Balance

First published on January 6, 2017

Balance is such an important word in today's culture in the UK. Work-life balance is among the most common things people want to talk about when they come to speak to me about coaching. I'm not a huge fan of that phrase, dating back to a lesson I learned in the Waking Up the Workplace interview series: it implies, after all, that work isn't life. And that would be a sad state of affairs. 

But balance, balance is key. 

Today I'm going to talk briefly about a different balance, essentially that between what feels nice now, and what we do because it is an important thing for us to do. This is a hard balance to make. 

Fred Kofman, in his book Conscious Business, talks about climbing mountains as an example of this. It isn't fun. It isn't nice. It is painful and frightening and, for the serious mountains, many people don't make it to the top, don't achieve what they set out to achieve. But when Fred is doing it, he knows that he will look back on it with pride: it is a memory he will cherish, for the experience it gives him, and because... Well... Because it is an important thing for him to do. 

Just before Christmas, I let the feeling nice part of things get in the way of me writing one of these articles. I was tired, and worried about the work I had on that day, and I was stressed about Christmas. I was also a little shaken by - in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Berlin - all trains stopping, eerily, around Clapham Junction station after a driver had pulled the emergency cord. 

I had been planning to write one final article of 2016, but instead, panicked by my state of affairs, I gave myself a break. For 12 minutes, things were nicer: I read my book and relaxed. I didn't write. It was nice. But I also lost out. I lost out artistically. What might I have written in that state? From that particular place of vulnerability who knows what might have emerged. And I lost out in my commitments to myself: to write an article every week to the end of the year. 

Now its important to look after yourself. But it's also important to win your creative battles. To beat resistance. So when you are feeling tired, and you decide not to fulfill the commitment that you know is the right thing for you to do - that you know you will look back on with pride, pleased that it was something you have done - remember this.