JUGHEADS
Youth Juggling Company, LLC
5905 Concord Avenue
Edina, MN 55424
jugheads@comcast.net
or 952.926.0896

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November 2007

“Balance: The Key to Margin”

I'm a Type A personality, immersing in my passions with goal-oriented fervor. I've enjoyed varying degrees of success in youth work, performing, athletics, and academics. I also sleep in most days, enjoy solitude, hire handymen, and seek advice. My personality is prone to commitment, loyalty, excellence...and sometimes saying "yes" too quickly. It's often a strain to say "no" to a social event, new responsibility, or requested consultation. Such a personality makes me a candidate for burn-out, and I experienced just that in the late '90's-taking about five years to fully recover.

As an antidote to future burn-out, and as a prescription for a healthy lifestyle, I just finished my first full reading of Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Dr. Richard Swenson. While I had been vaguely aware of his expertise, his chapter on Balance was especially insightful. Dr. Swenson lists 10 areas in life needing balance: career, education, family, emotions, church, nutrition, service, exercise, rest, and community. Swenson writes on p. 187, "If you wish to achieve excellence but also to have life balance, beware...[the other areas] are luxuries that may compete with stellar performance in a single area." High excellence in one area may produce "negative excellence" in another area. The key is balance. Type A (and obsessive) achievers like me thrive on new or recurring challenges, but we have to diligently keep the other areas in balance. I love celebrating others' and my own achievements, but I love even more the T-I-M-E to reflect, to be spontaneous, to read, to journal, to invest in others.

Margin is life-giving, marginlessness is deadly. Many people (even youth!) in our hurried and over-stimulated culture could use a prescription of more margin-for life.