Mastering Life's Big Three: Finding Balance Beyond the Office

By: Brooke M. Dukes

As a busy professional, you’re probably spending a lot of time focused on your career, but how are you balancing the other areas of your life, like your mindset, health, and relationships? Being the Ultimate Performer in business requires maintaining a healthy balance outside of work, because if your career is overly tipping the scale, eventually the other areas of your life will suffer.

If you want to achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself in your career, you need to have the mental clarity and focus to execute the tasks in front of you, optimal health and energy to support your body and mind, and thriving relationships that bring you joy and fulfillment.

Here’s a closer look at the three key areas outside of work that can bring your life into better balance.

Generating a Growth Mindset

Your mindset is your attitude; it’s what predetermines your interpretations of and responses to the situations happening around you every day. Everything starts on a mental level before it gets to a physical level, so to reach your next level of growth and success in any area of life, your mindset needs to be in alignment with the results you’re looking for. Establishing a growth mindset starts with determining who you want to be in the world (your identity), understanding what motivates you toward the things you want (your purpose), then utilizing your unique gifts in a way that everyone around you can benefit (your value).

The strongest force in human nature is to stay consistent with the identity you hold of yourself. Your identity is the (largely unconscious) understanding you have of who you are. Through the environment you grew up in and conditioned habits developed through repetition, you became a relatively permanent “self” through your personality attributes, skills and abilities, and overall beliefs. Although your unconscious mind would prefer to keep you living in the same identity, with the right mindset, you can change your identity to become anyone you want to be, do anything you want to do, and have all things you want to have. The difficulty in changing your identity comes from not being intimately connected with “why” you want to step into the shoes of the person you want to become. This is called your purpose — the reasons that motivate and drive you to make a change. Your purpose serves as leverage, causing your dreams, hopes, and wishes to turn into a passionate and compelling journey toward your ultimate visions. Leveraging your purpose can happen in two ways: 1) being motivated toward pleasure and 2) being motivated away from pain. When you are motivated by avoiding pain, you take action in response to the anticipated consequences or fear of something being painful if you don’t take action. When motivated by pleasure, you recognize opportunities to feel and be your best and you take proactive action toward obtaining the rewards when your goals are met. By getting clear on your purpose and reconnecting with it regularly, you support your mindset by becoming more emotionally engaged in becoming the person you truly want to be. Now you’re ready to bring value to yourself and to those around you. You have infinite capability to deliver value to the world in a way that only you can deliver through your own unique gifts and talents. And the more value you provide to others, the more abundance you will attract into your life. As you serve others and create added value, your consciousness expands, and like a boomerang, that value you gave away returns to you in many forms. Being valuable helps you focus on being grateful for what you have versus resentful for what you don’t have, and being in a state of gratitude primes your mindset to attract exponential results.

Optimizing Your Health and Energy

Deciding to consistently support your health and energy equips you to use everything that comes your way as a catalyst for growth. Your body is a direct reflection of your unconscious identity, beliefs, and focus. As you grew up, you witnessed (and modeled) your family’s or friends’ commitment to health — you noticed how the people around you ate, exercised, and approached their physical health. Your beliefs don’t require proof to be real; your beliefs are real for you because they represent a feeling of certainty. You are what you believe, thus you become what you believe, and what you believe is a choice. Nutrition is an imperative piece to evolving your health and energy. To empower the next evolution of your mental, emotional, and physical health, being intentional about what you put into your body for fuel is critical. Building and maintaining your physical flexibility, posture, and endurance is also essential for optimal health. Flexibility can be improved by stretching just a few minutes a day without straining. Being intentional about the structural positioning of your head, shoulders, hips, and ankles can strengthen your posture, and your physical endurance is improved by training your body to exert itself and remain active for long periods of time and being able to withstand and quickly recover from trauma, wounds, or fatigue. 

Building Strong, Supportive Relationships

Anyone you spend time with will either impact and influence you, or you will impact and influence them. When you choose to be a positive influence in people’s lives, you become someone that people want to be around. People will feel the best about themselves when they are with you. You also feel good about yourself and are able to perform at your best. It may surprise you that 55% of all communication is conveyed by your physiology or body language. More impactful than your actual words is how you carry yourself. Your body is always communicating something. Only 38% of communication is conveyed through your tone of voice, and the actual words you say accounts for only 7%. More than what you say is how you say it. Building strong connections with people improves your happiness and overall quality of life, so being intentional about what you say, how you say it, and how you express yourself to others might be the most important thing you do.

If you want to take your professional achievements to the next level, start by determining if one area of your life is overly tipping the scale. Balancing your mindset, health and energy, and relationships will support your career in ways you never thought possible.