One of the concepts that really helps in your craft as a word warrior is balance and balance is something that is talked about in the world. We hear a lot about work life balance and how finding the right work life balance can help us create a happier more fulfilling life.
We also hear about balance in terms of accounting, where we find the balance sheet as a primary financial statement. (Some would say the primary financial statement.) Accounting limits the accounts reported to financial ones. In life, we have additional accounts: health and wellness, social, self-worth, etc.
When I left the world of accounting, I was feeling really out of balance. On my healing journey, I stumbled upon was the concept of self determinism. The idea is we have the ability to self determine the life we want to be living by adjusting the balances of three elements. Different people talk about the accounts using different terms. I refer to those three elements as your passion, your purpose, and your people.
When you have a good balance in each one of those accounts, then you achieve a fourth element, profits. Both financial profits and also life profits where where things turn out well for you. When you’re in balance, you operate in a more natural state, more of a flow state. You get more of the results that you desire.
When you’re out of balance, when you spend too much time, say working, and not enough time with other people, or when you spend too much time meeting others’ needs and not enough time meeting your own needs, you get out of balance. You lose that sense of flow. That sense that things are right with the world.
Finding the appropriate balance can be a little bit challenging.
In the world of design, balance done well creates a visually appealing image that meets its purpose. When an image is out of balance, it can be ugly and ineffective.
The same is true in our work as word warriors, when we are trying to find the right words in order to express our ideas, and to make a bigger difference in the world. It helps to get clear on the principles of the craft, but it also helps for us to get clear on how to play with those principles.
We don’t all want to just go out and create the same content. We don’t want to just go out there and say the same thing as everybody else. That would get pretty boring pretty quickly.
We each have a unique mission. We each have a unique story. How we play with that story how we play with the elements of that story – the characters, the plot, the ideas, the events – impact how well that story is delivered.
When we use the elements of story, appropriately, in the right balance, the story is more attractive ad effective. A character-driven story will use the story elements in different amounts than a plot-driven story.
There is the science of story. There is also the art of story. The right balance needs to be created between the science and the art of story. Part of that balance is understanding the principles. Another part of the balance is discovering how we like to play with those elements.
To create a richer story, one that is more fulfilling and more engaging, resulting in greater profits, both for ourselves and for our audience, we need to find an environment in which we can play with those elements and try them out.
It’s not just a matter of grabbing the elements off of a shelf, pulling them out of the box, and laying them out on the page or the stage. In order for us to get good at our craft, in order for us to get good at playing with elements of story, in order to find the right balance, we need to practice.
It’s not unlike my yoga practice, where I practice things like the Warrior Three pose. That pose has proven a real challenge for me. Eventually I gained some success with the pose but only after months and months and months of practice. When I first tried to do it, I fell over every time I did it.
Then I finally began to find the right balance, when I realized that it wasn’t just physical. It was also mental, emotional, and spiritual. If I was out of balance internally, I would wobble when I tried to hold the warrior three pose. When I was in balance internally and externally, I could hold the Warrior Three pose.
I have to keep at it, though. I have to practice.
If I had just known what the pose looks like, and read, or heard, how to do it, I would have never found the right balance. I had to be out there doing it. I had to be engaged in the practice.
The same is true for writing and for speaking. In order to get good at writing and speaking, we’ve got to write and speak.
My invitation to you is to look at the environment that you are creating for yourself. How are you finding the time and the place and the people that support you in creating the balance that you want to have in your craft as a word warrior?