Balance
by RONNIE GRABON
Balancing Your Work and Your Life
We did balance poses in yoga this morning. Like a tree. Any shape you want. As long as you remain on one foot. We were practicing the ability to balance when our center of gravity is uprooted. That is not what we traditionally mean by ‘balance’ in the context of work. Usually, we are referring to the ability to build balance into our lives so that both our work and life are planted firmly on the ground.
For many years we learned to balance on only the foot of work, barely fitting in the rest of our life. In these difficult times, many of us are spending too much time out of balance; moving quickly back and forth between work and life, never fully grounded. Or we have given up on work and congratulate ourselves on our new found fitness, time spent with family and friends, the beauty of our garden. Yet we sharply feel the missing foot of our work.
The reality of our world is that balance rarely happens smoothly or evenly. Balance often happens sequentially. Like a child learning new skills. All walk for a while, all talk for a while. Before the different skills come together to form a more seamless whole.
Gratefully, it appears that we will not return quickly to that world of all work, nor live forever in the world of all beauty. What we need now is to help build a society with workplaces where work and life are woven more seamlessly. We can begin to challenge ourselves to think differently. To find ways to develop the support necessary so that even when we must be on one foot, we are not in so much danger of falling down.
Balancing Your Head and Your Heart
We also spend a lot of our lives seeking to balance head and heart. Recently, managing the HR function of an organization undergoing liquidation, I found myself leading with heart. We often hear the phrase “keep your head about you” when facing crisis. Sometimes ‘reality’ is beyond our cognitive skills. We are tossed about in permanent whitewater. Then, it is not our head we must keep about us, it is our intuition, our heart, our emotions that we must keep balanced.
Just when we think we need our clearest thinking, what we really need is a strategy to balance our emotions so that we are able to think. Only then can we move back into a world of logic and planning. Two managers I worked with during this period panicked and quit so they would not have to face the emotional turmoil of the closing. Though both immediately obtained other positions, they both realized that their hearts were still with staff left behind. Ultimately, neither remained with their new positions. They had not balanced themselves emotionally prior to making what appeared to be a rational decision. It wasn’t.
As a coach, I often suggest to people that they need a tool kit. Tools such as: exercise, art, meditation, nature. A series of tools that they can use when feeling emotionally unstable and need to balance prior to moving forward. The first tool in the kit always needs to be the awareness of when you need a tool to help you balance. What are the tools in your kit that keep you aware that balance is necessary? What tools do you use that assist you in finding that balance?
More about Ronnie
Ronnie S. Grabon (MBA, SPHR, ICF-PCC) has spent over 30 years as an Executive Coach, facilitator, teacher, trainer, consultant and HR executive. In her coaching practice she focuses on working with individuals to achieve significant professional and personal goals. Areas of focus have ranged among: strategic thinking, innovative processes, career transitions, team leadership and achieving a balance that allows leaders to be fully engaged in all facets of their life. She has worked with numerous individual clients from a variety of industries including law, finance, government, retail non-profit and manufacturing. In her consulting practice she works with a variety of profit and not for profit organizations on coaching, organizational development and HR issues. She enjoys integrating business strategy with people strategy. Ronnie has spent a major part of her work with organizations and people in transition.