Balance the Pie

Our lives are multi-dimensional with varying priorities, making it difficult to achieve the right balance. A state where all aspects that you care about are served by applying the needed attention and focus. Though this sounds like common knowledge, we often see people fanatically focused on one or two dimensions while inadvertently ignoring the others. This behavior prolonged over time creates burn outs and a lack of fulfillment – thus leading to unhappiness.

A good way to understand this is to imagine your life in the shape of a hot delicious apple pie, just out of the oven. You can slice this pie into pieces of your choice, covering all the key aspects of your life such as Family, Love & Relationships, Career, Health & Fitness, Spirituality & Religion, Growth & Learning, Fun & Adventure, Friends & Being Social, Philanthropy & Welfare etc.

The cardinal rule to remember is that if you overly focus on some slices and ignore the others, they will start to crumble. As time passes, this negative effect can spread across all other slices of the pie. Even the ones that you most care about, can get adversely effected. For instance, if you over work in your career and do not take care of your health & fitness, you will eventually fall sick. This will affect your career as well. Conversely, your career will prosper when you apply a fit body and mind to it – generating fresh ideas and opportunities for growth.

It makes a lot of sense in striving to achieve this balance, but many of us do not focus on this. In our best of intentions, we try to manage this balance and often find it difficult and at times, painful. Since we do not consciously think about it, we fail to plan the desired result and as the saying goes, when you don’t plan to succeed, you are indeed planning to fail.

Using a structured approach, the balance can be achieved in a few steps: -

Step 1 – Setup the slices

Identify the key areas of your life which you care about the most. Write down an exhaustive list and then classify it based on your priorities. The slices do not need to be of an equal size. Number of slices depends on your priorities as well.

Step 2 – Establish the current state

Evaluate each of the slices on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 indicates your highest fulfillment as it is where it stands today. This exercise would illustrate that some of the slices might be doing far better than others, thereby creating an opportunity to analyze the gap.

Step 3 – Determine the desired state

Using the same scale of 1 to 5, determine how high would you like to increase your fulfillment for each slice. Target of improvement may vary and can be tilted towards areas needing most attention for the desired balance. This also sets your intentions towards the improvement.

Step 4 – Improvement Actions

List down actions needed to improve your personal fulfillment towards the specific slice. For instance, if you feel that you can do more in terms of your personal Growth & Learning, then you can identify a few actions, such as reading more books or articles, enrolling in a program or certification path etc.

Step 5 – Track progress

Observe yourself taking actions as planned - what gets measured gets done. You can always repeat steps 1-4 every few months to refresh the pie (as it may be necessary due to changing priorities).

Everything in life is based on the inside-out principle (Happiness Within model), created by you through your focused intentions and actions. No matter how much others care for you, no one will be able to balance the pie for you. It must be you, working from inside-out. This can bring newfound joy and serenity in your life, ensuring that equal justice is done to all that is important to you.

Give it a try and see how it helps in creating more fulfillment.

It’s a no regret move and will surely be worth it.