Principles Of Personal Transformation: Balance

I’ve spoken time and again that the ability to succeed comes from the individual’s ability to balance. So let’s talk about the elements of balance and why it is so important.

The Reality Of Paradox Is… The Paradox Of Reality

In my previous introduction to the Principles of Personal Transformation, we are made aware of the concept of paradox as the reality. Paradox is essentially a contradiction of truth, and is always in existence because of perceptual realities. For instance, there may be a time where you are in pursuit of a goal. The paradox of your reality could be (i) you did not realize that you already encompass that goal in your daily being and your daily living, (ii) doing things to pursue that goal cause you to move further from the goal instead.

Introducing Balance As The Stabilizing Factor

The principle of balance comes in to enable an individual to be grounded. I have found that sometimes, neither pursuing nor staying the same enables the achievement of the goal. Balance can be achieved at various levels, including personality balance, propulsion/motivational balance, role expectation balance, and awareness balance.

Why Balance?

The entire universe flows in a balance, and it is the natural state of any occurrence in the world that we know. Let’s take for instance, the example of the water cycle. In a systemic view, the water cycle is never ending and stable. If you think of yourself as a droplet of water, you might be in the sea, evaporated into the atmosphere to form a cloud. Precipitation occurs and you drop onto elevated plains into streams that ultimately trickle back to the sea once again. This cycle is balanced.

What happens when the cycle is imbalanced? What if evaporation occurs faster than precipitation? You will end up with a world like Venus, with constant storm systems, accumulating thick dense clouds that trap infra-red radiation from the sun. This imbalance is the effect of a combination of factors that are causing global warming.

But if we take this analogy and look back at the process of individual growth and the achievement of success, one thing you will eventually realize is that success is based on the stability of various factors. You’re like the overheated earth until you learn to control your impulse to do various things. The ripple effect is the way to create the calm, and by extension to this analogy, the problems you encounter in life will be the path toward your growth.

Personality Balancing

In the MBTI, a psychometric tool to assist an individual in the process of self-discovery, we come to learn of various different personality types that converge around the balance of preferences. These opposites include (1) Extraversion and Introversion, (2) Sensing and Intuition, (3) Thinking and Feeling, and  (4) Judgement and Perception.

Interestingly, the tool suggests that, at our best, we are able to utilize our two best functions that are a combination of these preferences. Take for example, the ISTJ type. You have the Dominant function of Extraverted Thinking, which in this case enables you to share your thoughts in a logical fashion with ease. You have the Auxillary function of Introverted Sensing, which allows you to reflect upon the details of information that you receive.

In counterbalance, we have our two least developed functions. If these are not matured, we may end up utilizing them in ineffective ways. The Tertiary function is the Feeling element that, if not well developed, forces us to express or experience feelings that are not easily articulated, and the Inferior function is Extraverted Intuition, which in its inferior form, would cause an individual to express negative feelings and paint a doubtful or negative future.

In both, we can predict that our limitation comes from the inability to utilize these functions well. In fact, when our energies are strained, and the dominant and auxillary functions are used up or exhausted, we end up being forced to use the other two to balance up our personality. In such instances, our capabilities are severely diminished unless we are able to recharge ourselves and manage the psychological stressors in our lives to resume functioning as a regular human being.

The challenge of balance comes first of all in awareness of these psychological mechanisms for mental homeostasis.

Motivational Balance

It seems odd to think that motivation could be an imbalance, but it is absolutely evident in the lives of people who are highly successful, or in the lives of people who are highly deranged (and some say they are one and the same types of people).

I’ve met many successful individuals who have achieved their success because of a certain underlying motivation to compensate for what happened in the past. So, I can easily predict that someone who is financially successful today probably had a pretty tough childhood from a financial point of view. It’s not so surprising that something like this happens, though. After all, the problems we encounter in childhood merely create salience for the thing that we miss the most.

Here’s an interesting question though: once the psychological compensation has been achieved, what happens next? You could speculate that the individual has no longer any need for such drive anymore. In fact, if this is the only motivation, you will find that the individual has to consistently experience poverty in order to keep pushing the envelope of financial achievement. In the end, this individual consistently makes big wins and big losses, possibly in business and in other financial aspects of life. If everything else remains status quo, that’s still fine. The danger occurs if or when this adversely issue affects other elements in the person’s life.

The propulsion system created by motivational imbalance can be really powerful. Ultimately, the individual needs to recognize that this energy will eventually die down and the need to keep moving in the same direction will have to be fueled by a different motivation, something that does not have a negative precedent. To illustrate, someone who has become motivated to seek out a new love because he was spurned in his earlier days in dating may find that this pattern not only makes him a very popular ladies’ man, but also results in a lot of heartbreak for him if he gets disappointed by the attachment. If he does get married, he will have to re-investigate his entire experience of love and heal his initial experience of being jilted or dumped, or else he may find his marital experience just as daunting or fearful.

