A balanced life – can we achieve our goals and enjoy life at the same time?
We often have the feeling that we can either achieve our goals or enjoy life. Having both in our lives, a.k.a. having a balanced life is difficult. We feel like we can’t be a hundred percent fulfilled in both departments.
If you’re like most people, you probably think that only other people can have them both, who are super extraordinary, and you feel that you don’t fall into the mix. Today, the demands of work, career, education, family, and homeownership seem to take priority over enjoyment. We schedule relaxation time as a once-a-month outing or even an annual vacation. However, even those pleasures seem to be filled with work.
Are you waiting for retirement to enjoy your life? Many people feel as though they are waiting for life to happen rather than creating the life they want.
Creating a balanced life
If you think about being balanced, you might imagine a seesaw or an old fashioned balance in the position of being directly balanced in the middle. When it goes up or down it’s out of balance. It needs an effort to keep it in the middle position and it only stays in the there when the weights on the two sides are perfectly matched.
Life works similarly. There are ups and there are most certainly downs. Sometimes you might feel as though you just want to jump off the seesaw and lay on the ground for a little while to just gain your equilibrium back.
What does it mean to be balanced in difficult life situations?
When you’re in balance, you maintain your equilibrium while life’s ups and downs come to visit. Of course, you go through the various emotions as circumstances, both good and not so good, present themselves in your life.
However, when your life is balanced you’ll choose how long you stay in the down position. Of course, realistically, you can’t always stay up on the seesaw of life, but you can choose what your action steps are going to be while you’re down.
Being in balance means intentionally, no matter how hard it is, choosing how you’ll show up under any given circumstance.
How to create a balanced life?
Here are a few tips on how to create balance in your life:
Feel your emotions and move quickly through them
It’s perfectly fine to become emotional when the roller coaster of life gets too fast and too furious. Feel what you need to feel but move quickly on to the next step.
Meditation to help you feel your feelings
I’ve created a meditation to help you sit with your feelings. Originally it’s created to help feeling your feelings when you have the urge to overeat but it also works when life gets a bit overwhelming and you need help to process your emotions.
Listen to this meditation often and you’ll learn how to process your feelings.
After a while, feeling your feelings becomes automatic and you won’t need to listen to this meditation anymore.
Taking action
The next step after feeling your emotions is taking action. If something doesn’t feel right, chances are it isn’t right. To create more time in your life for fulfilling goals and enjoying your life your next important step is action.
Choose an action step to change your situation
Don’t just sit around and dwell on what happened, but take the appropriate time to figure out what happens next. If you’ve lost a job, fire up your resume. If your home needs repair, start asking family and friends for referrals on contractors. The faster you barrel through the downs of life, the sooner you can get back up. Put those feet on the ground and bounce that seesaw of life up again.
Don’t retell the same stories repeatedly
We waste a lot of energy on talking about what happened, how unfair it was, and what a nuisance it was. You could use this energy for better purposes. You can create an answer to the problem instead of just reiterating it and you can spend that much more time enjoying your life, setting and achieving goals. If you find yourself faced with a problem, take the energy needed to create some sort of answer rather than dwell only on the issue at hand.
Decide how much energy you want to spend on each task
We all have limited energy to get through the day’s events. Therefore, it’s important to decide how much energy we want to spend on each area of life. Look at your life, what is going well? Do you have an amazingly successful career or education? If so, then you might be spending all of your time and energy in that one area and the rest of your life is completely out of balance from family to personal relationships.
Sometimes, the unexpected can throw you off. How do you hit the reset button when life throws you a curve and knocks you off balance? Sometimes truthfully, no matter how hard we try not to dwell on something, we fall back into patterns of thinking and talking about something.
What to do when you can’t get the needle off the record and you are stuck?
Call a friend and get an accountability partner
Ask someone you know to reroute you when you are stuck. Ask them not to let you dwell on what happened or what you cannot control and help you return to present moment status.
Sometimes all it takes is someone to remind you that, in this present moment, you are fine and all is well. You might not have the answers to what will happen in the future, but anything is possible.
Make a choice and make some changes
If you really want to achieve your goals and enjoy life to the fullest, you must choose where your energy will go. Make a choice that seems best at the moment and follow through with it.
If it doesn’t work out, don’t hold yourself to task because, in human nature, there is always a choice. You may not like all the choices, but staying stuck won’t ever work. Make a choice with the information you have in front of you and take action steps toward that choice.
You will find yourself balanced until a more optimal choice presents itself. At least you are not standing still and you are taking action steps toward a solution as compared to constantly focusing on or talking about the problem.
A planner can make planning out your action steps much easier and more enjoyable too. I´ve created a beatiful planner for you with goal setting and produtivity tips, monthly and weekly planner pages and many more. Check it out here:
Productivity Planner For Women
It is okay to be out of balance
Sometimes there’s a big project at work or a special event at home. You are out of balance because that event or project takes priority. A special event, like a wedding, for example, takes a lot of time, but it will eventually be over. A home repair or work project will come to completion, as well.
An annual meeting or a conference at work will soon be nothing but a distant memory. Sometimes it’s your season to work like a dog to get the job done. It’s okay to be out of balance for a while on occasion. Remember, however, it only takes a few minutes every day to get closer toward a goal. One small action step is better than no action at all.
It’s perfectly fine to be out of balance due to a special meeting or function or life event. You can still create a daily habit of taking one small actionable step toward a personal goal, dream, or desire.
Find the balance between getting things done for others and for yourself
Being goal oriented is good, up to a point. Some people are obsessed with getting things done. People who obsess about getting things done put everybody and everything before their own hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Then, suddenly, they look around and their life is moving faster as time goes on. They’ve reached a certain age and all of their hopes, dreams, and aspirations are nowhere in sight.
Don’t be addicted to getting things done for everyone and everything. Put yourself on the schedule. Put your dreams on your to-do list. Be addicted to getting things done for you, and more importantly for your dreams.
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