Create a Points System to Measure the Weight of Your World
The difference between “imbalance” and “in balance” is just a letter and a space. They even sound the same when you say them aloud—but they couldn’t be more different. So which describes your life now? And which do you want to describe it? (Hint: it’s the latter.)
Most people don’t take the time to think about balance until they wobble. It’s like walking across an actual balance beam. When you’re confident and cruising along, you probably don’t think about changing anything with your form. Sure, you might still wobble a little, but you keep your chin up, put one foot in front of the other, and keep moving forward. The easiest way to fall off the beam is to move your eyes from your point of focus, because as soon as you do, you lose your center of balance. Well, Super Woman, we aren’t going to let that happen.
Even the most decorated gymnasts feel shaky sometimes. And because we know it’s inevitable, the best way to minimize the wobble is to train. And we are (obviously) going for the gold at the Olympics of Balance. In the last step, you started looking ahead to figure out where you want to go. This step helps you stay balanced on your way there.
PEACE OUT, LADY JUSTICE
Some days, you stick to salad and take a hot yoga class, while other days, you opt for cupcakes and refuse to change out of sweatpants. That’s balance, right? Well, sure, we’ve all been there and twice on Sunday. That kind of balance is delicious, but temporary. Finding the kind of balance that is consistent and sustainable takes a little more work.
The image we usually think of when we hear “balance” is a scale with two bowls, like the kind Lady Justice holds. Maybe this is why we tend to think in terms of balancing just two things. How many times have you heard the phrase “work/life balance”? I hate that term. First of all, since when is your life siloed? If you’re not happy in one aspect of your life, you’re not happy. Period. It’s your one life. Second, I don’t know about you, but my “work” is a pretty big part of my life. Thinking of your career as something standing in opposition to everything else in your world is guaranteed to make you miserable. Lastly, “life” is pretty damn vague. What about balancing a new relationship and your most important friendships, plus work and your burgeoning side hustle and your pottery passion? Is that “life/life/work/work/life balance”?! It’s time to be done with the standard image we have of “balance.” Go ahead, break that scale; the life of a Super Woman is too full to fit in only two categories anyway.
Balance looks different for everyone. That girl who practically lives at her office—definitely unbalanced, right? Not necessarily. Not only is balance not the same for everyone, balance isn’t even the same for one person over time. For that girl right now, balance might mean putting 90 percent of her energy into her career. Ten years from now, that number might be 50 percent. It all depends upon what you value at any given time, what you want to achieve, and when you want to achieve it. You get to decide what “balance” means to you during each chapter of your life.
True balance doesn’t mean spending exactly the same amount of time and energy on each area of your life all the time; but it also doesn’t mean existing on coffee and no sleep all week and then crashing on the couch all weekend. When asked about how they stay balanced, a surprising number of the women I surveyed gave similar answers:
• “Treat myself to a deep-tissue massage once a month.”
• “Stay in on a Saturday night and watch movies.”
• “Sleep basically all day Sunday.”
Listen, I love a good deep-tissue massage and a day to veg as much as you do. But real balance is not going all comatose and disconnecting on occasion. You can’t try to quickly plug a leak in a sinking ship and expect to be seaworthy. Staying afloat demands your daily attention. Sure, we all have crazy days—or weeks—but aiming for regular balance will help keep the crazy times from driving you crazy over time.
MMMM, PIE . . .
I’m going to change the imagery you might associate with balance from a scale . . . to a tasty pie chart. I often muse about why in school we learned stuff like geometry and how to dissect a frog while skipping practical things like how to set and stick to a budget, but I will say that the lesson on the wonders of pie charts has come in handy.
We’re going to balance a budget of sorts now—a budget of your time and energy. You can add or delete whichever categories you want a little later, but for now, let’s start with five of the most common areas of our lives we value and try to juggle:
BTW, you’ll notice that the categories fit nicely into our four Fs: Finance (career), Family (family & friends, romance), Fun (all of the above), and Fitness (Emotional Wellness and physical health). That’s intentional; your goals should play into the choices you make about how to spend your day. Keep that in mind if you personalize the categories.
