One of my roles as a life coach is to help people gain clarity and balance in their lives.  This is the age of “hurry sickness” and we can witness this everyday as we travel on the roads, queue at shopping check outs, cross roads, being too busy to invest time with family or friends and so on.  Men everywhere are struggling to balance day-to-day work and family pressures, learn new and changing technologies, and cope with personal financial pressures. Men’s lives are filled yet unfulfilled. These realities are impacting families and the workplace.  Burnout is rife! Is your life anything like this?

“ Psalm 23 Antithesis”

The clock is my dictator, I shall not rest

It makes me lie down only when exhausted

It leads me to deep depression, it hounds my soul

It leads me in circles of frenzy for activities sake.

Even though I run frantically from task to task,

I will never get it all done, for my “ideal” is with me

Deadlines and my need for approval, they drive me.

They demand performance from me, beyond the limits of my schedule.

They anoint my head with migraines, my in-basket overflows.

Surely fatigue and time pressure shall follow me all the days of my life,

And I will dwell in the bonds of frustration forever. (Marcia K Hornok)

Do you find any resonances here?  Are you pulled in a thousand different directions? 

Is your schedule out of control? Are your dreams lost while you live up to everyone else's expectations? Does it have to be this way?  If it is, it’s because you have made it this way, and you are the only one who can make it any different.  Everyone is busy, but who says you can’t have fun and enjoy life even when the pace picks up? Perhaps you are experiencing intense burnout or are just showing the early warning signs.  Quickly complete this inventory to see how many ‘yes’ answers you circle.

1.      More and more, I find that I can hardly wait for quitting time to come so I can leave work	Yes	No
2.      I find I’m not doing very good at work these days	Yes	No
3.      I am more irritable than I used to be	Yes	No
4.      I’m thinking more about changing jobs	Yes	No
5.      Lately I’ve become more cynical and negative	Yes	No
6.      I have more headaches, (or backaches or other physical symptoms) than usual	Yes	No
7.      Often I feel hopeless, like, Who cares?”	Yes	No
8.      I drink more now or take tranquilizers just to cope	Yes	No
9.      My energy level is not what it used to be. I’m tired	Yes	No

(Christina Maslach, How to Beat Burnout . In R Jenson (2001), Achieving Authentic Success, Future Achievement International, San Diego)       

How did you rate?  More than five ‘yes’ answers would indicate a problem.  Is your life in balance or out of balance? So how can we restore balance  in our lives before we burnout?  Here are a few strategies you might find useful.

Balancing life’s priorities

Have you established your top priorities in life so that you can focus on the things that are important to you? This means you need to take time out to plan your life.  We all know the saying “If you fail to plan you plan to fail.”  This applies as much to your personal life as it does to your work life. Many people spend more time planning a holiday than they do planning their own lives.  As Socrates said ‘The Unexamined life is not worth living.'

One of the first tasks I ask my clients to work through is to establish their top priorities in each of their life accounts.  These include family, finances, fitness (mental and physical), firm (vocation), friends, fun and faith.  Write down all your wants then play each of them off in pairs until you arrive at your number one want or your top priority for each life account.  Kevin McCarthy in his book The On-Purpose Person – Making your Life Make Sense, illustrates this tool very clearly.  For example you may decide that your core wants or priorities may look something like this: Family (heal a broken relationship), Finances (pay off the mortgage), Fitness - mental and physical (take a formal course of study and lose weight), Firm – vocation (greater job satisfaction), Friends (spend more time with friends), Fun (take up golf) and Faith (strengthen my inner core).  Having clarity about the things that really matter most in your life will help you to stay on track when you get pulled in so many directions. 

Action your priorities

Developing action plans to achieve each of these top priorities is your next step.  Because so many of us have such good intentions, you need to have a ‘buddy’ and give him permission to keep you accountable.  It takes constant work to integrate your life and stay balanced.  Somewhere, we have to face that ugly word discipline. If you are serious about exchanging burnout for balance, meet with your “buddy”every week and share your progress.  Having these top priorities will prevent you from being pulled in so many different directions thereby ending up ineffectual, confused, rushed, and unfocussed.  Knowing what you want and how to get it is a powerful motivation for life and is amazingly energising.

This process helps you to put First things First.  Many of you will have read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.  His solution is to zero in on scheduling our priorities instead of prioritising our schedule.  So each of our core wants or top priorities as established across all our life accounts must be visited regularly.  I suggest daily where possible especially for family, faith, fitness, financial and fun. You will have to schedule your day to leave room for your core wants.  You may say, “that’s impossible, I work from 6.00am to 8.00pm so how will I have time to worry about the other areas of my life?” Continue in this way and you will be a candidate for burnout. Your body will one day say “that’s enough” and many men often lose careers, relationships and finances as a result of not integrating all areas of their life.

Men often ask, “does balance mean equal?” No!  There are some areas of life that are more important than others but this does not mean we have to spend the most time in the most important areas.  Our work, by its very nature, takes up a large proportion of our day.  The diagram below, presents a model for evaluating the relative importance of our different life accounts.

