second place

“I’m #2!!!”  he announced with great pride and excitement.

“Awesome,” I replied.  “Is that good?”

“Fabulous.”

You see, most people as competitive as this client of mine tend not to stop until they hit #1.  Anything less is usually viewed as a failure, or at least, less than a success.  And that’s certainly what he thought earlier last year. But as we began exploring the question of success and whether he could be happy with the #2 position, something began to shift.  

Perhaps you’ve heard of The Wheel of Life? It’s a popular coaching toolencompassing eight important segments of life and measuring your overall “balance” between them as you strive for a well-balanced existence. While there are many segments in the “Wheel of Life” that are important, and others that aren’t even listed, there are three that seem to trump or make all the others possible. If the WoL were a color wheel, these three would be its primary colors.  They are Career, Family, & Health.  Without them, little else is possible or matters much.

As Count Rugen so famously said in The Princess Bride, “Get some rest! If you haven’t got your health then you haven’t got anything.” Health is paramount. Even spirituality for all its significance and value can’t be upheld or fulfilled if your health can’t sustain you. Then there’s your career. Career provides a sense of purpose at one level, but more rudimentary than that, it provides the income to feed, cloth, and shelter ourselves and our family. Without it, or some version of it, we can’t satisfy Maslow’s most primal needs. As for your family, well, let’s face it, whether we are referring to our immediate family of spouse and children, or our extended family of parents & siblings, or the “other” family made up of our closest circle of friends, we are social creatures, and without them it’s difficult to find and express the higher purpose of our lives that extends beyond the career! Each brings a primary color to your life, and you need all three to create an array of other possibilities.

Success, then, can’t be defined by just one of them. For some, career becomes bigger than the rest and our company decides whether we are “successful.” But our measurement in life isn’t what our company decides, our best measurement is the shade of life’s color YOU create with your primaries, with the blending of your career, family and health. Just like the color wheel, if you only use blue, you are severely limited in the colors you can create— and as we know, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  Similarly, if you give all of your time and attention to your family with no attempt to earn a living or contribute to the larger world or manage your health, that would be like trying to paint a Rembrandt with only red.  

Before this, my client was painting way too heavily with the color of his career, and his family life was taking the hit. Being “#1” in just one of those primary color segments of his life suddenly had a different meaning. He realized that to achieve #1 in his career, that time and energy would have to come from somewhere else – health and family.  So he asked, what if he were #2, but all the time it would have taken to reach #1 in the company was shifted to his wife and family, experiences he would have to leave behind to commit to being #1 in career?  If you have a wheel with a flat spot, it’s a rough ride, but a wheel well rounded, even if it’s a few PSI under-inflated, rides much more smoothly.  At the end of the year he was the proud achiever of #2 and he ended up with MORE than he could have imagined: happier life, happier wife and, it turns out, invitations to speak throughout the company to share and teach his methods of success–something he never saw coming. 

If you were to assess the primary colors of your life and the blended shade they create, would you be happy with the result? Does that color accurately represent the life you want to live and your definition of success?