Purposeful Growth

There’s lots of talk in the media about work/life balance as if we all understand exactly what that means. And we think we do, as we knowingly nod agreement at the latest pundit’s advice on gaining a balanced life. But what does it mean to have a balanced life?It may be easier to tell you what it isn’t. A balanced life is not stealing a few minutes from a busy but boring work day to do some online shopping or check on the kids at home.

It isn’t learning to meditate at the end of a hectic and harried day to wipe out the negative emotions of conflict with the boss or a customer. These things may be helpful, but they won’t bring lasting life balance.

A balanced life won’t necessarily come with self-employment; many entrepreneurs will attest to the long hours and relentless demands of running business. Taking a course in saying no or managing your time will help, but again, these are tools attacking symptoms, not the root cause of imbalance.

Blending Work and Life

Some even talk of the term itself, work/life balance, being part of the problem, as if work and life are separate and distinct. They talk of blending work and life, an acknowledgment that work activities are simply a part of life.

So what is a balanced life? It’s whatever a person says it is. Balance in life is not measurable in hours or number of responsibilities. It’s measured in emotions. A life is balanced when it feels balanced. A balanced life has a certain overall feeling of being right. It feels natural, normal, and appropriate for the individual experiencing it. Each person will reach that balanced feeling with a different mixture of activities and responsibilities.

The Fundamentals of a Balanced Life

The path to a balanced life is paved with the fundamental stepping stones of well being: Life Purpose, Passionate Activities, Personal Strengths, Principles of Living, and Personal Beliefs. These are easily remembered as the five P’s, Purpose, Passions, Powers (strengths), Principles, and Perspectives (beliefs).

A life built around the fundamentals of the five P’s will feel right, natural, normal, and appropriate. It won’t matter that much what life’s activities and responsibilities include, because they’ll be chosen in alignment with the fundamentals and they’ll naturally blend.

For more on building your life atop the five fundamental building blocks, see The Balanced Life.

Yesterday, July 27, 2006, I modified my feed process to utilize Feedburner. Feedburner offers several advantages to me as a publisher and to readers. BUT, I fear it negatively impacts those who established a feed prior to this change. Though this site has only been live for about a month, several dozen feeds have been active each day.

It appears there is no easy solution, for which I sincerely apologize. I had hoped that the feedburner plug-in would take care of previous as well as new feed subscribers. Not so. I’ve been reading the FAQ on Feedburner’s site, but confess I’m a bit intimidated by the steps suggested there. If you have any advice to help me work through this I sure would appreciate your input to jerry@purposefulgrowth.com.

I will be working to find a solution for feed subscribers prior to July 27, so that you need not re-subscribe. But my techie skills are somewhat limited. I hope for your patience and continuing support. For now, I suggest you subscribe again using either of the two Feedburner features described next.

EMAIL Feeds: By subscribing with an email address in the yellow box, top right of this site, you will receive a daily email if new information has been posted. The email will show posting title, brief summary, and a link to read the full article if it’s of interest. The email will come from jerry@purposefulgrowth.com, so put that in your safe list if you subscribe to feeds this way. The other way to keep up to date on new material on this site is…

FEED Aggregators: Clicking the small orange button, lower right side of the site, will subscribe you to feeds through existing aggregators such as My.Yahoo, MSN, Google, etc. When you subscribe you will get the choice of aggregators to use. Use this process if you already get RSS feeds and want to add my site to your existing feed summaries. Again, the update is daily and includes a title, link, and brief summary of the new material.

Thanks for your patience and support. My intent is to provide you with useful personal development information. I’m encouraged by the level of early support for this site and hope to retain you as a regular reader as well as to reach new readers.

If you find my articles useful I hope you’ll support my work by referring this site to your family and friends and by giving a donation proportional to the value you receive.

Though comments are turned off because of Spammers, I answer all email sent to jerry@purposefulgrowth.com.