Balancing: The Physical, Intellectual and Emotional aspects of your Life.
Mar 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Ron Davis
I am not a preacher, and I certainly don't judge how others live their lives. My ideas are purely practical and help you be a better entrepreneur-manager. Having gotten my motivation out of the way, let's deal with what I mean when I refer to the physical, intellectual and emotional aspects of our lives.
Physical is, of course, fairly self explanatory. Like the long-distance runner who prepares an entire life for relatively few events, as managers, we need to think about the events we want to be prepared for. If we are in poor shape, if we are constantly out with a bout of the flu, then we certainly can't do battle with some of the others out there. Your physical well<\!->being, your weight, diet and general health can contribute significantly to both your endurance at work and the way people perceive you. A healthy, robust manager is always perceived as more intelligent and articulate than one who is not.
To give you an example of how the physical side can be a turn-off in business dealings, let me tell you a story that actually happened. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.) The story involves somebody we will call Bob. Bob came to interview with me for a job. Bob was superbly qualified for the job, and he felt confident that if he could spend some time with us, he would be able to convince us he was the right person for the job. I met with Bob, and he certainly had the intelligence, background and motivation. Only two things bothered me about him. First, he smoked rather extensively, and second, he was a loyal customer of a local steakhouse that served a lot of food, none of which has ever been called dietetic. When I interviewed him, I was concerned that he wouldn't have the stamina to do the work. It involved extensive travel, meetings at the office and a level of commitment Bob had not made before we visited. The interview started, and after some false starts, Bob asked if I would mind if he smoked. (That was the right approach 20 years ago, although certainly not today.) I told him I did mind. Then, I wondered why he had this compulsion to smoke every half hour or so. Although a rhetorical question for me, I believed if Bob could do this while he was interviewing for a job, he could also do it while he was out talking to some of our clients. He was also substantially overweight and did not seem to realize the clothes he was wearing were at least two sizes too small. I was sorely tempted to hire Bob, but I didn't. He went with another company in the industry, and I kept track of him, all the way up to the time he collapsed with a heart attack a year after the first interview we had. Fate? Would it have happened anyway? Maybe, but I think that Bob was a cardiac incident waiting to happen. His mind and spirit were willing, but his body was not maintained well enough to withstand the stresses of modern day business pressures. Bob has since left the industry and taken on a less stressful job.
Intellectual aspects of our lives deal with the reasoning side of our mind. Logic plays a big role here. In many ways, the intellectual aspects of the lives we lead can be accurately compared to a computer action and reaction. Feed good stuff in, and good thoughts come out. Bad ideas in, bad stuff comes out. If you are intellectually aware of the business world, the political world, the economical world and yes, even the sports and entertainment world, then chances are that this side of your life is in good shape.
Finally, we have the emotional or, as many would believe, the spiritual side of our lives. Now, it would be easy to get into a theological debate as to what the spiritual side of our lives should be like; I wouldn't even dare to presume upon your patience to suggest how you should lead that part of your life. For the most part, I do know that those people with an emotional and spiritual aspect to their lives firmly in place lead happier, more productive lives than those without that psychological anchor.
How do we keep all this in balance? Certainly it is not easy, and often, we have periods of our lives when one or more of these aspects are really out of sync. And that's okay; it's to be expected. The thing that you have to keep in mind is that if any one of those three aspects are out of sync too long, it's like a gyroscope that suddenly makes a bad turn and goes off in an entirely different direction than what was originally intended. Perhaps thinking of yourself as a gyroscope moving towards a well-defined, predetermined goal will help you keep the physical, intellectual and emotional aspects of your life firmly in place. When that happens, you join the ranks of those people who seem to be happier, more productive and more adjusted to the world around them. Try it. All you have to lose are some of the psychological anchors that hold you down.
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