A Path for Ensuring Balance to Support Leadership Skills

Finance professionals have many demands on their time, energy and results. High performance is expected and we keep delivering and providing every day. As careers advance and both personal and professional goals continue to be achieved, those of us who live in this space need to work harder and harder to hold it together. We are caught in the nonstop pressures to move faster than our capacity, to keep pushing when exhausted and to achieve for others instead of living for ourselves. 

If this sounds familiar, it may be time to take a step back and ask yourself these questions: 

What is currently causing me stress, imbalance or dissatisfaction? How do these circumstances affect how I perform and engage with my job and how are they also impacting my personal life? What are my priorities? What am I losing?

Let’s now take a pause and acknowledge both these factors and open our minds to what can be done to bring back the Balance in our lives.

Similar to my previous articles on Business Partnering and Interpersonal Fundamentals, additional effort is required from finance professionals to continue to move forward, both personally and professionally, including these key tools and competencies:

• Keeping an open and curious mind with an always-learning mindset
• A willingness to ask questions and actively listen to the answers (whether to others or to oneself)
• Exercising patience and maintaining a collaborative perspective (whether to others or to oneself)

Here, my aim is to provide again a framework for finance professionals to better understand the dimensions of wellness, the areas to focus on, and the direction to help you achieve more Balance.

Let's get started with these four (4) key dimensions of wellness. To make the framework more memorable, we will use the acronym MAPS.

• M = Mental
• A = Awareness (of Emotions)
• P = Physical
• S = Spiritual

Mental Dimension

The fast pace of goals and daily tasks often leads people to believe that multitasking is mandatory for achieving and completing tasks. However, in reality, multitasking undermines realised productivity and mental continuity. A shift in attention from one task to another, even when just answering an email or taking a phone call, can increase the amount of time needed to finish the initial task by up to 25%. 

A recommended solution is to focus your mind specifically on one task at a time, with the most immediate tasks being the most important. Unless intentional, focused time is designated for the most critical and challenging work, the work may not get completed, or the task may be rushed to completion at the last minute. Some insightful executives have discovered a remedy and have adopted a practice for each evening. 

I will share this practice with you: Identify the most important challenge or task for the next day and make it the first priority when work starts the next morning. This practice uses the most productive hours of the morning to ensure critical tasks are completed and provides a sense of accomplishment early each day. The remaining daily time can then be used for further improvements to that task or to move on to the next most important task. This will rebalance your mental dimension and cultivate feelings of accomplishment and productivity.

I have used this technique for the last six months and also include top-priority task time blocks on my daily calendar to ensure time is set aside for this focused purpose. Try it, this practice works!

Awareness of Emotions Dimension

Day-to-day workday demands and challenges can cause a person to slip into a negative emotional zone. This is often termed a classic “fight-or-flight” mode. This can lead to irritability, impatience, anxiety and insecurity. These states of emotions can also “lock up the brain” and make it nearly impossible to think clearly, logically or reflectively. In addition, frequent spillover from these states of emotion can negatively impact family members or loved ones, provoke ambivalence towards activities that are most deeply enjoyed, and increase distancing from a more gratitude-focused mindset. 

Daily awareness and self-monitoring of our emotional state is a key step towards the improvement of negative emotions. A simple but effective ritual for mitigating negative emotions is to take a “time break”. 

One method of taking a “time break” is to practice and focus on deep abdominal breathing by inhaling and exhaling slowly for eight to ten seconds. This prompts relaxation and recovery and switches off the fight-or-flight response. 

Another beneficial habit that can engender positive emotions is to express appreciation to others. Yes, this may feel especially challenging when one is in a negative zone or mood. However, a simple email, phone call, handwritten note or conversation can go a long way in cultivating positive emotions. The key is to express genuine and specific appreciation while taking a sincere interest in someone else. Especially that person’s life beyond or outside of work.