Balancing Role Expectations

Expectations are very powerful motivators. They can be subtle and yet influential at the same time, as depicted by research done on the Pygmallion Effect: a teacher who expects her class to be an intelligent group of students often finds evidence of their intelligence.

Now, as we progress in the world, it becomes more apparent that we will need to see our roles in balance. The teacher is the student. The leader is the follower. The master is the servant. In fact the more you pursue the latter, the better you will be in the former role.

How does this work? Mostly, through the simple process of understanding and empathizing. After all, the teacher who knows how a student thinks and behaves is most likely the one who is best able to help the student learn the way they do. A leader who is also a good listener and good team player will better be able to earn their team members’ respect. I’m not suggesting that you simply leave yourself to the mercy of your students or your team members. That would be a blatant act of imbalance. Instead, learn to balance by recognizing that it is always best that you are able to take on a dual role in order to play your present role better.

In your quest for success, never underestimate your role as an achiever and as a failure. I don’t think you’d be surprised that  we can learn as much from success from achievement as we can from failure. To be able to balance such thoughts requires a greater sense of awareness of self.

Balance In Awareness

Most of the time, we function unconsciously. The more unconscious we are, however, the more ‘expertly’ we conduct a particular behavior. Such habitual adaptations are required for us as human beings. After all, you would expect behaviors like breathing and blood flow to be unconscious activities of the autonomous nervous system.

Achievement does not stem from the unconscious – it is maintained by the unconscious. If you had made a choice to exercise on a daily basis, you would have had to get this choice into the conscious mind first through awareness building.

In modern change management, there is a model for this known as the Commitment Curve. I figure that if organizations need to analyze how advanced their change is in their context, individuals should too.

In this modified commitment curve (NOTE: the terminology is still limited to the original text in the model, but after a cursory search on Google, I still can’t find who to attribute this model to), I’m suggesting that awareness needs to be established from the point of contact, although most of us will only gain awareness after an experience. Hence, it is important, in my opinion, to constantly keep reviewing your experiences in order to reflect upon how it impacts you, so that you can regain conscious control over it.

This, obviously, must be balanced properly with the ability to act. Reflection can only get you so far. This is where you begin to seek important reasons for you to build up some motivation to get you to do things.

So… How Much Of What Is Enough For When or Who?

Okay, so it finally comes back down to the question of what you are balancing for, under what circumstance and the like. In reality, other than the level of awareness you have of yourself as you go about your daily life, you may not be able to predetermine what you have to do. For instance, you might go about setting the goal of making $1m, and begin your journey. We all know that making a million is more than just setting a goal, but let’s say you did do this, and went about experiencing knocks from Reality. You would now have to reflect upon this in order to take an honest view of what you really need in order to accomplish this goal. Most of this is experienced at the point of contact. Until you are brought to awareness as to what it means, you might have a hard time understanding what went on.

A former student of mine was really excited to go into business. However, for him, he started a venture with several partners only to find himself being sidelined and unable to progress in the company no matter how motivated he was. Dejected and disillusioned, he started to play the blame game. His partners were at fault, not him. The economy was at fault but not him. By bringing him down to earth and letting him realize that the issue is not about fault finding but to look at how one’s behaviors could have contributed to the result, he began to improve. Initially, it was quite a rude shock because he had always believed that what he did was always for the good of his company. Of course, I believe he had positive intentions. To his partners, however, the path to hell is paved with such intention. Ultimately, it was the problem of his behavior in the company (he tended to be overbearing and oblivious to others’ feelings). He realized that he had a lot more to learn. Many of his beliefs were limiting his progress as a leader in the company. For instance, he believed that as the leader in the company, others should follow what he said. His predicament became obvious when the seven partners in the company began to do the same. So who do you follow?

“The Answer Has Always Been There… You Were Merely Asking The Wrong Questions…”

I think we go about assuming that things turn out wrong because of something we had done. Many turn on negative conclusions about this such as shame or guilt or even anger. The principle of balance merely tells us to play with paradox a little more. What if the outcome we face was meant to be? I think that this will skew your emotions differently. If you were meant to fail, then you already have an answer to the question you had failed to ask in the first place. This is where ultimate learning takes place, and will ensure that you learn the necessary lessons in order to progress toward your success. Balance the interpretation that you had just got “bad results” with the view that it was the result you were going to get for failing to ask an important question prior to such an outcome. When you realize that failure is always a predetermined path caused by behaviors that are incompatible with your direction of success, you might begin to balance yourself with slightly better grounded information, knowledge and resources in order to hone yourself. That would be the ultimate aim for achievement, since no success can be possible without “you”.