conversations With
marcus Buckingham continued
family, my friends, everything is perfectly balanced”—
your first reaction would be to say, “nobody move.”
We think of balance as a synonym for health, but it’s
not. It’s a synonym for stasis. And we don’t want stasis:
we want to move. Anything healthy in nature is not in
balance. That’s a bad metaphor. If you take a longer
view, you realize that anything healthy in nature—
whether animal, vegetable or mineral—is in movement.
And healthy moving is to move in such a way that you
can keep doing it. If you apply that to life, you ask, “How
do I move through life in such a way that I can draw
strength from it, rather than be depleted by it?”
When you do that, you realize immediately that
“work” and “life” are fake categories, because work is a
part of life. It’s not like you have work over there, and it’s
bad, and life over here is good, and you balance it. Work
is part of life. Friends are part of life. Community, family
and hobbies are parts of life. The challenge is to know
yourself well enough to know how to draw strength from
all aspects of life. Which aspects strengthen you, and
which deplete you? What do you love and loathe? We
shouldn’t strike a balance: we should intentionally
imbalance our lives. We should tip our lives, little by
little, toward those things we love.
getting on the floor and playing with the Tonka toys with
your son—because that’s just not you—but you do love
going for walks and playing with him outside, tilt your
life toward that!
Own the fact that you’re weird. You may think you’re
normal because you’re with yourself all the time. But
you’re not normal: you’re weird. And you’ve got to honor
that.
To put data behind it, the Mayo Clinic has research
that shows that when doctors spend less than 20 percent
of their time on activities they love, their risk of burnout
increases one percentage point with each point below 20
percent. What’s cool is that if you go above 20 percent,
you actually don’t see a commensurate decrease in
burnout. You don’t need a job where you love 50 percent
of the things you do. You just need 20 percent. Or, to say
it another way, a little bit of love goes a long way.
One analogy is that the fabric of your life is made up
of different threads, and some of those threads are made
of different material. They’re stronger, they’re invigor-
ating. You don’t need a quilt made entirely of this
thread—you just need to weave this thread throughout
your quilt deliberately. The best spa professionals will
know that too, whether as workers themselves or
through their clients.
P: So, in essence, do what you love?
B: Interestingly, this doesn’t mean do what you love—
that’s far too generic. It means find love in what you do.
Find which aspects, activities, situations, contexts, people
somehow invigorate you. If you love starting new projects
but not finishing them, tip your life toward that. If you
like challenge and confrontation and argument, angle
your life toward that. If you’re a mother who doesn’t like
P: How does maximizing the strengths of
one’s employees differ between a large spa
or a small spa?
B: The first lie in the book is that people care which
company they work for. And we hear a lot about
“company culture,” and we like that story. It just makes
for a good narrative. If company culture mattered, when
(CONtINUED ON PAgE 54)
“We want to move…. If you take a longer
view, you realize that anything healthy in
nature—whether animal, vegetable or
mineral—is in movement.”
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PULSE
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SEPtEmbEr 2019