How Many Legs Does Your Chair Have?

When I was young, we would visit my grandmother in a small rural town. Occasionally I would help gather eggs in the morning from the chicken coop, but I was too young to help with milking the cow. I did watch my older brother milk the cow once or twice. My recollection is that he would use a one-legged stool to sit on while milking the cow.

If you want to have stability, a one-legged stool should not be your first choice of a seating arrangement. Even in that scenario, my brothers two legs formed the necessary second and third legs to stabilize himself while extracting the warm fresh milk.

For the chair of your life, how many legs do you sit on? How many should you sit on?

Jim Rohn taught about five major pieces to the life puzzle. One could interpret this to mean that his chair had five legs. He outlined them as, Philosophy, Attitude, Activity, Results and Lifestyle.

While you technically have stability with three legs, four provides a more solid foundation. If you were going to name the four legs of stability for your life, what would you determine to be the four items needed for most stability?

Here are four legs I suggest will give you not only a stable life, but a solid foundation for personal success and life-long fulfillment.

Leg #1: Financial Stability and Security

If a person is starving, they don’t care about anything besides getting food. For most of us today that equates to having adequate financial resources to meet our basic needs. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, physiological needs (air, water, food, sleep, clothing, shelter ) are the most basic needs listed, and precede all other needs.

Financial stability and security can provide almost all of those needs, so long as we have sufficient financial resources. Gratefully, we don’t need money for air, but pretty much everything else in this category requires financial resources. Getting yourself to a point of financial stability, and ultimately security should therefore be a primary focus of our efforts for a stable life. For additional principles and ideas to strengthen this first leg in your life, see this and other previous articles.

Leg #2: Health and Wellness

For whatever reason, it seems that there are many of my friends, neighbors and coworkers who are struggling with significant health challenges. There are currently eleven different people that I know of who are working through cancer treatments and other serious illnesses. Two others have passed away in the last month. In some cases, there may be little we can do to prevent that, but in most cases there is a lot we can do.

Here are the foundational principles for good health:

Achieve and maintain your ideal body weight.

There are so many health issues associated with being overweight that it is almost akin to smoking in terms of dumb things you can do to try and die early. There are a lot of reasons that being overweight and obesity are at epidemic proportions, but most everyone that struggles with that is guilty of doing it to themselves. No one force feeds anyone else against their will.

It is true that others can be a significant influence over us, particularly in the areas of nutrition and eating. However, you don’t gain weight by the actions of others. You gain weight by your own actions (or inaction). What and how much you put in your mouth and whether you choose to be physically active or sedentary are within the power of all non-dependent adults.

As part of achieving and maintaining your ideal body weight, regular physical exercise should be part of your ongoing activities each week.

For more recommendations on achieving your ideal body weight, see this previous and other articles.

2. Get adequate rest each day

Tony Schwartz, award winning author and CEO of The Energy Project has spoken much about the value and need of sleep. He refers to sleep as a competitive advantage.

In my past employment we would be copied on the staff meeting notes of the senior leaders of our organization. On more than one occasion a line was included about not falling asleep in meetings, indicating the challenge this can be for employees and leaders in the corporate world.

For the corporate “athlete” trying to accomplish as much as possible in every 24 hour period, sleep is often sacrificed in attempts to get more done. As counter intuitive as it seems, you will get more done if you let your body get the 7 1/2 - 8 hours of sleep it needs each night. Even a short nap in the middle of the day will have a tremendous rejuvenating effect for the remainder of the day.

The American Sleep Association has published some disturbing statistics related to sleep disorders. Among them are:

50–70 million US adults have a sleep disorder. (~18 % of the US population)

4.7% reported falling asleep while driving at least once in the preceding month.

Drowsy driving causes 1,550 fatalities and 40,000 nonfatal injuries annually in the US

Dr. Mehmet Oz lists the following benefits, among many others, for getting a good night’s sleep

Sleep helps boost your immune system

Sleep wards off anxiety and depression

Sleep is linked to longevity

Leg #3: Set & Achieve Your Big Goals

With the stability of personal finances and health in place, the next leg on my chair of life’s stability is setting and achieving goals.

In other words, rather than trying from the outside looking in to determine what the purpose of our life is, we need to look from the inside out. Discovering or determining your purpose in life, and then fulfilling that purpose is key to your personal fulfillment. This can best be achieved by having a system for setting, tracking and achieving goals.

I have used Darren Hardy’s “Living Your Best Year Ever” system of goal tracking and achievement for going on four years now. I heartily recommend it as a means of consistently working towards your long term goals and breaking them down into short term, including weekly and daily activities.

Leg #4: Continuous Personal Development

Someone has said, “Nothing fails, like success.” One byproduct of success can be complacency. Unfortunately, I’ve been guilty of this myself, and I see it in many other adults. We get to a level of comfort, and we stop progressing. We stop growing. When we have a job with sufficient income to pay our bills, we tend to fill our time with busy work, or more often now, time wasters, and coast through the rest of our lives.

Unfortunately this is a waste of your greatest natural resource: you.

If the last time you’ve read a book was when you were in school, then you need to start reading again. If the only books you read are for entertainment, then you need to add something to keep developing your mind and your skills. This is probably not the case for those of you reading this post, but for much of the population it is true.

If you listen to news or talk radio when you commute, replace it with educational or instructional CDs or audio programs. Learn a new skill. Learn a second (or third) language. Start a side business and grow it into a significant source of income.

Step out of your comfort zone socially. Introduce yourself to people whom you admire and who will be a positive influence on your trajectory to a higher plane.

Find a mentor to help you with a personal skill and engage them in a regular periodic coaching session.

Any of these suggestions, and many others will help you to continue to grow personally.

Next time you sit on a four-legged chair, think about what those legs represent to you. The four legs outlined above have proven to me to be a solid foundation not only for stability but for continuing growth and development.

Take this ten question quiz to see how you’re doing overall on your personal development.