If you want to achieve true success in life, you must take steps to ensure you maintain a certain level of balance… spiritually, physically, emotionally, socially, mentally and financially. Oh it sounds so easy, but I know that it’s not. For too many years of my life, I struggled to achieve anywhere near a balance between all the things that I wanted and needed to do. Sometimes you felt pulled one way, another time you felt so guilty by doing one thing and not another.
You will know when your life is out of balance:
· If your business is flourishing and your income is soaring but you don’t have time to enjoy it
· If your hobbies and activities are stopping you spending time with your partner and children
· If you are so busy with living that you’re ignoring your health and fitness
· If you have the house, the car, the airplane and the holiday home but no one to enjoy it with.
Have you ever felt like your life was out-of-control? If you have, you probably have a problem with balancing life’s priorities. Balance is the type of thing that sounds good in theory but is hard to apply in “real” life. Don’t worry, you haven’t been alone. Living a balanced life seems to be one of the greatest problems people struggle with.
It may well be the case that up to now you find it difficult to imagine a life that allows for all the things you would like to do, with the constant demands from work and also from our families, making you feel pressurised. Often people put other’s needs ahead of their own, but this proves to be a mistake in the long run. Burnout, depression, and loss of health are often the price we pay for not making balance a priority in our lives.
It’s important to have balance in your life. Instead of living to work, work to live. When your work life and personal life are out of balance, your stress will be running high. Living to work will mean that you miss out on a rewarding personal life.
When we face challenges in our personal life such as caring for an aging or unwell parent or coping with marital or financial problems, concentrating on your job can be difficult. And thus your personal life dominates and holds you back in your career.
Whether the problem is too much focus on work or too little, when your work life and your personal life feel out of balance, stress — and its harmful effects — is the result. Many of you reading this, I’m sure, are nodding in agreement.
Modern society has changed dramatically. This can be illustrated by the fact that once upon a time people employed by companies worked from Monday to Friday, eight or nine hours a day. The boundaries between work and home were fairly clear then, I suppose. But the world has changed and, the boundaries have blurred for many people. I have never had a job where I had a set start time and end time, and only had to be there 8 hours a day. I’m sure not many of you have experienced that either. Is there any getting away from work with mobile phones, lap tops, fax and emails?
It isn’t easy to juggle the demands of career and personal life. Tell us something we don’t know already, I hear you say. For most people, it’s an ongoing challenge to reduce stress and maintain harmony in key areas of their life. Unfortunately, many people up to now have been failing in this key area of life.
More and more, you have too much to do and too little time. Your responsibilities and obligations seem to pile up. There are never enough hours in the day. You may be earning more money and doing better than you have ever done before, but you often feel overwhelmed with the demands of your job and your personal life. You may be working harder today than ever before, yet you are getting less and less satisfaction and enjoyment from what you do. This healthy lifestyle plan gives you the solution to these unavoidable challenges of modern life.
When our lives get too hectic, and all our energies seem to be focused on dealing with problems, it’s all too easy to find ourselves “off balance”, and not paying enough attention to important areas of our lives. At this time our life is out of balance, neglecting certain areas of our lives. Family and health are often the first areas neglected, and this leads to frustration and intense stress.
We often fall into the trap of only having time to deal with urgent tasks, so your non urgent tasks keep getting neglected. You tell yourself there will be time to deal with them later. But later never comes.
Just because something in your life is not urgent, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not important. So often focusing only on urgent tasks means we neglect what’s truly important to us. By the time these things become urgent, it’s often too late to affect them. They needed time and focus well before they became urgent.
For example, take a relationship. If you only invest in your relationships when they become urgent (you are on the brink of divorce or your child has become self destructive) you can’t just “take care of it.” It becomes a dominant issue that could take forever to “fix,” if it can be fixed at all. Focus needs to be centred on issues such as these before they come urgent. This might mean turning off the computer and mobile phone when you get home and really investing time and attention on your loved ones. And that big box, which is constantly growing in size, with an ever increasing number of channels, should, no doubt, be on for a lot less hours than it is already.
Our health must be considered as the most important area of our life. We have to eat well and exercise, because if we don’t we could find ourselves in a life risking situation later. Right now, your health may not be deemed as an urgent area for consideration, but when a health issue becomes urgent, it stops everything else. But if you take the time daily to eat well and exercise NOW, you take care of your body so that you lessen your chances of ill health. Even today, after so many years in the fitness industry, it amazes me how many people join gyms only once they have been diagnosed with illness. It’s time many of you got your lifestyles right and prevent illness in the future, and do something good for yourself before it has become urgent that you do. You have to decide what is important. What do you really want to be and do with your life? What is your mission? What do you want people to say about you 30 or 40 years from now? We will tackle this in the goal section.
At this point, you may be wondering how you could achieve more balance in your life and reap the benefits that come with it. The first step is to determine which areas of your life are out of balance. Now leave your negative thinking behind you at this point. If you believe that you can at last get your life in balance you will. But if you are telling yourself, ‘no way, it can’t be done’, there’s just too much to juggle in your life, you’ll find you won’t.
The wheel of life allows you to determine whether you are focusing too much on particular parts of your life and so neglecting others. It enables you to take a “helicopter view” of your life, so that you can bring things back into balance, considering each area of your life in turn so that you can assess what’s off balance. And so, it helps you identify areas that need more attention.
The Wheel of Life is powerful because it gives you a vivid visual representation of the way your life is currently, compared with the way you’d ideally like it to be. It is called the “Wheel of Life” because each area of your life is mapped on a circle, like the spoke of a wheel.
The first step in figuring out where you want to go is to look at where you already are. The Wheel of Life is designed to give you an overview of just that. You will determine the areas in your life where you are doing very well, as well as some areas where you might want to be putting more of your focus.
The Wheel of Life is a great tool to help you improve your life balance. It helps you quickly and graphically identify the areas in your life to which you want to devote more energy, and helps you understand where you might want to cut back.
I have attached a form that will enable you to do a balance assessment.
What’s Important To You
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oh, I’m definitely off balance because I don’t have a lot of ‘fun and recreation’ going on right now. But, you are absolutely correct about balance. Everything in this universe has to have balance of some sort.