Work-Life Balance and System Thinking
Systems are all around us. There’s the solar system with the planets moving around the sun. There’s Planet Earth – air and water, plants and animals, mountains and valleys, all part of one giant ecosystem.
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Your house is a system. For example, your furnace will have to work harder if your house isn’t well-insulated. You can plant shade trees on the southwest side of your house to give your air conditioner a break.
The human body is a system. Every component piece serves a purpose but also depends on the other parts to operate.
We could go on and on. We understand some systems. Others we don’t. Sometimes we don’t even recognize them.
Work – life balance ignores the system
Your life is a system. Yet the most popular concept for managing our professional and personal lives is work – life balance.
Work – life balance doesn’t treat your life as a system. We even have a problem with its name – it implies that work isn’t part of life.
Let’s use the human body as an example of work – life balance. If we thought about the human body the way we think about work – life balance, we would say your heart and your brain can never work at the same time.
Your heart would beat part of the time. When your heart wasn’t beating, your brain could work. But the two never work together.
And you know what would happen if that were the case? You would die!
Is this the best concept for managing our professional and personal lives?
No wonder so many people feel so frustrated trying to keep achieve balance!
Synergy from the system
We don’t think it works for most professionals today. Fortunately, there is a better way.
BIGG success is life on your own terms. The BIGG idea behind BIGG success is that you can create synergy in your life. You have to see your life as a system in order to do this.
1. Think holistically
Don’t plan your career, plan your life. Don’t manage your money, manage your life.
When you think this way, it frees up your mind to possibilities you might not think of otherwise. It also does something even more important. It helps eliminate options.
2. Don’t separate, integrate
Don’t think personal and professional; bring them together as parts of a system – your life.
Think about them working together instead of at odds with each other. Find ways to get the personal helping build the professional and vice versa.
For example, a lot of professionals today don’t work traditional hours. We have a lot of friends who maximize the time they spend with their children. Then they crank out some work after the kids go to bed or before the kids get up in the morning.
Seeing your life as a system is the first step to living it the way it was intended. Get in touch with your nature and you’ll be a BIGG success!
Do you view your life as a system?
Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file | podcast:
http://traffic.libsyn.com/biggsuccess/00606-071210.mp3
(Image in today's post by andrewatla)
