„… being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat /and joining a gym/ isn’t more balanced; it’s more fit.” Nigel Marsh
In retrospect it was this sentence a decade or more ago that first got me thinking about what work-life balance meant beyond the simple, one-sentence facebook-deep posts, what it is that makes a noticeable difference to well-being, not just in quantity but also in quality.
To be more precise it was the lives of my students and trainees I first started to look at, because of course it is always easier to examine other people’s lives “objectively” and find the points where adjustments could or should be made in the hope of a more balanced life. (Slowly after that it dawned on me that I had some scraping to do around my own life as well, and I did a good job of it, although it’s like a good vegetable garden: there’s always new weed to tackle with, but sooner or later you can do something about it if you have the will, the honesty and the means).
It’s been a long time since I last posted about habits although it is my love-project and we’ve had many great results in this area working together with those who have asked for my help (largely through Recogna), but it came back to me the other day when I read the attached James Clear quote on commitment.
Because it’s clear that without commitment we will not succeed in anything important. But less is said about the situations where we do sports 3 times a week, do 10 minutes of meditation, implement great-sounding life hacks and eat more raw vegetables to try to compensate for the 10 hours every day working for a multinational company or for our own business, the weekend work-emails, or the fact that we have been living with body image disorder for the fourth or fifth decade in a row.
In our cooperations I always encourage everyone to do the following: before you mobilize enormous effort to create a set of habits that best serves you and brings out the best in you, make sure you’ve got the ladder up against the right wall. And the only guarantee that that particular ladder will get you over the right wall is, on one hand, to choose ways and methods for your new system well-supported by literature, and on the other hand total honesty with yourself, and the best day to carry it over to a better place is today.
