Welcome to 2013 … a year of greater personal balance?

Firstly, warm best wishes for 2013 to all members of the 5YE ‘community’. I hope this finds you recharged and rested for the year ahead.

As is traditional for this period – a ‘down-period’ bridging one calendar year into the next – it is a time for reflection and renewed goal setting. In this time-honoured spirit, I want to share with you some musings and ideas/materials on the topics of ‘balance’ and personal planning.

It’s all about ‘balance’ … 

© Caulton Morris

In my adult/working life, I have never felt more ‘balanced’ than I do now. Indeed, it is only in the last year – having stepped back completely from a full-time MD position and having developed a new ‘pluralist’ existence – that I realise quite how unbalanced my previous decade had been. This is interesting because when I was in the full-time MD role, I convinced myself that – all things considered – l wasn’t doing too bad on the ‘balance’ front at all. It is only with the introduction of a fundamental life/work reinvention that I can see that I have taken a massive bound closer to this ‘optimal place’. I am no less busy (that is probably a wired attribute) but my energy is expended far more evenly and, as a direct result, I am a genuinely happier soul. Not that I was ever unhappy – far from it; it’s just revealing to know that the ‘last miles’ of contentment really are correlate with ‘balance’. To paint this personal picture, my current ‘deck of cards’ involves leading an online start up team (ticks the entrepreneurial buzz box), advisory support to boards of dynamic businesses (professional development and team contribution), I am studying Philosophy/PPE with Open University (personal/academic development), I am writing part-time (creative), I train 4-5 times week at Crossfit (physical/health ), I run a local debating event series and mentor young Princes Trust entrepreneurs (community), I schedule 1-2 epic outdoor trips a year (friends/adventure) and, most important of all, I spend far more time with my wife and growing family (home/family).

Of course, this debate requires a heavy dose of reality. We rarely have full, independent control over our own time (even as business owner-managers) and clearly, if/when dependents ever enter the scene, there is that small challenge of ‘paying the mortgage and feeding others’ that gets in the way of dreamy utopias. I write all this, therefore, not to gloat but to reinforce the point that perhaps the most important reward of entrepreneurial industry and success is that it can land you in the most fortunate of positions where greater self-definition is achievable. Clearly, a ‘balanced life’ has no absolute definition and, even subjectively, I don’t believe the optimal place is truly knowable (let alone achievable). In the quest to get closer to it, however, I can definitively say that I am ‘getting warm’. In this context, my pre-calculated risk for an intense period of entrepreneurism, my ‘build-to-value’ journey (during which the work/life symmetry was grossly distorted on occasion), was worth every hard step. At the start of such a journey, ‘balance’ maybe needs to be evaluated, and traded, over a specific time period. Realistically, you may need to accept (as I did) that it is worth a few asymmetric years to ‘buy you’ the strategic option of such personal autonomy, sounder financial footing and ‘balance’ downstream. Just don’t keep putting off the day on which you really do something deliberate, meditated and structured to bring this end-state about!

‘Balance’ – Personal Planning

On which note, let me also share with you in this newsletter/blog a simple tool I have used in the past. It’s nothing revolutionary and you will have probably seen variants of it before. Essentially, it is a ‘Balancing Wheel’ that seeks to facilitate discussion/planning across the key dimensions of a ‘rounded’ life. I developed this variant with my wife, Roz, a number of years ago. In a rare weekend away, we spent a great few days at a stunning hotel in the Italian Dolomites and this template was created on a scrap piece of paper as we sat in a sunny meadow gazing wistfully at a stunning, mountain backdrop. Once we agreed the template, we asked ourselves individually ‘one to ten, how are we doing now in each dimension?’. There were some low scores! We then set about discussing our personal goals, timelines and how we could support each other in raising the low scores, becoming … more ‘balanced in the round’.  If there is an ‘Important Other’ in your life you might want to find some ‘protected’ time (the setting is also important) to do similar. In a future edition of the newsletter, I will share with you a full personal plan template (as mentioned in Guide 01) that takes this concept into far more detail.

That’s it for this edition; suffice to wish you all every personal and professional success in the year ahead. May it be more balanced or, if not, part of a deliberate plan to allow you to be more so in future years.

‘Balance Wheel’: