Despite what many corporate high flyers might have us believe with their hectic schedules, meetings, travel plans and personal and virtual assistants, “Life Management” means a lot more than having a carefully co-ordinated schedule and a well edited ‘to do list’. 

Life Management means taking an ‘inside-out’ approach to your life - starting first with yourself, of course.

Rather than reacting to outside events, hoping circumstances or time constraints will improve, or worse still blaming the current state of affairs and expecting them or other people to change, managing your life effectively involves examining your own belief systems, your personality and your motives and shaping a set of principles or guidelines that reflect your highest values and which consistently points you in the right direction.

Each of us needs a set of principles to guide us through the increasingly complex world we live in.  Whilst we know much more about the ethics, moral codes and values of the modern world than our ancestors did, our models prove more and more invalid.

As Albert Einstein observed, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them”. 

This Life Management article aims to provide you with the tools to change your thinking – by taking that ‘inside-out’ approach - as you begin to construct your own compass and design a new course for your life.

The ‘inside–out’ approach means that if you want to achieve sustainable and enduring fulfilment, you have to work on YOU first and all your results in the outside world will follow; your results will only grow to the degree that YOU grow and evolve. The outer world is ALWAYS a reflection of our inner world so if there is chaos in your daily life, look no further than creating some essential balance.

“ Many want to change their results but they are unwilling to change themselves. They therefore remain bound.”

James Allen

We all know someone who seems to have all their ducks lined up in a row ~ a real high achiever with a successful business or job and an impressive group of investments and passive income but whose personal life is a fiasco. There's no one to share their success with or their ‘life partner’ is someone they don't even know anymore because their relationship has completely broken down due to neglect.

In one area of life, this seemingly exceptional human being gains everyone’s respect, yet in another areas, they're far from fulfilled! Sadly in recent times this has become a common sight the world over.

It's possible, (and even highly probable) that unless we take great care to remain on top of things, we’ll become so tunnel visioned and focus so much on one thing that our life becomes unsteady before we know it.

Just as often as you'll find financially successful people with problematic personal lives, you'll find devoted parents with poor physical health, or spiritually evolved people who have completely ignored their relationship with the practical areas of money and / or health.

These combinations of distorted focus come in many varieties and combinations but unless you redress the imbalance, your overall wellbeing will never be 100%.

The Wheel of Life

Some of you may have seen this model of self-assessment before but it is quite honestly a tool you could use once a month, let alone just from time to time when you get stressed and it becomes a matter of necessity!

So imagine your life as a wagon wheel.  What would happen if one of the spokes were broken or damaged? ~ The wheel would collapse, of course!

Your life is exactly the same and managing it effectively means balancing each of your priorities and activities ~ work as well as recreational.  If one significant area of your life is neglected, the whole wheel will eventually give way and you’ll be riding a very rocky road indeed.

This is why so many people these days feel so unbalanced, lop sided and stressed. They haven’t managed to create that balance because they’ve never charted where they are! 

This would correspond to having a map to get to Times Square in New York but not knowing if you were starting from The Bronx or Staten Island! You need to take stock of where you are before you can work out where you are heading! If you read one of my previous articles on goal setting, you will know how important it is to know from where you are beginning your expedition through life’s twists and turns.

Yet balancing each facet of your life can sometimes seem quite unthinkable. Keeping your career on track, your family happy, your social life buzzing and your bank account mushrooming often seem like completely opposing forces.  Life just seems to play an “either / or” game on occasion with little space for that “you can have it all” we hear so many self-help gurus and teachers assure us is possible.  What do they know!?

You might want to focus on getting healthier and more fit, knowing how much it will benefit you to increase your daily exercise regime, but where do you find the time?  You might want to implement a healthy eating routine, but your active social life or the fact that you work so hard means you have to eat ‘on the hoof’ at your office desk even, get in the way of all your best efforts. 

How do you balance the need for financial security with the desire for the occasional splurge, the pursuit of success with the longing for fun, career challenges versus relaxing holidays, low levels of debt versus asset acquisitions, relationship time versus time for yourself? Phew… just writing all that is making me feel stressed!

At this point I’d also like to make a simple but pertinent argument about the difference between ‘balance’ and ‘harmony’ which I learned some time ago from James Arthur Ray when listening to his personal development course “Harmonic Wealth,” a program dedicated to teaching people to create wealth in all areas of their lives, and which struck me as pretty significant. It has certainly made an impact on how I now view MY OWN life ‘balance’.

He explains how trying to create balance can be confusing and that finding harmony should be our objective. 

"Balance is bogus," he suggests. "Look at a set of scales in perfect balance: nothing is happening... it's stagnant... there's no movement... there's no progress... in fact, there's no life at all." Isn’t that an interesting concept? I’d never thought of it before but it makes absolute sense to me now.

Harmony is where it's at! Only when all areas of anyone’s life are in harmony can they achieve true wealth. And by wealth James means a life of passion, joy and fulfillment. Trying to achieve balance is unrealistic and sets you up for failure because balance is a duality that creates an “either-or” dynamic.

For example, you could go to work and build an impressive career OR you could become a stay-at-home-parent. The myth of ‘balance’ creates unrealistic expectations because you are restricted by whether you are in balance (good) or out of balance (bad). Harmony, on the other hand, implies that life can be more like an orchestra, a combination of sounds from voices or musical instruments.

Consider Mother Nature where harmony is always created in due course, even out of chaos, by taking into consideration the "whole" system and not merely one or two random elements.

Harmony is holistic, allowing for more variety and options and empowering us with a greater capacity to make our way elegantly through life's challenges. It’s like music, at one minute all the instruments could be playing together and the next minute the drums suddenly stop; and then… they start back up again. 

This should be our goal in life – to have all the areas of our life playing in harmony and be ok when one area isn’t playing full out rather than focusing on balance where everything is so steady there’s no momentum or energy.

It's purely a diverse synergetic experience that permits flexibility, expansion….. and contraction, but there is always movement and flow.

True harmony as I've defined it gives you an overall feeling of wellbeing, fulfillment and positivity. But please understand that each of the segments of the wheel you are going to work with are interdependent: When you attend to each of them, ALL of them increase in power.

For example, taking care of your health by working out regularly and eating well creates multiple benefits. Intimate and sexual relationships improve because of your greater confidence and stamina. Business booms due to your increased energy.

You're more alert and attentive to your spiritual pursuits. Similarly spiritual growth can translate to deepening intimacy in friendships and romantic relationships AND fuel your physical exercise. And so on and so forth. Everything is part of that synergetic experience because WE are holistic beings on a quest for wholeness and integration. 

The challenge of balancing a demanding professional life or the daily time constraints of a busy stay at home mum with a rewarding personal life is colossal.  The following exercise will give you a visual representation of your “Wheel of Life” and display the areas you need to focus on to keep it all in balance.

Please note that the life sectors I’ve selected here might not correspond to your life at all; they are only arbitrary suggestions that you can adapt to reflect your own particular needs and lifestyle.

1. Start by brainstorming the 10 to 12 areas of your life that are most important to you. Different ways of doing this are:

• Consider the roles you play in life. For example: husband/wife, father/mother, manager, colleague, team member, sports player, community leader or friend.
• Areas of life that are important to you. For example: creativity, artistic expression, positive attitude, career, education, family, friends, financial freedom, physical challenge, pleasure or public service; or
• Your own combination of these (or different) things, reflecting the things that are your priorities in life
• Or simply stick with the suggestions I’ve given you on the diagram above.

1. Copy the diagram onto a fairly large sheet of paper.
2. Write down the different areas you chose on the Wheel of Life diagram, one on each spoke of the life wheel. 
3. The next step is to evaluate the amount of attention you're currently devoting to each area. 
Consider each area in turn and on a scale of 0 (low) to 10 (high), write down the amount of time and energy you're allocating to that aspect of your life. Mark each score on the appropriate spoke of your Life Wheel.
4. Now join up the marks around the circle. Does you Life Wheel look and feel balanced?
5. Next it's time to consider your ideal level in each area of your life. A harmonious life does NOT mean scoring a 10 in each life area: some areas need more attention and focus than others at any one time or another. And inevitably you will need to make choices and compromises, since your time and energy are not in unlimited supply! So the question is, what would the ideal level of attention be for you in each life area? Plot the "ideal" scores around your life wheel too.
6. Now you have a visual representation of your current life balance and your ideal life balance. Where are the gaps? These are the areas of your life that require your immediate attention. 

And remember that gaps can go both ways. There are almost certainly areas that are not getting as much attention as you'd like but there may also well be areas where you're putting in more effort than you'd ideally like and these areas are sapping your energy and enthusiasm that might be better directed elsewhere.

Once you have identified the areas that need attention, it's time to plan the actions you need to work on to regain stability and harmony. Starting with the neglected areas, what things do you need to start doing first? In the areas that currently sap your energy and time, what could you STOP doing or reprioritize or delegate to someone else?

Next time I’ll talk about the things you might consider doing holistically to increase the ‘Harmonic Wealth’ in your life!

Till then have fun working with the Life Wheel and remember, “Where attention goes, energy flows.”