LEARN
Something Worth SharingThe 50 Shades of Balance My grandmother was a professional chef and instilled in me a love of baking. While watching her, I gained a real lesson about balance. I remember people talking about balance as two things: balanced and not balanced. It almost assumed that balance is simple; it’s either black or white. This never seemed to make sense to me, especially given that I was a competitive ice skater and knew instinctively (and from painful experience) that balance is not that straightforward. When my Grandma would bake she used an old fashioned set of scales. As she’d start tipping flour into them they were in a state of imbalance - not enough - until hitting the right measurement. However, very often she’d slip and quickly go back into a state of imbalance - this time it would be ‘too much’. Life is like this. We are always trying to navigate our way to the ideal state of balance, but it is more common to be either side of this - too little or too much. Sometimes we are very imbalanced and at other times we can just be slightly out. Businesses follow this same challenge - as do teams, relationships, societies and even nature. The trick is to have awareness and then develop the strategies to regulate balance. Your balance is personal to you - as mine is to me. The ice skater in me also knows that if we try to rapidly force balance we can easily overcompensate and swing past balance to a state of too much - and in my case, fall over! The ability to work through the shades of balance in a calm way that allows progress is like a muscle - it’s personal and takes practice - otherwise we will spend all our time just swinging back and forth!
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