Spinning Plates on a Stick and other Life Tricks

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Part 1 of a 2-Part Series

Many entrepreneurs and solo professionals express a longing for greater freedom from the bureaucratic structures that seem to envelope them as their business grows. Anyone running a business knows creating success requires a great deal of focused energy. Sometimes your focus can become an obsession.

Many obsess figuring out ways to build their business, create more income, and have free time to enjoy their success. Many become slaves to the enterprise they create– mostly putting out fires with little quality time for creative thinking, innovation, and rejuvenation. What’s the point of expended all your energy pursuing your business goals if other areas of your life suffer from little or no attention?

Indeed, managing the complexities inherent in the pursuit of your business goals can suck up the majority of your bandwidth rather quickly–if you allow it. I’d like to suggest you consider your whole life to be a delicate system. All the areas of your life experience are like the cylinders in your car’s engine–everything needs to be firing evenly in all cylinders for you to experience a smooth and efficient ride. It’s pretty difficult to experience freedom and joy “doing what you love” when your relationships, or your health are in disarray. One is no good without the other.

Spinning plates.

Bringing our life more into balance can sometimes seem like spinning plates on the end of a stick. All of them up there at the same time defying gravity with sustained momentum.  Of course, most of us have a few wobbly plates to contend with. Many have even had a couple fall and shatter to pieces. None of us can honestly say we haven’t dropped a few plates in our lives. I certainly have many times! To spin plates successfully, you have to be paying attention to all of them at the same time– and that’s difficult–especially when your attention is focused solely on the most pressing one… say your business for example.

Check in with yourself.

Here is a simple exercise that will help you check in with yourself to determine your level of satisfaction with the current result you are experiencing in each area of your life. I’d like to suggestion it’s best to do this exercise when you are feeling reflective or introspective because in that frame of mind you’re more likely be honest with yourself.

Step One:

On a piece of paper, simply make a list of these words on the left side:

- Geography / Environment
-  Career / Profession
-  Financial
-  Family
-  Personal Relationships
-  Health
-  Avocation
-  Spiritual

Step Two:

Think deeply about your level of satisfaction in each of these areas of your life, and then place a grade on a scale of 1-10 to the right of each item. Your highest satisfaction is a 10, your lowest is a number 1. (Remember to be uncompromisingly honest with yourself).

Step Three:

Make a visual bar graph of your current level of satisfaction. (See my own example) Your lowest scores indicate what areas in your life need more attention from you.  The highest scores are important too! Take a moment to appreciate yourself for the effort it took for you to achieve that higher score!  You might want to ponder what ultimate score you would like to have in each area of your life and set a goal to check in again six months down the road to see if anything is changing in the right direction. Keep your graph handy as a reference.

Now pay closer attention.

If you do this simple exercise 2-3 times a year, you’ll be tuned in to your whole life scene in real time. You‘ll find yourself paying closer attention to your whole life, not just one or two areas. If you focus your energy on balance, you’ll begin to experience greater freedom from stress and anxiety that will rob you blind of the energy required to keep it all together in the first place.

Of course, life is always dynamic and your focus will change accordingly. It’s unrealistic to think one can achieve a state of “balance” and then have balance be static. Life doesn’t live that way.

Living in balance is a daily activity, created by the choices you make in each and every moment.

People hard-wired for achievement put tremendous mental focus on their aspirations and goals for business and financial success. However, to achieve success in one area of your life at the expense of any other area is no achievement at all.  Your experience of satisfaction and fulfillment in life is determined by the delicate balancing act of shifting priorities of daily life.  No one area can dominate your attention for long before the whole system begins to weaken.

In the post to follow, I‘ll offer some suggestions for bringing all the areas of your life into greater balance so you can increase your experience of confidence, satisfaction and fulfillment.