It was Albert Einstein that said “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” The choice of the analogy is perfect because balancing on a two-wheel bicycle requires distributing your weight proportionately on both sides. Similarly, too, to live and thrive in today’s hyper-busy world, you must learn to allocate yourself proportionately across the things that matter.

Those things that matter may include: work, family, health, spirituality, relationships, money, entertainment, culture, ambition, and so on. The list-composition will depend on an individual’s priority, and the weighting of each will also depend on your assessment of where you are in life.

Therefore, finding that right balance is a dynamic exercise that can be different for every one of us, and different from time to time. Some of us may need to give a higher weighting to our health and family at a certain point in our life, and so on and so forth. However, the right balance cannot be found except in a reflective, proactive life.

To assume that your life consists only in your work, or only in your daily exercising, or only in your ambitious pursuits, is to painfully limit yourself. Unfortunately, this is the lot of many professionals today; they weigh heavily on one side, and almost nothing on other areas of their lives. The result is usually a thorny and late realization, and unending regret.

Friend, think of your life as a pie chart, will the size of each resulting pie yield a regret for you in the end? This question must form part of your daily reflection. First, what are my priorities? Family? Work? Business? Sports? Money? Spirituality? Relationships? How then do you share your time, money, energy across those individual pies? Which pie is getting the highest weighting for you? Which one should get more? Getting the answers to these questions right is how to begin to strike a balance at life.

It is my opinion that the term “Work-Life Balance” is vague. It lumps everything else that should matter to you as a professional into the tight box “life”, and almost equates work to everything else under “life”. I think the right approach should be LIFE as a heading, with WORK and other things coming under it. Your work is a simple slice of your entire life, treat it as such. Only then can you give full considerations to everything else that makes for a balanced life.

I will keep rooting for you! Cheers.