Most executives don’t engage coaches to find balance. Instead, they typically have a presenting issue like assuming or desiring a larger leadership role or building a larger book of business and they seek assistance charting their path toward greater success. As our work continues, however, we surface our clients’ values, which leads to bigger questions and broader possibilities.
In their seminal book, Co-Active Coaching, the authors state, “fulfillment is about living a life that is valued, purposeful and alive, and balance is about choosing a life that is in action, aligned with a compelling vision,” (emphasis added). According to their definition, then, balance isn’t so much about making the demands and opportunities in our lives equal. Instead, it’s more about seeing things from multiple perspectives and choosing courses of action that better enable us “to have our actions match our message,” as I wrote about in my previous blog post about the leadership shadow.
In his work as a researcher and executive coach, Wharton School professor Stewart Friedman breaks life into four quadrants, or domains: work, home, community, and self (mind, body, and spirit). In an article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review, Friedman described the seemingly contradictory goals of someone he met at a workshop. That person, Friedman explains, had the professional goal of becoming his company’s CEO, but he also wanted to get more involved in the community to which he recently moved and to strengthen his relationships with members of his family. Instead of overcommitting to one area of his life at the expense of others, this person was able to honor his values and simultaneously work toward fulfilling all of these goals by directing his time toward one activity that furthered the advancement of his goals in each of the four quadrants of his life. Friedman explains:
“To further all of these goals, he decided to join a city-based community board, which would not only allow him to hone his leadership skills (in support of his professional goal) but also have benefits in the family domain. It would give him more in common with his sister, a teacher who gave back to the community every day, and he hoped his fiancée would participate as well, enabling them to do something together for the greater good. He would feel more spiritually alive and this, in turn, would increase his self-confidence at work.”
At the core of this person’s initial dilemma of having to choose to work toward fulfilling contradictory goals between work and life outside the office was a shift in perspective. Taking a drone-level view, allows us to hover above the walls that box-in our perspectives. As we transcend those barriers, new questions arise that conjure new possibilities. Examining those possibilities from new perspectives allows us to choose the one that best fits the challenge so we can then create a strategy that will bring that vision to life. Once the strategy is in place, we commit to it and take actions that allow us to see our progress.
The best part is that when we do this while working with an executive coach, we have a thought partner who helps us test the possible choices from multiple perspectives before we embark upon a path that may take us further out of balance and therefore impede our progress toward our goals. Living in balance enables us to see what appear to be obstacles from new perspectives, thus creating new visions aligned with our values and enabling us to take concrete actions that turn those visions into reality.