How do you ‘order’ your world?

Here we get to our core values. What do you value most highly in life? – Spiritual? Financial? Physical? Vocational? Family? Social? or Mental/Intellectual?

Many personal development books teach that to have balance in our lives, all areas of our lives must be equal. 

I believe that some areas of our lives are more important than others.  The ripple effect of this diagram shows the importance of beginning from the innermost circle of our being, going next  to the inner self, and then to the outer world. This model offers us a different paradigm for the way many men order their world.  The spiritual side is revealed as the source of fulfilment.  We are spiritual beings longing to know we have a purpose. We have this hole in the centre of our lives that desires spiritual fulfilment.  It is one thing to say there is a god but it is another thing to say there is a God who has a specific purpose or design in mind for us.  Until we plug that hole called “What is my purpose?, specifically as we are called to live it out, then we are empty and unfulfilled (McCarthy, 1994).

Outside the double lines is Family with our spouse or partner on the inner part of the circle, closest to our inner self.  On the outer circle are the other areas of our life – Financial, Social, Vocational and Church (or other types of organizations). This ordering is basically saying:

• Have a relationship with God
• Love yourself
• Love your spouse or special someone
• Love your family
• And then take care of the rest of the world.

To build a successful and balanced life, you build from the inside-out rather than the outside-in.  If the core is void or weak, then we have no foundation upon which to build our lives.

What you are really being asked to consider is why so many men are so obsessed with their job when this is leading them to burnout.  There are other measures of success that are important other than work.  When “our time is up”, I believe we will ask questions such as the following rather than questions about material success.

• How did my kids turn out?
• Was my life personally rich and fulfilling?
• Did I positively change lives?
• Did I build meaningful and deep relationships?
• Did I really love my spouse or partner?
• Did I make a difference?

So many people have achieved “worldly” and “material” success in terms of power, prosperity, position, pleasure and prestige only to live lives of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation.  They often see their lives slip away compromising deeper meaning and satisfaction.  For me, the five P’s are by-products of success rather than the measure of success itself.  They are more likely to come about in a lasting way when we form and maintain a life of authenticity, integrity, fulfilment and positive impact through service. 

Harold Kushner writes: “Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power – Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve.  Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will at least be a bit different for us having passed through it.”

Getting balance into your day

If we agree that life is more than pleasure, prosperity, position, prestige and power,  how can we balance our lives day by day to achieve authentic success and ensure that our lives have meaning? One suggestion is to look at an ‘ideal day’.

The ideal day has to do with ‘balancing your budgets’. Being out of balance in life creates stress, depression, addiction, anxiety, and a litany of other illnesses.  Strength to stay in balance is drawn from an awareness and commitment to your plan and purpose. Have you ever taken time out to plan an ideal work day? Your ideal on-purpose day is your recipe for successful living and being on-purpose. Your life accounts are your ingredients so you need to mix these ingredients in proper proportion and timing for you.   Every day becomes a new opportunity to test the recipe.  

Some tips for getting balance into your day

1. Discover what activities are supportive of and compatible with your purpose and core wants.
2. Concentrate and focus on one activity at a time keeping a notepad handy to jot down other thoughts to be dealt with later.
3. Consider time as an investment, a perishable and finite resource to be used wisely.
4. Check your time allocations against your life accounts for balance.
5. When life gets out of balance keep pruning your focus back toward your major core want(s).
6. Sometimes it is necessary to be out of balance but only for a time. 
7. Remember, every choice made has a tradeoff and/or consequence.

In closing, I would like to leave you with this story.

A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks right to the top, rocks about 5cm in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full?  They agreed that it was. So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. The students laughed. He asked his students again if the jar was full? They agreed that yes, it was. The professor then picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. "Now," said the professor, "I want you to recognize that this is your life. The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your friends, your health, your children - anything that is so important to you that if it were lost, you would be nearly destroyed. The pebbles are the other things in life that matter, but on a smaller scale.  The pebbles represent things like your job, house, or car. The sand is everything else, the small stuff.” If you put the sand or the pebbles into the jar first, there is no room for the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your energy and time on the small stuff, material things, you will never have room for the things that are truly most important. Pay attention to the things that are critical in your life. (Source Unknown)

So refuse to force hilarity into the back seat every time responsibility takes the wheel.  If the fun’s gone its because we didn’t want it around – not because it didn’t fit. It’s not the hours we put in but what we put in the hours, that counts. Catch a movie, take your child or grandchild somewhere special, play golf, go dancing, take your spouse out to dinner, take time to have a medical check up.  I don’t care if your “to do” list is as long as the horizon, you need to get back in balance, and take time to dance, to laugh and to love.  Your family and friends enjoy you a lot more when you do! Take care of the rocks first - the things that really matter. Set your priorities, the rest is just pebbles and sand. And remember that no man ever went to his grave wishing he had spent more time at the office.

 

Edward Gifford

Principal: The On-Purpose Life Academy