Another method to nurture positive emotions is to change the perspective of how you may view yourself. Frequently, people in unrest and experiencing confusion can blame others or external circumstances for their current situation. Reframing the situation can include asking,

 “How will I most likely view this situation in six months?” 

Another is to keep an open and curious mind by asking,

 “How can I learn and grow from this situation?” 

This combined with self-compassion, focused on treating yourself with kindness and understanding, can rebalance your emotional state of being during difficult times.

For the last six months, I’ve been working on maintaining the “gratitude mindset”, expressing sincere appreciation to others and using the “How can I learn and grow from this situation?” All have been very beneficial for improving my emotional condition, both personally and professionally. 

Physical Dimension

The body has multiple facets that can either positively or negatively impact our physical energy. We can look at areas such as exercise, sleep, food, and rest. In our day-to-day lives, many of us take our bodies and our health for granted. However, we do need to pause and perform a body check or body audit to assess our body's condition and ensure we stay healthy now and in the future. 

You may notice that at times during the workday, you become restless, start yawning, feel pangs of hunger, and have difficulty concentrating. Intermittent breaks are needed to renew energy and focus. These breaks must include the critical aspect of being quality breaks, not just breaks of a specific duration. 

Create the habit of taking breaks and periodically disengaging from work. This can be having a conversation, listening to music, taking a walk outside or any ritual of your choice. This will disengage the overworked, rational-thinking part of your brain and effectively re-engage the creative part. Any follow-on tasks or actions will benefit.

I will admit that the habit of taking breaks has been especially challenging for me to create and maintain. This is still a work-in-progress for me, so please make it a focused habit for yourself.

Spiritual Dimension

All the dimensions are important, but the Spiritual Dimension is the deepest. This dimension is critical because it is where we connect what we do daily with our purpose, values and meaning in our lives. We access this essence and energy of the human spirit in our lives across three key areas: 

1. What we do best and enjoy the most with our work. 

2. Intentionally allocating time and energy into the areas of our lives that are the most important to us. This can include: work, family, health, service, etc.

3. Living our core values in our day-to-day behaviours and actions. 

If you want to uncover what you do best and what you enjoy most, try to recall two or more work experiences in the last few months when you found yourself in a “happy place”. An occasion with circumstances where you felt fulfilled and inspired, time moved quickly, and you experienced high effectiveness. Next, examine and analyse those engagements to determine which aspects were particularly positive, and especially which skills and talents you leveraged.

To allocate time and energy to our priorities, it helps to create a ritual and routine in which a specific amount of time and energy is devoted to family, health, or other priorities that may have previously been pushed out of each day. Establish the ritual, repeat it to form the habit and then ensure you are fully committed to be more available for those critical priorities.

Living and practising our core values every day can be challenging. Most of us today live at such a fast, frantic pace that we do not stop to ask ourselves who we want to be and what is most important. Insight into our values and trying to define them can often be uncovered and understood by instead exploring qualities or values that are disliked. 

For example, if you are strongly averse to rudeness, then perhaps consideration and sympathy may be among your key values. This opposite-or-dislike approach can be insightful if, for example, you find yourself practising rudeness or inconsideration. A new routine can be to pause in situations where you might otherwise be impolite, and instead redirect and focus on being considerate and courteous. This practice can then course-correct your life to better align with your values.

The Spiritual Dimension is not only the deepest dimension, but is also frequently the most difficult to understand and adjust to. Do not let that deter you from making the effort to live and practice your core values and enjoy their benefits.

Conclusions and Recommendations

You now have the MAPS framework to take action on the multiple dimensions of wellness. 

Continue to keep an open mind with the learning mindset. Actively listen to yourself and exercise patience and kindness with yourself. Give yourself the time breaks you need and reserve the mornings for your most productive and focused activities. Create a new routine and begin it to align with your core values. 

Don’t wait! Start today! Use the MAPS method to focus on your Mental, Awareness of Emotions, Physical and Spiritual dimensions and bring more Balance to your life.