Don't create balance, create this instead
the best recipe for work-life-play
A word against "balance"
This week I’m living the opposite of work-life balance. As I am serving a group of amazing Emerging Leaders Monday through Thursday in Dallas, TX, I’ll be way more work, much less “life.”
There is a tempting quest for the ever elusive "balance" of work-life-play-relationships-responsibility-etc. I often hear “desire for balance” when someone is starting coaching or attending a leadership event like this week.
When someone is seeking to get "unstuck," balance seems to be the antidote. Imbalance is a very real and a felt experience for most of us.
There will be seasons where:
out of 7 or 8 "life accounts," (family, health, work, finances, social relationships, etc.)
1 or 2 get the majority of our time and energy,
while the others are at best floating along, or at worst floundering and failing.
Balance would imply all areas of life receive a perfectly equal amount of our time and energy, all of the time. To strive for this is a fool's errand.
Harmony in life
As a musician and artist, the word I find most accurately describes what we are searching for is not balance, but harmony. We long for beautiful harmony for the season in which we find ourselves. This harmony can and should change and modulate as life demands, and as we create new things and new versions of ourselves. Consistent imbalance or overemphasis on any one thing (often career/money/things) creates pain and eventually comes crashing down.
Musical harmony involves combining several elements, sometimes elements that are seemingly at odds, in order to create something new and impactful.
Basic chords involve 3 notes. Classically, we play these 3 consonant notes in equal measure(balance)--which is fine(while often plain). If music only included consonant [balanced] harmony, it would sound very bland without the aspect of tension and release in the music that makes it interesting and moving. Getting imbalanced by emphasizing a note, adding a 4th and 5th note, swapping the order in which we play the notes, adding octaves, etc. creates some of the most beautiful and moving harmonies.
I think of the Christmas music scene in La La Land as an example of this. Jingle Bells is filled with very basic and balanced harmony. He plays it well—but it’s square and boring. His jazzy masterpiece though (“Mia and Sebastian’s Theme”)? It’s wildly complex and imbalanced, with tons of tension and release, and far more captivating.
Imbalance as a way to fulfillment
In our life, the right emphasis at the right time (intentional imbalance) creates tension, power, momentum, and emotional fulfillment. We intentionally create seasons of imbalance for specific purposes, and this is often rewarding. There are seasons of tension and subsequent release important to the human experience.
Consider the concept of attending college: it is an intentional season of imbalance away from family, away from financial growth, and toward intellectual growth and toward social and eventually career growth.
This concept of harmony in life is as innate to us as appreciating a beautiful song. The quest for creating the right harmony in each season of life adds up over the decades to become a life well-lived, with clearly distinct seasons behind the engine of our life and legacy.