A Reflection on Work-Life Balance Inspired by my Wheel of Life
In December we asked our social media followers to reflect on their work-life balance inspired by the Wheel of Life – looking at 8 discreet components of life (recognising there are many more than 8) as an indicator as to how balanced each person felt their life was between domains we typically ‘live out’.
Tony and I pondered this question – “Can one domain of your Wheel of Life positively influence others?”
During the past year Tony and I have invested heavily in our learning domain. It has drawn attention to a sense of purpose, career, money and spirituality domains and because what we learn is connected intimately with our bodies, that has not escaped attention. Learning itself seems to have been a powerful accelerant in more than 4 other domains – and in a positive way.
As committed learners we have learned to see what we take for granted in our habits of thinking and behaving, and to invest our attention and focus in adopting new ways of thinking, behaving and conversing. Add to this, new ways of reading the world, this has led us to open possibilities and opportunities because they have now become visible. For this, we thank our teachers, fellow students, clients and team.
Through the learning we pursue and pass on, we understand more than ever what it is like to live in hope and wonder and to encounter life with agility and frailty with compassion. We feel more able to interpret and shift what’s happening around us, crafting a narrative that serves us and has us out of victimhood and into a generative self. This means we can create a life of purpose day by day. We generate it.
We are ever grateful for our 65 fellow students who show us how it is to learn, fall down, reflect, risk and try again. Always supported. We are forever grateful for our facilitators, Fernando Flores, B. Scott Rousse, Rafael Panteon and the entire support crew at Pluralistic Networks. Our lessons have not been easily won, but they are deeply acknowledged as shared victories. We learn much by watching and listening to other’s journeys.
To our teams – Team 2, Team 3 and Team Powerful Women – we extend our gratitude. Last week in our scheduled call, I had a huge insight. It was an insight for this year, but it was really an insight of a lifetime that arrived this year. It felt like every lesson and experience, had culminated this year with this one sense of knowing. That if we’re brave enough to un-braid the deeply entrenched habits of the places we’ve come from, we can liberate our lives and truly craft our future. We craft this next moment, choosing each thought, each interaction, each response with care and consciousness. We become observers of habits and generators of our lives.
It is such a remarkable way to enter the year ahead – to round out this year’s business and to shift more to mission and purpose liberated from the concerns of our past. We look forward to offering our deep learning in a way that serves other leaders in our practice.
