Balance is THE Key to Excellence and Quality of Life
Recently we wrote about Terry Orlick’s Wheel of Excellence, which is a model of mental excellence. Terry Orlick has produced a wealth of interesting research exploring the nature of excellence in a range of fields including business, medicine, the arts and sport. Terry Orlick and Nadia Towaij have conducted some interesting research into the nature of quality of life and how it is possible to achieve excellence in both your work and personal life.
They interviewed 12 employees from high-tech sectors and identified that balance was key to achieving good quality of life and therefore a range of factors were considered as being important including family and relationships; being physically active and having a sense of accomplishment at work.
In addition the following factors were identified as being pre-requisites for achieving excellence in job performance:
- Being organized
- Having good interpersonal skills
- Seeking challenges
- Living a balanced lifestyle
- Being viewed as being different by management.
- Being committed.
How many of these are present in your working life?
However, Orlick and Towaij were particularly interested in how excellence in job performance and quality of life can be achieved and their analysis revealed the following themes:
- Making a commitment to a balanced lifestyle
- Having supportive relationships in work and at home
- Participating in physical activity
- Being highly organized and efficient.
The research is qualitative and therefore highly readable and illustrated with numerous quotes from the participants. Reading through Orlick and Towaij’s findings certainly causes you to reflect upon your own life-work balance and challenges some of the more traditional views of how excellence at work can be achieved. More importantly it critically considers how excellence and quality can be achieved in both areas of life.
Here is the article in full …
http://www.zoneofexcellence.ca./free/excellence/14_Quality_of_Life.pdf
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Tags: balance, balanced lifestyle, Challenge, commitment, excellence, interpersonal skills, Nadia Towaij, physical activity, Quality of Life, supportive relationships, Terry Orlick, wheel of excellence
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