More Than Staying Ahead: A Balanced Life For Community Leaders

From the Fall/Winter 2008 issue (Vol. 7  No. 3) of the Community Leader newsletter.

By Vic Klimoski, BCLP Trainer

Gather any group of community leaders, and you¹ll hear stories of people who get things done.

Sometimes the amount of work individuals take on is amazing. How can any one person do it all? The fact of the matter is that rare is the individual who can “do it all” without paying a price. The price might be a having few evenings in a week free or the sense of being overwhelmed and just able to stay one step ahead. Sometimes the price is burnout -when the leader simply shouts, “I give!”

Spiritual masters over the centuries have always cautioned about getting out of balance. A well-lived life for these influential thinkers results when the different dimensions of life form a coherent, integral whole. For that to happen, we need to be mindful of how relationships, job, voluntary commitments, personal growth, and recreation work together, rather than compete in a race with time.

Spiritual masters have suggested a variety of disciplines to cultivate a balanced life. I want to emphasize four: paying attention, being reflective, cultivating personal interests, and making choices. Like all disciplines, these take time and practice to develop. People will make small advances at first and experience some backsliding. But, practicing these disciplines faithfully helps prevent overload, collapse, and burnout.

Paying attention:
This discipline can help tame the overgenerous heart. Community leaders are eager to build and sustain healthy communities so when asked to pitch in, their first response is “yes.” Paying attention is a matter of being alert to the consequences of “yes” in light of all the other “yeses” already given.

Paying attention enables you to determine when a project is going nowhere or has long ago fulfilled its purpose. It also includes awareness of how our leadership commitments impact relationships with family and friends. Any community in Minnesota would benefit from a hundred different initiatives. What one is most needed now in these circumstances and given this set of conditions? The answer lies in paying attention.

Being reflective:
Community people are active and engaged in good work. Busyness becomes problematic when it squeezes out time to reflect on what is going on and what is being learned from all the doing. Ask yourself the following: How does all my activity reflect the ideals I value? How does it influence what I might do next time or what I might suggest to others facing similar issues?

Being reflective is the discipline of carving out some regular time to think about what your experiences teach. One community leader refers to her “Sacred Five,” the five minutes she began using at the end of the day for taking stock. As she continued the practice, the time grew and reflection became a necessary part of her life. It is the faithfulness to reflection, not the amount of time spent, that contributes to living in balance.

Cultivating Personal Interests:
The commitment to the common good and public service we see in community leaders is admirable. Those who make sacrifices to advance the health of their communities inspire us. This very spirit of generosity, however, can slowly absorb all of a person¹s time so that soon they have no life but work and community service.

One way of balancing such “service absorption” is to cultivate those interests that bring a sense of relaxation, pleasure, creativity, or joy. Taking time for hobbies, sports, outdoor activities, or reading feeds our imaginations and allows our bodies to relax. As this happens, the spiritual masters tell us, our vision broadens. We see life differently and enter into it with a deeper sense of what is needed, what is possible and what our true role is.

Making Decisions:
In some ways, the first three disciplines are preparatory for this final one for it is the most difficult. Opportunities abound, and requests for leadership never run dry. If someone has the reputation of being the person who can always get things done, there usually is a line at his or her door. Living in balance, however, means choosing from among many good things those that make the best use of your talents and time given all the other commitments you have, including those to yourself.

These are not easy disciplines and may seem awkward at first, even time-consuming. The interdependence among these disciplines, however, reinforces our commitment to strive for balance.

Balanced living is an uneven art. Paying attention helps us focus just as ongoing reflection helps identify lessons learned. Cultivating personal interests encourages us to create space in a day for quiet reflection. And, being attentive and reflective makes your choices more purposeful. There is no trick to living a balanced life. Like any change, it takes practice. If the spiritual masters are right, the reward for investing the effort is a new level of freedom to be more than just one step ahead.