What I like about picking five to start out for this exercise is that there is less of an inclination to make them all even. Sure, you can evenly divide a pie into five pieces, like the one on the previous page, but it’s not as easy as cutting the pie in half and giving one half to “work” and the other half to “life.” Don’t be a lazy bitch, use two categories, make them fifty-fifty, and call it a day. That’s not realistic and will never account for the nuances of your life. There are nuances within “work” and “life,” and those nuances will change. And that’s good. That’s the point. All areas of your life are not going to need equal attention at every moment. In fact, this pie chart will change all the time. Depending on major events in your life, it could change daily. Choosing your categories based on what you are focusing on and specifically value now will help you cut the pie more precisely and make better choices based on what you deem important. (If you want to keep track of what you’re focusing on daily, you can do this with The Super Woman Journal.)
THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST
So, how we are cutting this pie today? Most exercises like this have you divide the pie by assigning each area of your life a percentage to reflect the weight it holds right now, with the percentages totaling 100 percent. I hate this conventional method. (Shocking, I know.) But I mean, come on: “Well, I would say 38 percent goes to career, 1 percent goes to romance (it’s a dry spell), 8.5 percent goes to friends, 23 percent goes to physical health, and 29.5 percent goes to Emotional Wellness.”
I rest my case. Instead, I’m going to give you some super fun points to play with! It’s like the Weight Watchers system. You get ten points. You have your five categories. Now, divvy out those ten points into the five categories. Here’s an example of how I would have first completed this exercise, years ago when my career was on the rise and my eventual breakdown nowhere in sight:
BTW, you can easily turn the points into percentages by simply adding a zero and a little “%” sign. Then if your brain likes the visual, draw based on those.
As you can see, I was working like all day, every day. I barely made time for dates or friends, and I worked out once in a blue moon. I certainly never did anything to help my mental health or develop a hobby. (I would have laughed at the suggestion of taking an improv class or going on a hike, two of my favorite things to do now.)
Now, your turn. Don’t worry about the future, just focus on the now, and how many points each category is getting at this moment in time:
I’ll even give you a pie chart divided into ten pieces you can shade in to get a better visual of where things stand.
Now, what do you notice? There’s no “right” answer here.
You could have given each of these categories exactly two points. Or you could have given all the points to romance if you’re living in a real-life version of The Notebook. (Speaking of, Super Woman Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat Pray Love and has a thing for Bali like I do, said, “to lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”) I don’t care how you slice this pie, as long as the way you slice it is right for you (with one exception, which I note below).
To determine whether it is indeed right for you, answer these two questions:
1. How do you feel when you review your points? Do you feel empowered? Resentful? Do you feel overwhelmed just trying to allocate enough points to the part of your life that you know, deep down, is under-served? Notice how you feel—free of judgment—and then use those feelings to make any necessary tweaks to your pie.
2. How do you feel about the categories? Do you have extra points for which you can’t find a home, which might indicate a missing category? Do you want to add one? Or, is there a category you want to take out altogether because it just doesn’t pertain to your life since you aren’t focusing on it now? Listen to that reaction and then switch ’em up if you need to.
For the allocation example I just gave, that was pretty much all work, here’s how I would have answered those questions:
1. I was okay with the point allocation. I didn’t see a huge need to prioritize anything but my career. Of course, in hindsight, I really needed to give at least one point to Emotional Wellness. That’s actually the only requirement I will give you for this exercise, because if you give nothing to that category for too long, it can and will demand all ten points eventually, like it did for me.
2. I was into these particular categories because I wanted to include all of these things in my life in a meaningful way, and I hoped that I would move toward them, even with very different points allocated to each. Now, if I decided I wanted to be a nun in the future, I would change things up and eliminate the romance category altogether. No judgment if that’s what you’re into.
CONFESSIONS
OF A SUPER WOMAN
Finding True Fitness
My Super Woman she-ro, Lavinia Errico, is the founder of Equinox. She is the ultimate self-made Boss Bitch who built one of the most recognizable brands in the fitness world. Her dream was to sell her company for a lot of money, and she did. But soon after, Lavinia plunged into a two-year-long battle with depression.
“My whole identity was wrapped up into the company. Without it, I didn’t know who I was,” she told me. “I never felt so alone, scared, and unsure of myself. I had been working my ass off since I was fourteen and without the grind I was lost.”
For years she had focused only on physical fitness, but after selling her company, she began a journey to finally incorporate the mental and emotional fitness she’d ignored for too long. During that time she tells me she found “her truth,” or who she was without any of the external factors like “being the founder of Equinox.” She resliced her pie and gave her own Emotional Wellness, which had been starved for years, the largest piece for the first time.
