Finding a happy mix for that balanced life

Someone asked me the other day if my life was balanced. I tend to think of this as a trick question, because if you answer in the affirmative, you're not believed, and if you answer in the negative, you are invariably pitied. So I used the common avoidance tactic of answering the question with a question: 'What is a balanced life?'

The answer for most of us post-industrialists surely is a happy mix of focus on family, career and personal finances - enough risk to gain some returns, but not too much to keep you up at night.

The more pertinent question, therefore, is how do we achieve this so-called balanced life? While my life might be as lopsided as the next person's, I have learned a thing or two about what it takes to 'have it all' from interviewing some of the most successful people in business.

Focus is key

I once asked Jan Leschly, the ex-chief executive of SmithKline Beecham, now GlaxoSmithKline, what helped him succeed. A former world-ranked professional tennis player, Mr Leschly said that all the attributes he needed to succeed as chief executive officer he learned while battling his opponent on the court. The most important was focus.

'Tennis puts you in a situation where you have to be totally focused and concentrate for five, 10 seconds,' he said. 'Then you have to be totally relaxed for 20 seconds.' On, off, on, off. He credited this ability to home in on one task at a time as the reason why, despite his incredibly hectic life, he managed to remain a fairly laid-back kind of guy.

'When I'm at a meeting and I'm sitting there, I'm totally focused ... after I get out of the meeting, I'm totally relaxed. I'm a totally different person.'

Cathie Black, the president of Hearst Magazines, said: 'When I'm with my children, you zero in on that time. It is feeling that when you are there, you are really there instead of half your brain somewhere else.'

It is easy to see why this ability to focus is crucial to living a balanced life. If you give 70 per cent to everything you do, nothing will turn out as you would have liked. But if you give 100 per cent to each thing, you end up with far better results and you don't end up carrying it to the next task.

Set small goals

In financial planning, it's often easy to discuss the major investment goals, but when it comes time to implementing a strategy, all becomes lost. It is a known fact that we human beings love grand, visionary plans yet aren't good at carrying them through. How to get something done, then? A major part is keeping an eye on the big prize while facing the reality of all the drudge work it takes to get there.

A best-selling novelist once told me that while all her fellow writers were envious of her success, they forgot about the stack of rejection letters from publishers in her office that stood waist-high. She also noted something about wallpapering her bathroom with them, which I hope was just a joke.

Focusing on the small things will inevitably get you the big results.

Be selfish

One of the ironies of living a balanced life is that sometimes you start to feel unbalanced. The more you achieve, the less you feel like yourself. In between e-mailing your boss, taking the children to school, and working on that big project, people tend to forget what made them tick years ago.

If you ask high achievers, the one thing they will say is that they take time to think about themselves: what they want and how they will get there. Many of them will do it while exercising because that's one time in a day when they can be alone. But others just simply sit for a few minutes each day to collect their thoughts.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul once said his best writing often happened while he was doing the dishes or taking a bath - in other words, being by himself.

Betty Liu is the Hong Kong correspondent for CNBC and author of Age Smart: Discovering the Fountain of Youth at Midlife and Beyond. E-mail her at [email protected]