Happy New Year everyone! I'll assume you've made a New Year's resolution and, as we're almost halfway through the month, I'm guessing you've potentially broken it already. Fret not my Resolutioners, as New Years resolutions are now yesterday's news and 2016 is the year to introduce a revolutionary concept - balance.
2016 feels like the perfect time for people to move away from excess and our incessant need to see instant results. From improving health, happiness, careers, projects and the rest, I want to propose we all apply a far more balanced manner in the way in which we approach improving our lives. Sure, instant results are useful, but not if they don't deliver long-term positive change.
As the world has advanced, humankind's appetite has grown, attention spans have dwindled and people's patience has withered. Towards the back-end of last year I was sat with one of our clients when they outlined their new "Better Growth" concept, in relation to their mission to put an end to mindless deforestation - a difficult task given the stakeholders involved, but a noble and extremely important cause.
"Better Growth" is based on the idea that saving our planet doesn't have to come at the expense of business, and of the communities that depend directly on those fragile ecosystems. Instead, if we are smarter about how we manage our resources, we can achieve greater long-term success as a collective, working together to ensure that businesses continue to grow, communities continue to flourish and the environment is not damaged.
It's hardly surprising that, with so many facets of modern life being set-up for excess and instant results, we are often guilty of ignoring the most sustainable approach - instead opting for a quick fix. Take fad diets, the stock market and even politics - all are geared to create quick wins. You only have to look at this week's headlines around junior doctors. Yes, here are a group of people who are paid a good wage, but when you look at the amount of hours they are being asked to work it's easy to see the balance has been lost. After all, how is it sensible that people in charge of the population's health are worked to the bone? Not only will this affect their own health, but it's also more than likely to have a negative influence on the level of care they are able to administer, ultimately affecting our nations health. From the outside looking in, this point alone makes it hard to argue against striving to find more balanced solutions to our problems.
Naturally, we don't live in a perfect world where balance is easy to achieve. However, just because something is difficult to achieve, it does not mean we shouldn't strive to accomplish it and ensure we can all continue to enjoy our lives in slightly more balanced way. So forget about messing up your resolution, it's not important; instead find ways to bring more balance to your life across 12 months, not just for the first few weeks of a year.