“Sitting with myself to find my truth wasn’t easy but it wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part is living in accordance with it,” she says. “People still ask me all the time, ‘Where is the old Lavinia?’ and I say, “Oh, you mean the one who would put you first before me? She’s long gone.”
It’s cool to use the same five categories I did, and it’s cool if you think all of the categories need to change to reflect your values. Change them. Change them back. Change them again. You can value anything you want: education, fame, impact, public service, religion, wealth, and on and on. Your categories don’t reflect my truth. They reflect your truth.
Knowing your truth inside out is a big part of living in balance. But the most important part is staying true . . . to your truth. Each day life gives you choices for how to spend your time. And each day you and only you get to choose how you want to do that. There can be endless options or at least enough to make your head spin. To not feel wobbly when it does, go back to your values. If you actually value what you say you do, the choices become easy and falling becomes hard.
THE FUTURE IS FEMALE
The first time I actually completed my balance exercise, I knew I wanted to use those same categories, but I wanted them to carry different weights. In fact, I knew that they had to carry different weights, because my goose egg next to Emotional Wellness had come back to bite me. My priorities had changed since those days focused only on sprinting up the network news ladder. So, following my breakdown, I allocated what I wanted to work toward in the next couple of years, over-indexing on Emotional Wellness to make up for the deficit I had. Here’s what my exercise looked like shortly after I left the hospital (in the hospital, of course, all ten points had needed to be in the Emotional Wellness category):
Throughout the book, I will unpack in great detail all the ways I discovered of adding more to the Emotional Wellness category of my life. That category is the crust in this analogy; you can fill your pie with anything you want, but without the crust, it will all fall apart. Do whatever you like with your pie, but remember that real Super Women always have at least one point in the Emotional Wellness column.
I hope you’re still hungry, because now it’s time to slice another pie. This is the pie of the future. Here’s what I’m working toward these days, now that my breakdown is in the rear-view mirror and I’m in a more balanced place:
You might be thinking: “Maybe there’s a typo here, because Lapin’s list is changing about as much as a single drop of Botox changes my face. Not a lot.” Well, it’s not a full-on facelift, but it’s a slight change that I certainly know is there. The tweak in this most recent pie chart puts just a little bit more emphasis on trying to see whether I want to have a baby. And, if I do (or don’t), my current pie and future pies will change yet again, just like yours will.
Super Men (yes, they exist too!) don’t think about balance or babies as much we do. They just don’t. But we have to, if we want them. When we reach a stride in our career in our thirties, that’s also typically when we crave that bun in the oven. Again, I don’t care if you want to have ten of those buns or none. But I do care that you decide and plan how they will fit into your life if and when you have them.
That just means Super Women have more creative slicing to do than Super Men. It also means we have to commit to pulling our pies out of the oven more often to make sure they still taste the way we want them to. Nothing you can do with your pie is “bad” as long as it’s to your liking. No one else is tasting it but you.
There’s a hilarious Amy Schumer skit (redundant, I know) called “I’m so bad” that shows a group of women around a table talking about eating things like dessert and fries and saying how “bad” they are for doing it. The only thing that’s bad is beating yourself up about living your life your way, because you think you should be doing something else or because everyone else is. So, let’s stop having eater’s remorse: eat that fucking pie, and enjoy it (along with all that cake we had in the last step).
BOTTOM LINE
Conventional Wisdom: I’ll be balanced when [the kids move out, I get a new job, insert whatever excuse here].
People think balance is impossible, but I think it’s their definition of balance that makes it so. There is no such thing as a “perfect” balance, and balance isn’t something you achieve once and then have forever. There are always going to be new demands on you (and more excuses you can make to avoid balancing things). Instead of giving up on balance because it doesn’t look like “what it’s supposed to,” keep rebalancing and shifting allocations as you go.
Conventional Wisdom: I feel unbalanced, but I do yoga!
Yoga is great exercise and can be a relaxing activity if you’re into it, but you’re not balanced just because you get down with downward dog. If you’re feeling unbalanced, then, my yogi princess, you’ve got to strengthen your core, and I don’t mean your abs—I mean those sweet Emotional Wellness skills.
Conventional Wisdom: Life balance means equally distributing your time between all parts of your life.
Balance is whatever you make it, as long as you’re aware of what you’re focusing on now and what your priorities are for the future. Stop being hard on yourself for not focusing on things you’ve actively decided you’re not going to focus on at a certain time. Plus, the amount of time you might spend worrying about not being balanced, you could use to um, be more balanced.