Balanced System
As we said in the module on general strategy, your personal strategy has two parts: the Balanced System and the Creative Breakthrough.
The Balanced System is the optimization of your life as stands today, preserving your personal architecture, your current life model. This approach is built on well-known and developed approaches in business ("balanced scorecard" and "operational efficiency improvement"). This approach leads to specific recommendations (many of which are numerical) that can be put into practice right now.
There are other situations in life when you have to make Creative Breakthrough and reinvent yourself; this approach is based on the business model innovation. It's much more creative and disruptive. We describe it in other modules.
As you remember, you can be on the rise or in a decline regarding your personal architecture during different times in your life. Optimizing your life and balancing your system only makes sense when your personal architecture is fine and you are in a period of growth. If not, then you must make a Creative Breakthrough and then optimize. But suppose that now you have to optimize what you have (and what satisfies you generally). Create balance in your life as it is.
What is the main objective of such optimization? We assume that the main goal is to achieve the highest level of life satisfaction and happiness. To reach it, you need to have intellectual awareness that all is well with your goals, with what you think about and what you aspire to. It is also important that your mood be fine, feeding emotions. And your body is also a key factor. It directly and physically affects your hormones, which regulate your feeling of well-being. These three parts, of course, are interrelated and strongly influence each other.
These three parts are not only interrelated, but they also include a number of very important factors, each of which must be considered separately.
The success of your body’s physical state depends on what’s happening with your fitness, nutrition, sleep and rest, and your health in general. All this strongly drives your appearance and your intimate life.
Your mood includes aspects such as your level of confidence and calmness, energy, optimism, clarity of mind, self-discipline, spirituality and motivation.
The goals may be different for different people. We have tried to shape them into groups that are applicable to most people. These groups include attractiveness, career and education, money and the resulting financial independence, and possessions and entertainment. A very important goal for many people is to have healthy relationships, friends and social life, family and children. And there are important fulfillment goals, which are different for different people, that we combined into a single group called self-realization.
These factors not only exist and need to be balanced (present in a certain proportion of your life), but they also influence each other strongly. For example, physical factors affect mood factors and even other physical factors. They, in turn, affect attractiveness and relationships. Mood factors also affect attractiveness, and through attractiveness impact your career and education, and, ultimately, influence your finances (and therefore your ability to afford possessions and entertainment).
Various goals are also strongly interrelated. For example, your situation with your career and finances can affect your relationships as well as family stability. Freedom and independence, which you can get from having a good financial situation, can give you more opportunities for self-realization. And, in the end, the motivation that you get from a large number of goals is a much more powerful driving force for you to develop your physical foundation (including fitness, healthy food, etc.) than some minor motivation such losing weight for the summer or fitting into a pair of jeans.
All of these elements affect the overall feeling of life satisfaction and happiness. Physical elements contribute through hormones. Intellectual awareness of reaching goals leads to the positive thoughts that everything is fine in your life. And of course, your mood and feelings also contribute directly to happiness and life satisfaction.
Here are several examples of how these relationships work. If you stay fit, eat right, sleep well and relax, then there is a good chance that you will be okay in terms of your looks and health. This gives you the opportunity to be a more attractive person. Through psychological appeal and physical factors, you can improve your intimacy with your partner, which, along with these factors, makes it more likely that your relationships will be good.
At the same time, in this scenario, you may have a better situation with your mood, which also makes you come across as a more attractive person. Because of this increase in attractiveness, you will have a better chance of doing well in your career (and thus in your finances), you will get more enjoyment out of your finances in the form of possessions and entertainment, and you will have a better relationship with your family and your social connections. This is just one example of how system elements influence each other positively.
But there can be negative connections. If you fail on any of these elements, it often leads to failure in other elements of the system. For example, if you were fired from your job, then you may have problems with finances, causing your confidence to fall and thus reducing your attractiveness, which may lead to problems in relationships. Because of this, the motivation to do anything to improve your health with physical activities may disappear.
Very often, people think that everything falls apart coincidentally. For example, perhaps their loved one cheats, they have problems at work, they have financial problems, maybe they get in a car accident, etc. Everything falls apart all at once, and some people feel as though they are being haunted by bad luck. This is no coincidence and it is not bad luck. This is the consequence of the inter-relationships that we describe here.
At the same time, we often see people who have everything: everything in their life is perfect, including their work, relationships, etc. This is not a coincidence too; this is also the result of these relationships, only positive.
Fortunately, you can keep track of these interdependencies. Cultivate and develop positive connections. Ensure that something positive follows from other factors so you can prevent and control negative influences. If you know these relationships, then you can isolate the problem to work on it and not allow this problem affect other elements. In this manner, you can break the vicious cycle of negative interactions. But to do this, you need to know the entire system of inter-relationships and the specific practical steps in each module.
In order to achieve such practical results, you have to delve into the individual modules of the Balanced System. Each of these modules reflects both the influence of this particular factor on the other factors and the impact on other parts of this factor. And, of course, we will concentrate on the elements relevant to each factor separately. The main conclusion of this introductory module is that these factors exist and they not only should be balanced (be in certain proportion in your life), but also have a very strong influence on each other and the control of these inter-relationships is in your hands.
As a final exercise, we suggest you think about which of the above items in your life are in good condition and which ones are in poor condition. Also, think about how those that are in poor condition can adversely affect the other elements. This general starting view (along with the mini-test) will help you set priorities and more consciously delve into specific modules.