Imagine a beach house perched on a dune overlooking the waves. The house is built on stilts. Now, let’s remove the stilts one by one. If you remove each pillar one by one, the house will become a little unbalanced. Soon he will have only two stilts, and then only one. The next big wave knocks the beautiful house down onto the sand.
Your life is like that beach house. There are several important pillars like pillars. There are pillars that probably get the most time and attention. You have a job, a career, and you are trying your best to be a good parent, partner, sibling, and child. But it’s only two stilts. What about other things you are concerned about?
in our book, learned excellence, we divide life into six different pillars. In addition to work and relationships (including family and friends), we care about our health (exercise, nutrition), spirituality (purpose, religion), hobbies (things we do for fun and community), and heritage (all of these ). When everything goes well with these pillars, life goes well. The house is stable and can withstand repeated waves. However, if the pillars are left to rot, life becomes even more unstable. Trouble can arise if a big wave occurs, such as a bad evaluation at work or a breakup with a lover.
Many people invest all their time and energy in one or two pillars of their lives, usually their jobs and relationships. Because they are inherently unbalanced, failure has a greater impact and increases stress. If all you have is a job or a career, you might as well knock it out of the park because you have nothing else to do. But when you are balanced, you have other things to fall back on when adversity occurs.
Excellent learning, learning balance
Our profession allows us to work with many of the world’s best performers in the military, sports, first responders, and business. We found that across all these fields, these stars have some things in common. What distinguishes them from others is not their physical or intellectual characteristics, but their mental approach. These mental exercises are fully learned. In other words, anyone can learn to excel just like the world’s best performers.
That includes learning how to maintain balance. The best and healthiest performers continually nourish and water their six pillars. This is helpful when adversity hits or when change (marriage, retirement) is on the horizon. It also helps improve performance.
This may seem counterintuitive – how can we take energy and time away from work to improve performance? But it’s empirically true. Balance helps relieve some of the pressure of performance and gives the body and soul a means of recovery and replenishment. That’s just a fact. The best performing companies maintain balance across all pillars.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula for this and it varies from person to person. The focus should be less on the outcome (X hours on this pillar, Y hours on that pillar) and more on the process of balance (regularly reviewing how you’re addressing each pillar).
Here are some strategies used by top performers.
Set goals and make time
You’re probably familiar with the power of goal setting. In fact, you’ve probably adopted goal setting as a standard practice at work. What about other pillars? One way to ensure you invest your time and energy into each challenge is to set goals so you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve across all pillars.
Make sure your goals are SMART. Specific, measurable (you’ll know when you’ve achieved it), achievable (it’s possible to reach your goal), relevant (it’s important), and time-bound. To increase accountability, write them down and share them with someone.
Next, have a process for managing your time so you can invest at least some of it in all pillars. Once a week, check your calendar for the next 10 days. Make the most of your time by eliminating white space. An empty calendar slot means it is dominated by events. Color code the time slots according to the pillars. Perhaps red is work hours, blue is relationships, green is health, purple is spirituality, etc. Some events can be mutually beneficial. Going hiking with your family counts as both health and relationship time. Now you can quickly see what’s going on by looking at your calendar. No purple events scheduled for next month? Please do something about it.
Let’s drop the ball (but be sure to pick it up)
You can do all of these things with the best of intentions, but something happens in your life, like an important project or a deadline or the birth of a baby, and before you know it, you’re spending all your time with work and family, and you’re losing yourself. There is little time for. Human relationships, let alone other pillars. This is fine. It must be so. Sometimes you have to drop the ball.
Just don’t let yourself off the hook so easily. Be careful if the ball falls or your life balance is disrupted due to short-term circumstances. Then make a plan to deal with it. Your children may not be able to go to practice or games by themselves because of their busy schedules. But he may have one or two free days on his calendar sometime next month that he can invest in other pillars. Block it, color that pillar and make it happen. Often people are aware of the imbalance but may maintain a helpless mindset of “there’s nothing I can do about it.” The best performers have a plan.
The good news is that once you establish these habits and achieve greater balance, it will begin to take care of itself. Balance becomes a habit. The busiest, most successful people we know invest time and energy into all of their pillars. We often hear stories about how we are not the best and how much joy and relief we feel in not having to be. New friends, new purpose. And it will tell you how much your performance has improved as a result. Balance pays off.
Eric Poterat is a clinical and performance psychologist. Alan Eagle is an executive communications consultant. They are the authors of Learned Excellence: Mental Disciplines for Leading and Winning from the World’s Top Performers (Harper Business, 2024)..
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