How to balance the 9 pillars of life

We always come back to success! There are a thousand and one ways to define it, to represent it, to schematize it. If you’ve read the about page of my blog you’re aware that the concept of Keys To Success is based on the balanced nourishment of every aspect of our lives.

From a personal point of view, it is a question of balancing three elements of your constitution: your mind, your body and your soul. Hence the three main sections of the blog: Nourish your mind, Nourish your body and Nourish your soul.

From a more general point of view, taking into account our environment, for me, success come from the daily balance of 5 differents areas which :
- relationships: family, friends, love, etc.
- health / well-being: mental health, physical health (which includes diet, sport, physical care) and emotional health
- money: its daily management, knowing how to get it, how to make it grow, how to circulate it.
- spirituality or personal development: the learning of our emotional wounds, their healing, the management of our ego, etc.
- work: flourish at work, live from your passion, find your ikigai.

According to Cécile Neuville, psychologist in Montpellier and director of the ZenPro positive psychology training center, it is necessary to find a balance not between 5 but between 9 pillars of life. These 9 pillars are to be maintained and managed together to ensure their balance. Without this balance, we risk mental overload, even burnout or depression.

Today I present these 9 pillars to you. You will necessarily see links with the 5 domains or the 3 entities mentioned above because everything is a question of personal interpretation. It’s up to you to choose the one that speaks to you the most, or even create your own at the crossroads of each one!

The 9 pillars

According to Cécile Neuville, it is possible to group daily tasks by pillars of screws, 9 in number.

1. Love / sentimental life: it is the set of tasks related to the life of a couple or a single person, and which relate to communication, emotions, sexuality, shared times, projects.
2. Family life: These are the tasks related to family life, exchanges, sharing, going out, activities, common values, even even the in-laws and the larger family.
3. Social life: these are all activities related to relationships with others, friends, acquaintances, new meetings, but above all the frequency, quantity, quality, sincerity and authenticity of these relationships
4. Professional life: these are activities linked to the trade, profession, career, salary, skills, organization, planning, but also professional relations, recognition, career changes and to ambition.
5. Personal pleasures: these are events linked to leisure, personal activities, relaxation, passions. These are all the tasks that one does for oneself for simple personal pleasure.
6. Healthy living: all actions carried out for food, meals, sleep, health or any other activity related to the needs of the body
7. Daily management: these are the daily administrative tasks such as budget, finance, house, household, shopping, etc. management.
8. Personal development: these are activities to build self-confidence, self-esteem, and everything related to personal development
9. Actions for the world: all ecological gestures and commitment to the world such as volunteering, but also gestures of donation, sharing, altruism and generosity.

Why should we keep them in balance?

To illustrate the balance of the 9 pillars of life, I will take a very concrete example: the case of a plate juggler on vertical sticks. For everything to work well, the juggler must watch the 9 plates spinning on the sticks.

However, there is evidence that the brain is not multitasking. [And yes ! the old belief that makes us think that women are multitasking … that’s wrong! And that’s why they suffer more often than men from burnout and mental overload. But hush … this is a preview of a future article on mental load. I’m not revealing more. Closed parenthesis]

Let’s go back to our juggler. Why is the balance of the 9 plates simultaneously so important? Well because if one of the plates fell, it could affect the balance of the other plates. Indeed, the attention and energy provided to make up for the imbalance of a plate, comes to reduce the attention paid to the other 8. There is therefore a risk that a second plate is out of balance but escapes the attention of the juggler when he is about to rebalance the first!

Our 9 pillars of life work the same way. If a pillar is weakened or even non-existent, it will inevitably impact the other pillars at one time or another. And the energy used to catch up with an area of ​​life in imbalance risks being to the detriment of another area that worked well …

We see it frequently for example in couples. Suppose that the “professional life” pillar of one of the two partners is vacillating because he is not fulfilled in his work. This will likely impact the pillar “personal development” and “personal pleasures” and may also unbalance the “love life” of the couple. It is the same when you are sick or in poor health. Difficult to move the other pillars of life in the right direction. There are many other examples, I think you can find others with your life experiences.

“The energy provided to rebalance one pillar is at the expense of maintaining the balance of another pillar”

In the end, the fact of grouping all our daily tasks and activities into pillars of life allows us to see more clearly on the progress of our projects and our ambitions. This forces us to take a look at each of these aspects, not to leave any of them to progress them all at the same time. The key to success is finding the right balance in everything.

How to keep them in balance?

The balance of the 9 pillars is not easy! Let’s take the example of our plate juggler again. He must watch the 9 plates at the same time. In reality it does not do it “at the same time” but one after the other. The main thing is to do it at regular intervals and in a precise order to be sure to check them all at the same rate. Otherwise, if he forgets to check a plate, he risks losing speed and failing to fall. And here we come back to the problem stated above: the others will soon follow. It is all a question of rotation in the checking.

More concretely, to achieve a good balance in the different areas of your life, you will need to check regularly each area in order to identify the improvements to be made in each of them. This will help you know where you stand in each of these 9 areas. It also helps to maintain a calm and positive life balance because you know where you are and in which direction you want to go. Then you can take new actions to keep moving forward in your life and reach your goals.

For this there are several tools for time management, priority management and organization to be more efficient. I will talk about this in a future article soon.

But maybe you already know about the field … Do you use tools like trackers to gauge different aspects of your life? If yes, tell me all in comments I would be happy to answer you!

See you soon.

Lélia