Life Balance and Resilience Intertwined
The Importance of Life Balance and Resilience
The notions of life balance and resilience are very much intertwined. Both are needed for individuals and organizations to be sustainable. Life balance is the harmonious blend of many aspects of life and resilience is the ability to be adaptable, bounce back or roll with the punches, so to speak. Individuals who experience life balance have many sources of meaning in their lives. They have a career where they get to use their talents and skills in a meaningful way. They have close relationships that bring joy, satisfaction and fulfillment to their lives. They have their finances under control. They have some type of a cosmology, philosophy or spiritual framework that provides a sense of purpose and some order to their life. These are just some examples of the different elements of life balance.
Individuals are going to be more resilient when they have more, shall we say, ‘banks’ of experience and wisdom to draw from. It is that ability to gather and use a wide range of tools in your life experience tool kit. When you have life balance, you have a wide range of different areas of your life that help you grow, give you a sense of fulfillment and contribute to positive self-esteem. You are literally building knowledge and skill sets that allow you to be more resilient.
When something unexpected happens in your life, a crisis, an illness, a death, a major change in an economic situation, you need a level of resilience in order to deal with these challenges. If you have been filling your ‘bank‘ with different areas of experience then those experiences will have been feeding you and filling you up, providing you with more in your ‘bank account‘. People with a full ‘bank account’ have a reservoir of useful experiences which is available to them in order to respond to the situation at hand making them much more likely to handle these challenges in a resilient way.
In this way life balance can help you become more resilient and sustainable because the more adaptable you are, the more flexible, the more tools in your toolkit, the more likely you are going to be able respond to challenges in a healthy way and to last for the long haul. So resilience can lead to sustainability. If you do not have resilience, if the first storm that comes along throws you off keel, you are not going to be able to endure for the long term.
