This week’s Sunday Story is a continuation of our Adventure Mindset series, and it’s about one of the most important practices in an adventurer’s toolbox: maintaining balance.
We’ve all heard it a million times: “Work/Life Balance”. It’s used by recruiters, HR departments, and leaders in all industries. It’s almost as if telling people to maintain a “work/life balance” is the revelation of some secret knowledge that a leader can drop in a coaching conversation, and the imbalanced person who is receiving this information is suddenly going to have an “aha!” moment, take up Yoga and start leaving the office on time.
It never happens that way.
Balance is most often talked about in terms of that ever-present Sword of Damocles above all our heads: Time. “If you spend an hour at your desk, maintain balance by going for a 10 minute walk” or “You get 2 weeks vacation for a reason - make sure you maintain balance by using that time well and disconnecting from work!”. It’s almost always presented as being about time.
But it’s really not, is it? I’m writing this blog on a Sunday morning, with my family at the dinner table hanging out with some TV, and I’m sipping coffee and slowly getting ready to start our day. I’ve written other pieces in restaurants or hotel pubs at 8:30 at night, and some at 5:30 in the morning. Those aren’t considered “typical” work-times for a person who has a regular office job cycle. The reality of running a business while working full time requires that the work has to fit into the 24 hours I have in a day - the same 24 hours we all have. So how do I maintain balance?
Candidly, I sometimes don’t - I hyper-fixate on projects I’m excited about until they are at a place I’m satisfied with, and I tend to work in sprints like that. But, my priorities are crystal clear to me - family, my day-to-day job, and then our business, in that order (I have other priorities of course, but for the purposes of this pieces I'll only share those three). When I’m not maintaining balance, I connect back with my priorities, which are based on my values, and I find I’m re-balanced pretty quickly. But balance is not about time for me, and I know a ton of professionals who feel the same way about it.
Let’s get explicit on what this looks like - if I work my regular job all week, and I make sure I am leaving exactly on time Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday as my weekend and my evenings free to do what I want, it won’t help me feel balanced. The e-mail inbox isn’t magically not on my mind when the clock strikes quitting time, and sometimes I need to put energy into that outside of office hours it to get it off my mind so I can put energy into other priorities. The multi-month project with challenges I’m trying to sort out isn’t something I can magically stop thinking about when I'm playing with legos with my son, and my brain starts making connections between building legos and building futures in higher education - but I can put energy into writing that idea down so I can get back to lego-ing, and carve out time when he's asleep to think more on that idea. The point is, our brains don’t really work on schedules - so why do we think balance is based on a schedule?
Balance is not about time.
It’s about energy. And, I think you can control your energy even more easily than you can control your time, as there are always other things preying on your calendars.
I’ll explain this using another motorbike story: When you are riding a motorcycle off-road, you need to use a different technique than you do on the pavement. The best practice is usually to actually get up out of the seat and stand up. Standing up on the foot rests looks hooligan-ish — the world is used to motorcyclists actually using the seats that Triumph or Harley-Davidson or Kawasaki put there for that purpose, so seeing a rider standing on his foot-pegs looks borderline irresponsible to other drivers.
But it’s done with good reason. When you are riding on a highway, the traction in your tires is based on those tires having a lot of friction between the rubber and the road,. When you are off road, the surface of the road is not solid like pavement - it’s a combination of sandy gravel or mud, and it moves around all over the place as your wheel spins on top of it, and traction is extremely limited. Think of it like the difference between a running shoe on a basketball court versus a hiking boot scrambling up a rocky hill - only it’s going 100 kilometres per hour, not human walking speed, because there’s always a bit of hooliganism here. It is motorcycling after all. It’s like leadership - you don’t do it because you want to be safe and comfortable.
So, the bike's wheels are constantly moving and shifting in their relationship with the road, and it’s more like an animal, scratching and clawing it’s way forward by digging into an ever-shifting surface however and wherever it can - it never really has consistent traction, it’s always fighting for it, and that’s why we stand up. Standing up shifts the centre of gravity on the bike a bit lower, but more importantly, it allows the bike to move independently from the rider - it’s like attempting to ride a fish, with the fish swishing back and forth underneath you and your body being relatively stable and still standing over the saddle. This is super unsettling - but you do get used to it. The bike is still mostly in the rider’s control. The rider is constantly making micro-adjustments in where their weight is distributed - leaning forward and back depending on the surface and incline, and leaning side to side as the bike swims along the gravel beneath them, twisting the throttle open and shut to adjust rotational mass of the wheels and power. Early on in a person’s experience, these shifts are quite abrupt and big and require conscious attention and focus; it’s the rider having somewhat rough and clunky reactions to these changing conditions. But eventually, the rider-and-bike become a finely tuned machine where both are working in concert to maximize traction and forward movement. It requires immense attention - conditions can shift in a fraction of a second, but after some experience the rider is able to unconsciously do micro movements to adapt to these shifting conditions without thinking about it. Once the rider and bike get in synch, it’s a flow state unlike any other. It is almost meditative in a way, forcing a person to be present and aware of exactly what’s going on with their body and in that specific moment. Beyond the philosophy of the zen caused by motorcycling, the overall point is that the rider is constantly shifting their energy into where it needs to be for them to stay in control of the bike.
Maintaining balance on a motorcycle is exactly like maintaining balance in life: It’s not about time, it’s about where you put your energy.
Imagine if I spent the entire trip up the Dalton and took a typical “work/life balance” perspective to it - I’d have a plan to spend half of the trip leaning on my right peg, and half the trip leaning on my left one, as a nice balance of time. And I’d fall off immediately, because that’s not how you maintain balance in a dynamic situation.
Life is dynamic too, and we need to be able to shift where we put our energy to keep balanced. As leaders and as humans, we will feel imbalance often. When we’ve put too much energy into something that is probably really important - like our day jobs - but that comes at the expense of something else we truly value - like family - we are likely to feel imbalanced. The solution isn’t necessarily just “more time with family”, especially if that time is spent by you thinking about work or checking your phone every few minutes. All the time in the world won’t matter - because your energy is going to your work, even if your “time” is going to family. Maintaining balance is about where you put your energy, and you’ll feel it when you’re not putting it in the right places. Trust that feeling and respond by shifting where you’re putting it.
There’s another really good reason to think of your life’s balance like a motorcycle. Because your life doesn’t care if you’re balanced or not, really. It’s going to keep happening to you. If a rider fails to maintain balance, the bike doesn’t necessarily stop - it’s got momentum and like all bikes, the energy of it’s rotating wheels means that it’ll keep going whether it has a rider or not.
Your goal, then, at a minimum, is to be balanced enough to stay on the bike. Especially if you are a beginner rider - don’t worry about the flow state, just focus on staying on the bike by going a bit slower and making conscious decisions about how you shift your energy. You’ll get that flow state later with practice, and it won’t take long. Your life might feel like a motorcycle, moving around underneath you like a fish, and when it really starts moving - like on really loose gravel, when traction is hard to find - it’ll feel like you are barely holding on and it’s really unsettling. That’s where it’s more important than ever to put your energy as much as you can in the places you value most to maintain balance. And as you learn to ride, you’ll know where the energy needs to go well before you fear falling off. But where do you start?
Start by considering the question: What is most important to you?
Make a list - force yourself to create a hierarchy. You ALWAYS have the option of putting energy into your second-most-important thing instead of the first, but if you say “these two things are equally important” and you feel imbalanced, you’ll have a tough time of diagnosing where you need to shift.
The things that are most important to you are your values, and I believe everyone should try really hard to identify what is core to them.
Begin with the end in mind - when you are done your spins around the sun, what story do you want to leave behind? If you imagine what that story would be, it will likely give you a pretty good lens on what’s most important. You can check out this other blog post from a few weeks ago for more - "You're gonna die, you know".
That end-of-life story is the story you are writing every single day. Does the story you are writing align with the story you want to leave behind? If not, why not? You might need to put some energy into making that alignment happen - if you do, balance will likely follow.
But if you focus on time, you WILL fall off the bike. And just like life, the bike is going to keep moving - just maybe without you.
(video from Eurosport.it; accessed and saved in 2015)
Falling off a bike sucks, and sometimes failure to maintain balance results in big injuries - in life and in motorcycling (but that's a story for another Sunday). But falling off isn't always the end - like the video above shows, with the right burst of energy at the right time, you can get back on the bike and keep on riding.
That concludes this part of the Adventure Mindset, which is all about maintaining balance by putting your energy where you need to. And on that note, it’s time to go to the beach with my family.
See you next Sunday.
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