Another Balancing Act

In your view, what is the ideal ratio of time spent looking inward vs. outward? Like me, I'm sure you've known people who find introspecting or even being alone very difficult and others who appear lost or off balance when forced to face the outside world and engage with others.

For me, this balancing act has been a lifelong struggle. As an extrovert, I derive loads of energy from my interactions with others. At the same time, the Socrates dictum "Know thyself" drives me to look inward incessantly. I've trained myself to pay a lot of attention to the outside world for creative fodder. Yet I've also learned repeatedly how important it is to the creative process to be able to readily access feelings so those feelings are often as important to me as the outside world.

When my full time job was leadership development someone once asked what I considered the most important leadership trait. My answer? Self-awareness. That response probably reveals that whenever my balance is off, it's likely I'm erring on the side of too much inward and not enough outward. How about you?