Anushka's blog: The Best Advice I Ever Got: Don’t Put All Your (Easter) Eggs In One Basket

Well, the actual advice was to always keep four distinct pots on the boil in life. 

These four pots are:

1. Your friends and family
2. Your career*
3. An academic pursuit that isn’t your career (music, reading, writing etc)
4. A sporting/exercise pursuit

This advice was given to me at a stress management/work-life balance seminar I attended. Of the myriad talks I have been to in my career, this has been the singular most useful piece of advice that I adhere to today.

The broad idea is that you do not have all your eggs in one basket or you hedge your bets – pick your cliché of choice.

You make a conscious effort to nurture each of these four pots or areas in your life by having distinct goals in each one.

Friends and family form just one pot together and a goal might be to diarise time with them.  Your diary is the biggest clue to what is important in your life. I schedule friends and family’s birthdays and catch-ups.  This includes having 1:1 time with my kids each week, even just for 20 minutes, which we dedicate to doing something they enjoy together or even just a walk.  The key is that we build a communication habit that will hopefully continue after they have left home.

The career pot is easy as most of us have SMART targets at work and Year-Ends to navigate but other goals may be to find a new job, get promoted or redirect your career.

The sporting goal may be to achieve a certain sport PB or, one year, mine was to qualify as an aerobics instructor in a favourite exercise class I had long attended.

The academic goal could be reading a target number of books, learning a new skill or, for me, currently, I write this blog 4-5 times a year.

At various times in everyone’s lives, one of these pots will invariably boil dry and it will be because you have invested time in the other pots, that these other pots will sustain you and make you resilient when that happens.

When I found challenges in my career, the confidence I had gained from qualifying as an instructor in something I found very tricky (simultaneous mirror-image choreography and public speaking!) reminded me that I can do things way outside my comfort zone and the qualification itself served as another potential source of income. Similarly, I find that my writing and running hobbies cathartically diffuse career or familial hardships or frustrations. Harnessing anger from time to time can fuel a PB and consolidating your thoughts in writing has a transmutative power to problem solve.

It’s self-explanatory that a strong friendship group and/or family support nurtured by intentional investment of time with friends and family will likely mean that you have moral support when things do not go to plan.

So, keep those four pots on the boil and you too should cook up a recipe for resilience.

*Could be raising your kids/caring at certain times in your life.

Anushka is a full time lawyer, parent of two teenagers and running and writing hobbyist.