Forget About Living a Balanced Life
By: Liz Karungi
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Work Life Balance, Guest Blog, Guest Contributor, East Africa

Forget About Living a Balanced Life

The Guest Contributor section of the UEA Business Pulse hosts opinions and thought pieces written by experts in various fields. Bikundo Onyari is a self-taught lifepreneur based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is a Master NLP coach, life/business coach, facilitator and trainer. He inspires high impact individuals on how to defy the impossible in their personal and professional lives in order to produce immediate, unprecedented and lasting results. He achieves this by supporting them to develop authentic personal vision for life and go for it!

“Congruence entails living in dynamic harmony, where strands of our lives play in concert together in a way that has a deep and meaningful resonance and that changes as we learn to grow” — C. Gergen & G. Vanourek

I loved the idea of balancing work and life and made several attempts — in vain — to integrate this balance into my life. My attempts included using the Life Wheel (the “work plan for life”) that has several categories including Health, Education, Financial, Personal Development, Career, Family & Friends, Leisure and Contribution. I would rate the different categories on a scale of 1–10, 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. I did this whenever I was struggling with my life or not getting any fulfillment.

Later, when I started my own enterprise, I struggled to maintain my focus. I would spend the day doing non-essential tasks, my mind constantly wandering. At the time, social media was gaining popularity and I would spend hours online. I worried that any employee I got would repay me with a similar kind of focus!

Regardless of my attempts to focus and balance, I had minimal success and got increasingly frustrated until I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steve Covey. What caught my eye was the last habit: Sharpening the Saw which is about preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have — you! This means self-renewal, self-care and self-improvement. This inspired a mental shift; I realized I didn’t have to balance all the areas of my life. I started thinking that maybe true balance doesn’t exist, just as perfection doesn’t exist. This challenged me to re-analyse what “balance” meant to me.

I started by replacing the word balance with congruence. Congruence is a noun that means “agreement” or “harmony;” Regardless of outside noise, you can teach your mind to remain singularly focused on whatever task is at hand, whether your attention is the status of your email inbox or a work project. While enjoying dinner, you’re not thinking about all the emails you need to check or what it would take to start a new project. With this realisation, I replaced the “work plan for life” with “a life of congruence.”

Most people think a life of congruence means maintaining balance in their lives by ensuring enough time for the things most important to them. Surprisingly, time is just one variable and doesn’t speak to the quality and nature of our respective endeavours. Aiming for a balanced life makes us compartmentalise the distinct areas of our lives without having any coherence.

To be able to live a life of congruence, I have started to see what I do, who I am and what I believe as one integrated life. Congruence is about alignment, integration and having both flexibility and control in the work we are doing. When I am stuck, I take a step back to reflect and ask, “What do I need most right now? Am I neglecting an area of my life?”

The best way to achieve congruence is to align our passion and our work. Our values and purpose should resonate with every aspect of our lives. You can — and should — be the same person in your work, home, family life and community.

A life of congruence also means taking time for personal renewal and reinvention. This helps us restore authenticity and passion to our lives. When we overexert ourselves or end up on the wrong path, we must have the courage to stop, look around and self-correct. Personal reflection helps keep us on track.

As we strive to piece together the dynamic puzzle that is life, our goal should be a lifestyle that supports all the different areas of our lives symbiotically.

What do you think? Let me know your thoughts by joining the conversation here https://www.facebook.com/LifePreneurTribe/

You can reach Bikundo on Twitter @alifepreneur and linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/bikundoonyari

*We are immensely grateful to Bikundo for writing this piece! Here’s to a life of congruence!