Activity: How Balanced Are You?
In this activity we’re going to use your original list from the previous activity to determine where you’re spending your time. This should give some insight into who you are shaping up to be. Don’t try to analyze yourself at this point or pass any judgement, we’re just trying to get a baseline for where you actually are right now in the present.
Tasks
- Take a moment to rank each facet for yourself without much thought.
- Are you more social or physical?
- Put them in the order that you feel fits you like: physical, mental, social.
- Go back to your original 15 things and try to classify each primarily as one facet.
- Many things could fall into two or three facets, try to focus on what you get out of doing the activity or why you do it and pick only one facet.
- How many are in each facet?
- Does this line up with your initial ranking?
- Should you reevaluate each facet's rank?
Example
Using my initial list that I built earlier I bucketed them as follows.
I want to take a few moments to define why I think certain activities belong where I put them. I won’t list out every one of them but there are a few that I think providing some insight into would be beneficial.
Listening to music is something that I do to relax. It helps me clear my mind if I’m stressed or energizes me if I’m feeling low. Music has always had a special connection for me and while this activity could be listed as social for some because they’re getting out of it some common ground with which to share with others, I feel that this is a mental activity for me.
Developing software, planning projects, meetings, and financial planning are all things that I would consider social even though they certainly require some mental effort to accomplish. The main reason that I would go social with these is because, for me, the benefit out of these is my influence on other people through them. I’m not building software for myself, I’m building it for other people. The meetings that I attend are largely social gatherings around a specific topic. This is not to say that there is no mental aspect of these activities, only that the primary purpose for them appears to be social for me.
Looking at each of these lists it would certainly seem that my facets in order should be social, mental, then physical; where my original assessment of myself was mental, physical, then social. Why does this list differ from my original list so much? It all has to do with how I see myself versus how I’m actually spending my time. In truth, the only thing that changed was that I’m doing way more socially than I originally thought that I was. I think that I’m going to accept my new list as social, mental, physical and chalk it up to not realizing how social I actually am. For you, comparing these lists may be very different, in the opposite order for example. Take some time to look at the two and the activities you’ve identified to determine where you think you actually fit.
It’s important that you come to an agreement with yourself about how you spend your time and where you feel that your strengths are because if you are truly skilled in something that you don’t do frequently then you will begin to lose that skill because you’re not actively using it. So even if you’re an expert baker, if you aren’t baking muffins routinely and you’re forging swords instead then you’re headed in the direction of being an expert blacksmith and not an expert baker. That can be ok if that’s the direction you want to be going, it’s better to recognize the reality and course correct now than 6 months from now.
Comments
Post a Comment