Think Of Success In Terms Other Than Work

People suffering burnout are frequently counseled to get more “balance” in their lives.

But balance isn’t necessarily the answer, according to a new book, “Success With Soul” (Dorian Welles, $14.95, 1997), by Doris Pozzi and Stephen Williams. The element that’s missing is not balance, but meaning.

Pozzi and Williams are management consultants in Australia, with U.S. consulting headquarters in Seattle.

“We started looking at this issue of success and redefining what success means in the ‘90s,” Pozzi said.

Many people have achieved recognition and financial rewards but still somehow feel dissatisfied. They complain of symptoms such as “vague depression, disillusionment, meaninglessness and lack of fulfillment,” she said.

To fix that, they try working harder on themselves - their fitness, their health, their family lives.

“People think work doesn’t provide me with meaning, so I’ll consider it separate and try to balance that against other things,” she said. “But balance doesn’t work if it means partitioning (your life) into little compartments.”

People keep chipping away at all their outer problems and tend to ignore their inner world, the world of the soul, she said. She and Williams define soul as “that part of our non-physical being that is the home of real personal meaning.”

“The tragedy is that today we are often only aware of the soul because of its absence in our lives,” she said. “We associate the soul with that hollow feeling we experience. It is something we yearn for, something we miss.”

Rather than work harder at time management, Pozzi and Williams suggest that the secret to more meaningful success is to assess your values and use them to discover your purpose in life.

And discovering purpose often starts with re-evaluating success, she said.

Most people define success in terms of individual achievement, she said. Success means winning over someone else. It means being in competition with others. Ultimately, it means someone else is losing.

But a lot of people have started questioning that mainstream definition of success. “People are asking, ‘Is this all there is?”’ she said.

For example, many managers in their mid-40s and mid-50s who were laid off in corporate restructurings have been forced to redefine success in less material terms.

In many cases, as they set up their own consulting practices or pursued alternative career paths, they found something else - a deeper satisfaction in their work, a new purpose, she said. “They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t lost their jobs.”

It doesn’t always take drastic life events to forge new views, however. It just takes a little redefinition of success.

For Pozzi, success isn’t about individual achievement, but about achieving meaningful relationships. “We view success as achieving quality relationships on three levels - with ourselves, with people around us, and with our environment,” she said.

Finding a purpose and building relationships won’t necessarily lead to a balanced life.

“Think about when you are most satisfied with your life,” she said. “Is it when your life is most balanced, or when you are creating something and your life is less balanced?”

Instead of dividing your time in a relentless pursuit of the perfectly balanced life, she and Williams recommend trying to find ways to integrate work with other facets of your life.

Pozzi, a psychologist, and Williams, a management consultant, have done that. Each formerly had jobs consuming 80 hours a week and were finding it difficult to maintain a relationship. “So over five years, we worked toward a different solution,” she said. Today, they share a consulting practice and work out of a home base in Australia.

“Once you figure out what’s meaningful to you, you won’t feel such a need to balance so much,” she said.

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