Is your personal life on the back burner? Is there chaos in your professional life? When attempting to complete every task on your to-do list, have you tried the latest time management tools, stress techniques and mind-over-matter? Are you doing the best balancing act you can and still experiencing mental and emotional pain?
Forget the decades old advice on how to “balance” life and drop out of your juggling class. Daily demands are too complex for these outdated methods of handling the intricacies of life in the 21st century.
Experts once assured us that the answer to a harried lifestyle was to “balance” your life. I reject this advice. Balance implies only two elements, typically interpreted as work and home. It also implies the teeter-totter effect: one will be up and one will be down. I never want my work up and my home life down, or vice versa and balancing these two elements of life leaves no room for ME!
I know now that the key to a satisfying and productive life is to harmonize daily demands, not balance them.
How did I come up with this concept?
My degree is in music education and in college I took a music composition class. I was in a piano practice room trying to compose the next song that would be heard around the world like Silent Night. I was not succeeding.
Then this voice came to me and said, “Did you know that all the music in the world is made up of the 12 tones in an octave?” I mused, “Do you mean that Beethoven Ninth Symphony and Taylor Swift’s songs are all composed of just 12 tones?” “Yes.”
How do they do it? How do gifted composers and songwriters keep coming up with wonderful new music from 12 tones?
Obviously not by playing the notes all at one time. They compose distinctive and exceptional music by:
- Playing them in different combinations
- Arranging them in different sequences
- Distributing them in different octaves
- Assigning them to different instruments
- Adding new and varied rhythms
- Omitting some tones at the appropriate times
In our daily lives, we often have simultaneous demands hitting us all at one time. Taking the principles composers use and applying them to our daily lives, the question is, how do some people take all the simultaneous demands being made on them and make beautiful music while others live life in a frenzy, bedlam, pandemonium, and discord?
They do it by harmonizing the elements of life. To illustrate this, think of a basic harmonizing chord: C, E, G. On the keyboard below I have highlighted these notes.
To make the application to these notes and harmonizing your life, we’ll use the music education method of Solfège, the same scale used by Maria in the Sound of Music to teach the Von Trapp children how to sing.
Do is C, Mi is E, and Sol is G.
Do represents Dough or the money we need to purchase the things we need to sustain life.
Mi represents taking care of myself, my physical, mental, and emotional health.
Sol represents the soul you give to others.
This is a brilliant concept because as shown in the graphic below, you can assign different components of your life to each note. Remember back to your 7th grade music class. Your teacher might have asked the students singing the C note to sing a little louder and the students singing the G note to sing a little softer.
Using this concept, you as the conductor of your life have times when Work, C or Do, is the loudest note you are singing. That doesn’t mean that E or Mi, Myself, has not gone away. The note is just sung softer. At other times, G or Sol, may be the loudest note you sing if you have an emergency in your family.
Using this illustration, you are following the rules of famous composers who:
- Combine tasks in different ways – often called multi-tasking.
- Prioritize and arrange tasks in different sequences.
Distribute tasks at different times of the day or on different days of the week.
- Delegate or assign tasks to different people.
- Add new and varied activities/hobbies that make you a more interesting and satisfied individual.
- Omit tasks that are not a high priority.
Use this revolutionary concept. It will change your life.
Bring this concept to your organization as a keynote or workshop. I’ll bring a keyboard and we’ll make beautiful music while we harmonize.
#LifeBalance #Success #Leadership #Worklifebalance #Harmony