[Guest post] Bringing balance into focus

*this a guest post by Erich Jordan on integrating focus and balance. Focus means to deliberately concentrate on something that you want to achieve. Successful people have a strong ability to dedicate to something they are passionate about. But as we grow older, it’s a balanced life that we are looking for, being able to juggle with career, family and health, more than getting caught up in that one thing we want to do. But how?

10 years ago, Erich went from being a Christian minister to becoming a life coach. He’s now a happy successful man, doing what he loves most, owning his own business and attracting clients. He’s passionate about helping people to reach an abundant, meaningful and productive life.

Erich is also a faraway friend living on the eastern coast of South Africa and an ex-student of mine at International Coach Academy (ICA) in 2012, writing with a strong voice on TheCoachman.co.za.

On a number of occasions over the course of our lives together my wife has very kindly created opportunities for me to spend time alone with my kids. She recently felt the need once again to do so and booked a ticket together with her mother to Abu Dhabi in the UAE. Thrilled as I was at the prospect of having my daughter to myself for two weeks, I was also concerned that with my busy coaching schedule I may not be able to give her the attention she required. The thing is, my little girl has recently grown up and decided she is no longer satisfied with being average. She wants to excel as an athlete and has begun to seriously eat, dream, and live for swimming. I’ve been quite amazed, to say the least at the focus she’s brought to her chosen discipline, how diligently she follows her scientifically formulated eating plan, personally preparing each day’s shakes and recovery drinks the night before. She orders her social and academic life to allow her to train for two and half hours, seven times a week. Such is the dedication, focus and attention of champions in all arenas of life.

My son is equally focused, not as an athlete, but as a scholar and we’ve often spoken of the importance of keeping his purpose for being at university in mind. It’s so easy to become distracted, to pay attention to seemingly valid yet unrelated topics and so to lose sight of his purpose of earning an engineering degree. Mastering a range of drinking games, pursuing a romantic partner or forming lifelong friendships, may well be part of the process, but don’t in any way form part of the purpose. To secure success, not only does he, like my daughter need to give himself completely to his chosen discipline, but more importantly he cannot allow himself to become distracted by, committed to or engaged in anything that shifts his focus from the task at hand. Such focus required of successful people, the world over is that they concentrate the floodlight of their energy into a single, powerful beam of light and attend only to what it illuminates.

I remember discovering the power of focused energy as a young boy. My father, like most dads, delighted in showing me how with a magnifying glass the sun’s heat could be concentrated onto a clump of wood shavings, paper or cloth with enough intensity to ignite it. By setting the distance of the lens from the surface of my hand I remember, as will many of my unsuspecting school friends, the heat it generated at the focal point. This is what happens in life when through convergence, integration and focus we bring everything we are to bear on all that we do. It’s how we generate the heat of passion and the excitement that drives us to achieve our purpose in life.

Without focus there simply is no way, either my son nor daughter could have achieved what they already have or plan to in the future. Without focus none of us have or will ever achieve much in life. This has been the way of achievers throughout history, it is how they reach their goals, how they realize the vision of their own potential. It’s never been a secret, yet because it comes at a cost, has seldom been the choice of average people.

The price my daughter will pay to become a professional athlete is not the same as the sacrifices my son will make to become an engineer. What they do however share in common is their forfeiture of a completely balanced life. I’m yet to hear of a world class sportswoman, academic or musician, attributing their success to a balanced approach to practicing scales, being well read or ultra-fit. It’s the very focus of their energy and time in a particular direction that renders their lives unbalanced. This is not to suggest that all sportsmen ever do is develop their bodies or that an academic can only ever be found with her nose in a book. What it does however mean is that this is the way they spend most of their time hence the cultural caricatures of ‘jocks’, ‘bimbos’ and ‘nerds’.

We all want and in fact need to maintain a certain degree of balance in order to enjoy the full spectrum of what life has to offer. We all want to have friends, sometimes escape into a novel or just eat pizza for supper. Not only does a degree of balance achieve this, but it also affords us a more holistic and integrated way of achieving our ultimate purpose in life. What use is a six cylinder engine under the hood of ‘who we are’ if all we ever service and use are four. With each strand of cord we twist into the rope of who we’re becoming we add strength, stretch and durability. So then, bringing balance into focus means bringing all that we are into a concentrated and more efficient pursuit of our ultimate purpose.

The more complex our lives become as we grow older, the more we tend to strive for balance. This happens as we try to spend ourselves equally on our careers, families, hobbies and health. Those who fail to maintain the balance usually end up losing something precious, while those who do often wind up being bored with only a memory of the passion for life they once knew. Clearly too much balance can undermine our living a rich and purposeful life. We need focus, we need something to be excited about, something to be working towards other than merely keeping our proverbial balls in the air for yet another day.

Each of us will decide where we fall between complete balance at one end of the spectrum and complete focus at the other. In the final analysis it’s our purpose and the degree of complexity at each stage of life that will determine how focused we are. Where are you on that spectrum today? Are you bored with life or simply tired of juggling? Maybe it’s time to redefine your purpose and restore some focus to an overly balance and boring life.