Are you juggling young twins and a toddler and wondering how to stay sane? Last week Andrea Davison, Technical Manager of Special Projects at NZGBC spoke at a Women in Environment, Conservation and Sustainability Leadership Summit about keeping it all in balance.
Is your life sustainable? I don’t mean whether you recycle, compost or have solar panels on your roof… What I mean, is whether you have found that sweet spot, that balanced position, the eye in the calm of the storm of all the activities and responsibilities you are managing in life?
Last week I spoke at a Women in Environment, Conservation and Sustainability Leadership Summit, alongside some inspirational leaders from diverse business, legal, government, local government and not-for-profit backgrounds. Over the two days themes emerged around authenticity, engaging hearts and minds, and systems thinking, and I was not alone in sharing the more personal side of my professional and life journey.
Some highlights were:
I somehow signed myself up to delivering a presentation entitled ‘Managing Personal and Career Priorities with Ease’ and indeed the attendees wished me luck as I got up to speak – we all know full well that achieving balance between these oftentimes competing priorities is anything but easy.
‘Work’ and ‘Life’ is not the only push-pull relationship that we need to negotiate in life. In his book ‘The Happiness Paradox’ Ziyad Marar describes two types of happiness – the exhilarating happiness we get from freedom and adventure, and the contentment we get from being grounded, rooted and committed. It is important to have something to look forward to, but peak happiness experiences (such as that trip to Fiji) shouldn’t be a ‘quick fix’ or addiction that distracts us from a lack of contentment in our everyday life.
When it comes to planning our career path, we need to apply a healthy mix of focus and flexibility. It is through practicing yoga that I came across the concepts of ‘discipline without force’, and detachment. We should plan some kind of trajectory and take well considered steps forward in our career, however we also need to be somewhat detached from our vision of the end destination. Life is dynamic, goal posts will shift and life’s circumstances will change. We need to have confidence in our ability to adapt and grow with these changes.
While it may feel uncomfortable, it is ok that we don’t know exactly where we will end up. In life it is essential that we have aspects of both certainty and uncertainty. Certainty is what grounds us, gives us confidence and makes us feel safe. Uncertainty is what keeps us open, to life, to change to others. Risk and discomfort is what challenges us to grow. If we approach life only with absolute certainty, absolute knowledge, we close ourselves off to the opportunities that come with the openness of uncertainty.
There are many more dualities that I could describe that I have encountered in my life:
In ancient Greek philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, the ‘golden mean’ or ‘middle way’ is described as the desirable middle position between two extremes. A moral person, or someone of virtue was thought to be someone who displayed characteristics which fell nicely between two extremes, typically of excess and deficiency. There was an acknowledgement that the golden mean position would vary, given circumstance and relative to the individual. Likewise, as we forge our way through life, we need to continually evaluate our current golden mean position, between the numerous dualities that pull us in opposing directions.
There’s no denying that life is complex. One change in one area of our life can be a catalyst for a cascade effect of changes across multiple other areas of our life. For projects using our building rating tools, different measures and design aspects must be evaluated for their merits, and decisions made around which direction to pursue. Extensive skylights and glazing may provide an abundance of natural light, but it will also have an impact on thermal and energy performance. Natural ventilation may save on energy costs, but could negatively impact upon occupant acoustic comfort.
If we were to focus only on career progression and ignore everything else in our life, it could be akin to only focussing on energy performance of a building without considering occupant comfort and other impacts. Considering that the most energy efficient building would probably be a sealed box with no windows, this narrow focus is not likely to lead us to the overall outcome we are after.
We need to apply a systems thinking approach to evaluating our life as we do our natural environment and our buildings. We need to recognise the interlink between the various aspects of our life, consider both heart and mind in the decisions we make, and live with authenticity. In doing so we will start to move towards our golden mean, the ‘middle way’ that will lead us on a journey of fulfilment.