I have yet to meet a person that has not struggled with their life balance between work/career/business, their health, relationships and personal development.
There just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day and most of us are taught (through school, our parents or role models) that to achieve success you must make sacrifices…meaning that to succeed in one area of our lives we must give up something in another area of our life.
So, when we are young, it’s all about work and relationships…middle age brings a new-found realization that we need to think more about our health and as we age even further personal development comes into play as we search for added meaning, focus, energy, and stress management techniques to make sense of where we are in our lives.
HOW DO YOU FIND LIFE BALANCE WHEN THE LOAD IS HEAVY
I’ve also struggled to maintain balance in my life between building my businesses, putting my family first, healthy lifestyle and personal development.
When I was young I was taught to put all of my energy into my career…in doing just that my health suffered, something I’ve written as the basis for the teaching in my book Attracting Greatness.
In my thirties, I was able to regain control of my health and renewed my focus on my relationships…but still floundered in terms of career and couldn’t seem to remain consistently balanced around those things I wanted most in my life.
Can you relate?
I achieved a fairly major breakthrough after studying many successful people – what it all came down to for me are the following…
1. You cannot fit everything you WANT into your days, so wishing, wanting, dreaming and spreading yourself too thin is a recipe for failure
2. You tend to always get what you MUST have, so I came up with a list of MUSTS in each area of my life and made the main focus of my day my MUSTS
3. I make sure each MUST is backed by strong emotional feelings (negative associated with failing and positive associated with realization) and make sure I focus on those each day
From this point on I’ve gone from 20/80 (doing what I most value to scattered action) to the other way around – spending most of my time on what I value the most
It really works…you immediately start to gain more confidence, energy, motivation and look forward to making progress in each area as you jump out of bed each day (seriously!)
I used to dread taking time to exercise and because it was not a consistent activity I found it painful, always seeming to fight my own body’s rhythm…just when I would get into shape, something would inevitably interrupt me for a month and I had to start back at the beginning again.
Now, each day is simple..there are set activities I look forward to, that I would not miss no matter what and for which motivation is not an issue. For me, this was a 180-degree change in my life, keeping my list of MUSTS has been my life balance breakthrough.
HOW ABOUT YOU…?
Do you have balance in your life? Are you sacrificing one part of your life for another? Leave a comment, we would like to hear from you.
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