Lack of sleep didn’t help his increasing stress levels, both of which seemed to be contributing to his decreased passion for the life he’d once dreamed about living. 

We wrote about Mike’s story in our book, The LEADing Edge:  9 Strategies for Improving Internal and Intentional Leadership (Wilke & Wilke, 2019) because it was indicative of so many leaders we were working with at the time—and that was pre-pandemic!  Since then, the demands on leaders and their teams have risen dramatically, and many individuals have expressed the awareness that their lives are out of balance—but they’re also not sure how to get back on track, or more importantly, how to create a better personal and professional life than they’ve ever had before. 

If you can relate to some of these personal and professional life balance struggles, the good news is that you’re already headed in the right direction.  As the quote above so poignantly reveals, knowing something seems amiss is the first step to reclaiming balance—or as we like to say at LEADon, creating the balance needed to live successful, significant lives.  

Why do we prefer the term creating?  Because the concept of creation gives you the power to do something new, something better, and something that can evolve over time as you grow and develop. 

To get this process started, we’ve developed a simple formula that explains our strategic approach to achieving the personal and professional B.A.L.A.N.C.E. all exceptional leaders need in their lives.  The seven elements in our life balance formula include: 

Brood 

Associations 

Laugh 

Assets 

‘Nine to Five’ 

Creed 

Exercise & Nutrition 

 Brood refers to your Family of Procreation (FOP) and Family of Origin (FOO).  Everyone comes from a FOO, and many of the individuals who comprise this part of your life impact your daily health and happiness.  Your FOP is the family you’ve created, or perhaps are dreaming of creating.  Either way, these intimate members of your current and/or future life are essential to you—and vice versa.   

Associations are the next layer of relationships in your life.  Friends, close colleagues, neighbors, and members of other groups you belong to (church, community, clubs, etc.) impact the quality of your life.  These “others” not only add value, but they also are sources where you can share part of your wisdom, experiences, ideas, and opinions (see our blog “Community Service—Core Value or Competitive Edge” to discovered how reaching out to others can positively affect your life). Members of your Brood and Associations are also the ones who most often make you Laugh.  The benefits of being joyful should not be undervalued, especially by leaders whose professional lives often tend to be more harried than happy.  We’d recommend finding ways to increase the amount of laughter in your life, which is much easier today with all of the resources available through online streaming and social media connections. 

On that note, let’s pause a moment.  Take time to evaluate these three elements for a balanced personal and professional life.  How are you doing right now with your brood (family members), associations (friends and other people in your spheres of influence), and levels of lightheartedness and laughter? What’s working well?  Which area needs to be improved? 

Here’s the next element for creating life balance:  Assets.  How are finances in your firm trending? How about your personal finances? As most of us would agree, it’s difficult to have life balance when the balance sheet is out of whack.  The same is true for our ‘Nine to Five’ environment.  At LEADon, we call this your Corporate Family®—the third family that all leaders are part of and where they spend the majority of their waking hours during the week.  Do you look forward to interacting with this important part of your professional life, or like Mike, has this environment become a challenge for you too? 

Every healthy, happy leader we know has identified and embraced some type of Creed. Your personal and professional credo represent what matters most to you—those values and beliefs that guide you in good times and bad.  Finally, most of us would concede that Exercise and Nutrition are vital to overall health, but unfortunately this is often the element of life balance that gets minimized when other needs multiply.  Years ago, we were working with an executive who told us he simply didn’t have time to work out or worry about eating right—until he had a cardiac event onboard an airplane during yet another jam-packed workweek.  Thankfully, he survived that health crisis, and since then, he has made significant changes to his personal health and fitness. 

Before we wrap up this blog, take a few minutes to ponder these final four elements of B.A.L.A.N.C.E.  Is your personal and professional financial portfolio as balanced as you’d like?  If not, what can be done to improve the situation? Is your ‘Nine to Five’ a grind, or are you giving and getting joy out of Corporate Family experiences?  What values and beliefs guide your daily life, and would people around you affirm that you strive to live by your credos?  Finally, take an honest assessment of how much time you’re investing in physical exercise and eating right.  If you need to make adjustments to these areas of your life, who could you enlist to help out and hold you accountable for improving? 

The LEADon team believes in the importance of creating life balance so much that we developed an online course, LEADing with Personal & Professional Life Balance® so leaders can explore these seven elements in greater detail.  At the end of the course, we provide specific action items you can readily implement so you can begin to benchmark improvement in the days ahead.  If you’d like to dive deeper into overall health and well-bang, we also have LEADers Manage Their Health® among our offerings of thirty-plus online leadership courses.  

After reviewing these resources, if you have any questions that the team at LEADon can answer, please contact us at www.LEADonUniversity.com— or call 858.592.0700 for personal assistance.  We’ve spent several decades assisting leaders, teams, and entire Corporate Families create the balance they needed, and we’d be honored to help you achieve similar success in your personal and professional life too.