What does the Balance Sheet of your life reflect as your assets and liabilities?
An organization’s balance sheet tells us a few key things: what assets do they have at their disposal, what liabilities or obligations do they have to others, and ideally, what equity has developed and become theirs over time with success.
But the Stoic philosophers, Seneca especially, regularly asked that we review the balance sheet of our lives.
What assets are we accumulating? How do they reflect our priorities? How many of them are things that we may love but can’t take with us? How many of them are related to the people and relationships that we claim are most important?
Equally, what liabilities have we taken on to collect those assets? What work obligations, financial obligations, social obligations, rules that we must now follow, and so on are we obliged to continue so that our assets don’t decrease?
Do we even want those liabilities? When we measure them against the assets they earn for us, are they worth it?
A favorite question I discovered earlier this year is: What game are you playing that you never consciously chose to enter?
It’s a great question for reviewing the balance sheets of our lives.
The next great question is: if I don’t like what I see, what assets can I “sell” to reduce my liabilities and reset the balance positively in my favor?
Want these blog posts delivered straight to your inbox each week? Click here to subscribe.
Follow us on social media at the links below.
