CORPORATE SUFI: Why choices create your destiny

We have interviewed busy people to learn what concerns them as they take on the responsibilities of home and career.

Here are some of the laments we’ve heard:

- It’s impossible to be a successful executive and be a loving and contributing family member. We must choose one or the other.

- Most of us are caught in an activity trap. We’re too busy to give our children the nurturing they need, resulting in insecurity that leads to emotional issues later in their lives. They resort to quick-fix solutions such as alcohol and drugs to avoid pain. This just perpetuates the problem.

- Executives keep busy at work to avoid the realities at home.

- People live fearful lives, having lost all means of real communication with the people close to them.

- We are making a living but are ruining our lives. We continue to do work we don’t like because we have no choice.

- People are beginning to live secret lives and to avoid authenticity.

- As we struggle with large mortgages and other debts, we find it more advisable to conform than to take risks, especially when we’re getting older.

- Business organizations have no souls.

- Business has lost its meaning; it’s just profit-making for the sake of profit-making.

- We are being squeezed like lemons, and when the juice is gone we’re discarded and replaced by fresh lemons.

- There is no loyalty. We’re just commodities, to be dispensed with when newer, more vital, more productive commodities come along.

- People are in denial about their lack of balance. They avoid facing up to reality because reality is too painful.

- We can either focus on one thing and excel, or strive for balance and forget about excellence.

Each of these dreary situations arises from a life out of balance. Executives who find that the higher they climb on the corporate ladder the harder it is to maintain balance in their personal lives.

Most people lead lives that are out of balance. That’s not surprising. We live in a frantic and stressful age in which change is the norm and stability is an endangered commodity. Though balance is needed to negotiate the bewildering situations that confront us, our equilibrium is constantly being challenged by the swirl of events. It’s as if were living constantly in the eye of a whirlwind.

The age of communication only complicates matters. Hundreds of daily e-mails, cell phone calls, pager messages, faxes, and seemingly interminable meetings interrupt our concentration.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can choose to lead a balanced life. It isn’t your circumstances that bring imbalance to your life; it’s the choices you make in response to them. “Circumstances do not make you; they reveal you,” wrote author James Allen in his book, “As a Man Thinketh.” Your choices create your destiny, and you are their master. You can choose to live a life in balance, or you can reel through this existence constantly off-balance.