6 Tips to Successful Balance

We often hear about “balance” in the way we manage our personal and business lives. For many of us, though, it seems illusive. That’s because the meaning is not clear. The word “balance” implies that everything has to be perfectly weighted and arranged so that it won’t move and get out of balance again. To maintain balance, things must remain rigid and static. You don’t hear a lot of people wishing for “static” lives. That sounds incredibly boring.

So what about this issue of balance—is it possible for wildly successful people? When people, especially women, say they want to know how they can balance their lives, what they’re really asking is how they can set their priorities and stop feeling guilty that some aspect is getting short shrift no matter what they do.

Balance is an individual matter and one of control—control through integrating, prioritizing, and staying flexible. 

Wildly successful women see prioritizing as an ongoing process. They understand that there will be days when their business takes precedence over family, and other days when family will come first. And they know that those days can’t be predetermined. 

Yet many people tend to think of “balance” as compartmentalizing. They try to determine in advance what they will do with every minute of their time. Betsy Collard, former director of the Career Action Center said, “I think ‘balance’ is a fallacy. I don’t like the word because, like ‘career,’ it sounds too box-like and linear. It’s more a function of the integration of work and life in a manner that makes sense. If that’s ‘balance,’ I’ll buy it. But I tend to think when people talk about ‘balance’ they mean, ‘I’m only going to work this many hours’—setting very strict boundaries. Each of us has our own definition of ‘balance.’ It involves deciding what we want out of our career. No one is going to balance our lives for us.”

Betsy continued, “We used to have actual barriers before we had today’s technology . Now, we can work at home. We can work out of our cars. We can work twenty-four hours a day, if we like, and some people will. We’ve entered an era when each one of us has to define when enough is enough in terms of work, and what role we want our career to play in our lives. …This knowledge-based global economy we live in today isn’t going to slow down. We have to think differently about careers and make choices. Nobody is going to make them for us.”

What you can do about the search for “balance”:

   1. Stay flexible.
   2. Don’t beat yourself up when you can’t please everyone .
   3. Focus the values you’ve set for yourself.
   4. Know that seeking “balance” is healthy, expecting it is foolish.
   5. What ever you are doing at the time, pay full attention to it. Live in the moment and don’t worry about not being two places at one time.
   6. Listen actively. You save a lot of time and misunderstandings when you truly hear not only what other people are saying, but what they’re not saying.

Integration through prioritizing makes you more productive and can help you avoid worrying about home life at work and work life at home. With clearer priorities and more conscious focus, you can even find you do better at everything from earning more money to raising your children. The key is to focus fully in the present.

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Pam Gilberd is the author of many articles and books on career, life, and success issues, including The Eleven Commandments of Wildly Successful Women., The Twelfth Commandment of Wildly Successful Women, and Leadership Secrets of Elizabeth I.

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