to think about your position or each move. It becomes a natural act.
Achieving balance or being centered in your life works in much the same way. Being in alignment or centered in life is about making clear choices that support your core values. The act of aligning your values and your life choices will achieve the same results as being centered on the balance ball. Doing so implies a dynamic process, just like sitting on the ball. You must constantly reassess your life, your challenges, and the consequences of your choices.
Values are the beliefs or feelings that are important enough to drive our decisions about how we behave. For one person, creativity, following a passion, and self-renewal can be major values. For another, knowledge, discovery, and intellectual curiosity can be drivers. For yet another, the attainment of material wealth, power, and status are key motivators of behavior. This is not to say that one is necessarily better than another; there are often no right or wrong answers, no absolutes. Our values shift during the course of our lives. Accordingly, so do the choices that flow from our different values. When our lives don’t reflect the satisfaction of our values, we feel that inconsistency as some measure of imbalance.
Aligning your behavior with your values is much like any other developmental experience; the basic process involves assessment, challenge, and support. You need to determine where you are, define where you want to go, and then put into place the tools you need to get there.
Ann, a successful marketing manager, and her husband, Don, have two children under the age of five. Both Ann and Don are successful in their work, but Ann holds a senior position and earns significantly more than Don. They both travel a fair amount and rely on family and babysitters to help them. Each weekend, they sit down and plan their schedules for the week, determining who will run errands and pick up the children after preschool. Ann is grateful for Don’s support. Things run smoothly most of the time, but she finds herself getting up before dawn to do e-mail and staying up late in the evening to finish household chores. She frequently admits that she misses spending quality time with her children. They could live on her salary alone, but they have recently purchased a vacation home and two new cars. With college and retirement ahead, neither Ann nor Don wants to live on one paycheck.
Assessment: Gaining Clarity
Assessment helps you understand and gain clarity about your current situation so that you can identify the gaps between your present reality (where you are) and the future (where you want to be). Assessment provides you with information, which helps “unfreeze” your perspective, and results in a heightened awareness of yourself and understanding how others see you. A thorough assessment process becomes the “map” to help you move over the terrain and face the challenges that lie ahead. It is the process by which you develop new skills and perspectives that will help you become more effective in all aspects of your life.
Time Journal
There are many ways to assess whether your values and behavior are aligned. One simple form of assessment is to inventory how you spend your time. Keep a log for a full week or two and jot down what you do for any period of time of an hour or more. Some themes or categories will emerge: career, family, community, health, self, spiritual pursuits, and so on. As a second step, write down why you did what you did. What value was being served? Next, consider the following questions:
• Are the activities in your log necessary for daily living, for your career, for your family, for your health, or simply for pleasure?
• What percentage of time did you spend in work-related activities versus family activities?
• How much time did you take for yourself?
• What inspires and rejuvenates you? Did you spend enough time on those activities?
Warning Signs
We’ve listed below typical warning signs that we have learned about from our clients. Your life might be out of balance if …
1. You have conversations with yourself in which you say, “I’ve got to make more time for my significant other.” You hear yourself telling others that you really wish you had time to do certain things that you just don’t get done now.
2. Your relationships with your colleagues are less fun, less productive, and less easygoing than they used to be. From your point of view, your direct reports should be far more serious about work than they are. And you think that your family should appreciate you more than they do. They don’t realize how hard you work for them.
3. You are bone tired as well as frustrated, and you lean back to ask yourself why you stay at your computer long after the family has gone to bed. It’s 2:37 a.m., and you can’t recall exactly why you are sitting at your computer.
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