Leadership and the rest of the balanced life story

Having a balanced life has other benefits beyond just supercharging your creativity by taking advantage of your subconscious and leaving yourself the energy to be open to new ideas (and execute on them).

If you have a balanced world view you’ll find that when you have failures, or when you experience setbacks, you will not fall as far or land as hard. This is true for either personal or professional failures (if you’re experiencing both at the same time, you’re just going to have to settle in for a patch of rough air).

Of course we’ve been focused primarily on the work side of the balance equation—that is, not investing all of you energy, identity, and perception of self into your work. But it’s completely possible to go the other way, too, and identify yourself solely through one or more facets of your personal life: your kids, for example. It’s not that focusing solely on work is bad because your focus is work, or that focusing solely on your family is bad because you shouldn’t focus on family per se. The point is that focusing completely on any one thing is going to set you up for serious knocks to your self image.

If you are doing anything challenging, learning anything new, and in general making a difference you are going to have failures, as we’ve talked about before. You need a cushion to land on when you fall.

Using a work example, if your identity is completely determined by your job and your job doesn’t go well, your self image and your confidence will start to erode. This will cause you to perform even more poorly, leading to further erosion of your sense of self. Before you know it, you are in a negative spiral from which there is no evident escape.

But if you have balance, in other words if you have a rewarding personal and professional life, you have a buffer against difficulties in either portion of your life.

Leaders seek balance in all aspects of their lives, and encourage it in others.