Life, Inc.

As the plane hummed its way to Philadelphia, Leigh Morgan pulled out the diagram of her six "life businesses." The names in the circles, ranging from Spiritual Practice Inc. to Scorpio Adventures, symbolize what she's committed to - personally, professionally, and financially.

On her way to a meeting, she decided it was time to do her annual ROI - the analysis of each business's "return on investment."

Ms. Morgan, a global project leader for the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in Research Triangle Park, N.C., drew the diagram four years ago, after a workshop on applying business tools to life planning.

Ever since, she says, "I've been very intentional about linking my financial resources to what really brings me happiness. One of the things I learned is that you really don't need a lot of money to feed your soul."

It may sound odd to feed the soul by plotting out one's deepest aspirations in a strategy matrix or a spreadsheet. But as Morgan found, business tools can be useful for identifying what you love - and making sure your time, money, and energy follow.

Her teachers were John Eckblad and David Kiel, organizational consultants in North Carolina who have been refining this "Life Business" metaphor for the past 20 years.

They take specific methods businesses use - to clarify goals and budget their resources, for instance - and then translate them into a personal context. After conducting hundreds of workshops with people inside and outside the corporate world, they have now detailed their 13-step plan in a book: "If Your Life Were a Busi- ness, Would You Invest in It?" (McGraw-Hill).

Although the authors aren't financial planners, their work overlaps with a relatively new movement in the field, says Keith Fevurly, executive director of the Certificate in Financial Planning Program at Kaplan College in Denver. "It revolves around ... looking at money not just for money's sake, but asking, 'What psychological value and importance do I put on money? What can it do for me as it relates to my life?' "

Every conference of financial planners includes some discussion of this holistic view, Mr. Fevurly says, but "it's still a minority [perhaps 10 to 20 percent] who are trying to incorporate life planning into their practice."

Like other life-planning advocates, Drs. Eckblad and Kiel encourage people to look beyond conventional wisdom that sometimes scares them into overestimating how much they'll need for retirement.

"We counsel investing now in your skills and your relationships and your health, to such a point that you can live those parts of your life fully when you finally get there. It's not without regard for savings, but it's putting an emphasis on looking for reward now, as a corporation would," Eckblad says.

When Morgan took the Life Business workshop four years ago, she was skeptical about doing an ROI on her personal life, she says, because at its worst, the phrase can mean putting profits above all else.

But the point was to measure her "returns" according to her own values. "Does it really jazz me where I put my money?" she asked herself. "Do I get a good return on my emotional investment by spending money and time to go on vacation, or would I rather spend it cultivating relationships in my neighborhood association?"

The businesses Morgan identified focus on friends and family, spiritual growth, progressing at work, and being active in her community. And she added another priority to her list when feedback during the three-day seminar helped her see how much she craved adventure travel. "I realized that it can be expensive," she says, "but spending my money on that is exactly what I want to do because it really brings me a lot of joy; it fits with my personality."

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