In the book "Masters of Our Own Destiny: How to Reconcile Professional, Family and Personal Life," authors Nuria Chinchilla and Maruja Moragas maintain that the first step towards obtaining a balance is "our own willingness to improve the reality in which we live and become masters of our own destiny."
Reconciling With Oneself
Changing the reality that surrounds us requires us to modify things within ourselves. The book declares that knowing ourselves helps us to better understand reality and deepen our identity, giving us a security which we can later transmit to others. Understanding oneself is fundamental to identify the mission we have in life and to prioritize the roles we undertake. This is what the authors call "reconciling with ourselves."
Conciliation with oneself comprises all elements of personality, bearing in mind that the perfect person does not exist. Three elements influence personality: genetics, rationality and emotions. These last two dimensions are dynamic, which means they tend to create imbalances. How can these imbalances be corrected? There are several ways: through understanding oneself, through compensation mechanisms and with the help of a coach.
Understanding oneself includes recognizing the conscious and unconscious motives that lead us to make our decisions. Chinchilla and Moragas group the motives into three main categories:
- Extrinsic: those that come from the social setting (money, fame, etc.)
- Intrinsic: those which are linked to the action itself and whose origin is internal (learning, the challenge or pleasure obtained from the action, etc.)
- Transcendental: those whose origin is also within the person, but whose addressee is another, where the actions have positive repercussions on them
These three types of motives can simultaneously influence any decision, yet they have a different weight depending on each person and his or her particular motive structure. The authors write, "Understanding the motives that drive our decisions is essential in order to determine whether we are the masters of our own life or whether our environment has taken control. The more we manage to shift the weight of the motives towards the transcendental, the closer we are to being masters of ourselves."
Reconciling With Family
Today, long working hours are one of the reasons why individuals tend to focus on the nuclear family, relegating extended family without considering the consequences. Society needs leaders who understand themselves well and who know how to move with some degree of fluidity. For Chinchilla and Moragas, the family is an institution halfway between the individual and society. "It's the perfect environment in which to achieve balanced progress and to develop personal and professional abilities, essential for joining the workforce and society later."
The book considers the different roles a person has within the family: husband/wife, father/mother, son/daughter, grandparents, and the roles taken on by in-laws (son/daughter in-law, brother/sister in-law, etc.). "It's good to prioritize the roles following a hierarchy to avoid feeling overwhelmed by simultaneous demands from the whole family, and in order to build resistance against this possibility," write Chinchilla and Moragas. Following a role hierarchy leads to a family balance which avoids confusion, unease, disunity and conscience problems.
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