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Do you know what the Spring Equinox is?
Don't feel bad if you don't, I didn't either.
The word equinox comes from the Latin words aequi, meaning “equal” and nox, meaning “night” and is defined as the “equality of night and day.” This is because the equinox occurs at the specific moment the sun is exactly above the equator on the two days a year when the 24 hour day is perfectly divided into light and darkness everywhere around the world.
Throughout history both the Spring Equinox and the Autumnal Equinox have held significant roles in the human imagination. The Spring Equinox has represented more than just the first day of spring – it was the symbol for rebirth, fertility, and new beginnings.
The equinox has also been credited with a lot of religious and beliefs including rituals at the Mayan temple of Chichen Itza where adherents believed the giant god-serpent descended from heaven. Rituals were also performed at the Druid's Stonehenge monument, but no written records remain to tell us what their beliefs or rites were.
The Spring Equinox didn't just inspire and influence the ancients. Modern superstitions include the disproven belief that the equinox disrupts satellite communication and that it's the day of the year when you can effortlessly balance an egg on its end.
This last idea probably comes from combining two of the Spring Equinox's attributes:
1) That the day represents balance, and
2) That the day heralds the coming of spring and fertility, perfectly represented by an egg.
But while you certainly can try to balance an egg with equal effect on any day of the year, the Spring Equinox can be a good inspiration to focus on balance – in your life and in your business.
One of the things our reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic has done has been to force us to combine our work lives and our personal lives more completely. Whether sheltering-in-place, home schooling your children, holding meetings on Zoom, or figuring out other ways to try to continue our lives without exposing us to infectious pathogens, our hours at home have increased substantially. At the same time, our visits to our offices or other workplaces have diminished.
In the old days, before CORONA and also before the Internet, it was easy to keep your personal and professional lives separate. But today, technology, social media, work habits, and our reaction to the pandemic all conspire to force our lives together.
Plenty of people have written about the problems with this new mishmash but it seems to me that there's a lot of crying over spilled milk or closing the barn door after the horse has run out. Instead of trying so hard to keep our different lives separate, the real opportunity for all of us is to look at the benefits of combining our lives while we improve both of them at the same time.
In my Strategic Roundtables I've found that more and more of the people I work with are discovering that while their clients or customers come to them first for the product or service they provide, they ultimately stay because of the person they're doing business with. In other words, it's the balance of the personal and the professional that adds to customer acquisition, customer satisfaction, and customer retention.
What our members discover is that they're each missing some semblance of “balance.” And they go on to discover what it is they're missing through their trusted relationships and collaboration. They discover that they are no longer alone. They rediscover their confidence by gaining clarity of purpose and by understanding who and where they are. And they discover that they've perhaps never been involved in something so purposeful and fulfilling!Celebrating the Spring Equinox can be the perfect motivation for mining the value that exists in balancing your personal and professional lives. If you'd like to learn more about how to do this, simply click HERE.