Balanced Horizon Canvas, creating balance in your personal & professional life
Matthew Porter • 10 January 2023
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I have been successfully coaching founders and directors for the last few years, using some of the best practice tools and approaches out there, and found that I needed a new approach to bring together some of the existing thinking in a novel, visual and effective way - so I created the Balanced Horizon Canvas.
When people aren’t getting the results they want in their professional or business lives they often turn to coaching to help them take more effective action toward their goals.
What do people want when they pay to be coached? They want to change something, achieve something different, feel different, work in a different way and ultimately to be authentically fulfilled.
This tool helps you create lasting, meaningful changes in your work by drawing on the personal resources and strengths you need to achieve your professional goals. It guides you through a holistic process of assessing your goals so you can be more effective in achieving the changes you want.
Great for:
· Leaders and managers of businesses and startups.
· Anyone wanting to have work that has more purpose and impact.
· Anyone stuck or plateaued in their professional growth.
When embarking upon business and professional coaching, clients and coaches alike often focus solely on the business strategies, the tactics and the commitment needed to achieve their professional goals. They don’t usually reflect on their wider, personal life goals and the personal resources and strengths they need to draw on in order to be successful in their professional life.
If you desire deep change and real personal development, it is important for you to bring your whole self to the conversation, to give voice and consideration to both your personal and professional aspirations. You need to be curious about the relationship between the two parts of your life.
This new tool was inspired by a model I developed working with clients using the Wheel of Life and the Vision Orbit strategic planning tools. By using this new model you’ll create what I call a 2-year Balanced Horizon Canvas, which visually plots 12 themes that cover your personal and professional lives, applying a measure to each, and then projecting each of them out along a 2-year timeline.
Balanced Horizon Canvas
You will be working with a strategic 2-year horizon. The inner circle is for this current year, the middle circle year is +1, the outer circle year +2.
This tool will focus on the “what” and the “who” – what you want to get done and who you need to be to achieve your goals. There are 12 themes on your canvas, covering 6 personal themes and 6 professional themes.
If you would like to read more about how it works click through to download the PDF of the Balanced Horizon Canvas chapter from the new Activate Your Life II book.
Case Study
I was working with a client on his strategic 2-year plan and we started to explore his strengths. We took a dive into a strengths focused character survey (available from VIA) and looked at the top five strengths that were currently driving his life. We then explored the top five strengths the client felt would be of greatest help to him while he was pursuing his goals. They were not the same top five strengths.
Through a deeper conversation we realized that the strengths the client was holding onto were those he applied in his personal life, and that to achieve his professional goals he would need to call upon a different set of strengths. By looking at both his personal and professional goals through this exercise the client was able to achieve a higher level of self-awareness in his life following this session.
Tips for using this tool with a client
You can start anywhere on the model and encourage your client to follow their intuition. You can substitute any of the life themes where the client feels there is something missing or important.
The model takes time to build, and you may find some of the themes take a whole session to develop. This model, once complete, will act as a lasting touchstone and reference point for the client and form the basis of many coaching conversations to follow.
What next?
If you would like to explore how coaching could help you achieve balance in your life this year then direct message me or visit www.matthewportercoaching.com
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