Achieving balance

A teacher of mine recently sent me some thoughts, including this: "‘balance’ in our lives is not static, it is fluid and dynamic - more a dance than a fixed state."

When I speak to my clients about social enterprise, the issue of balance inevitably comes up. As social entrepreneurs, we constantly struggle with balancing our social mission with profit. There is a dynamic tension that occurs when these two complimentary, yet sometimes conflicting, elements require difficult decisions to be made that can feel like you're giving up one for the other. I am often asked how to stop this tension. My answer: you can't - and, you shouldn't. I believe that there is great power in this dynamic tension and needs to be identified, managed and embraced, rather than stopped. I believe that this tension is what pushes both sides of the coin. The need to make decisions at times that are more focused on the money than the mission can be an important catalyst for examining whether you are making smart, financially sustainable financial decisions. After all, there is no mission activity if there is no money. On the other hand, when you find yourself making decisions that put the mission first and may feel detrimental to the financial bottom line, you're being pushed to examine how your enterprise impacts people. The key is that the decisions that are more money focused and the decisions that are more socially focused balance out over time - not that every decision itself is balanced. I've found that once organizations understand this, as well as the common areas of tension that arise - they can begin to recognize it, foster healthy discussions and embrace both points of view as important parts of the whole.

Big Thinking or Small Actions?

I recently came across an old story about a traveler who comes across two stone cutters. He asks the first "What are you doing?" and receives the reply "Squaring the stone." He then walks over to the second stone cutter and asks :What are you doing?" and receives the reply, "I am building a cathedral." Both men are performing the same tasks, but one of them is aware that he has the choice to be part of a greater dream (from Alberto Villoldo's book, The Four Insights).

Social entrepreneurs and those who support them are often asking the question of whether it's enough to save the world one social entrepreneur at a time or if we need to be thinking bigger. My answer is: both. It is up to everyone one of us to learn how to simultaneously be focused on our daily tasks - whether it's the emails we're responding to, reports we're writing, conversations we're having or thoughts we're conceiving - AND begin to understand how those daily tasks affect a bigger dream. In this work and in any world changing work, there are often a contingency of dreamers and a contingency of doers. I believe that while most of us are stronger in one area or the other, we cannot exclusively be one OR the other. We must learn how to be both, how to do our daily tasks and figure out what more we need to do to affect greater change.