Hey Everyone!!
Boy have I missed you guys. Life has been crazy and moving at full speed and I am working at catching up. It has been a fun drive through life though. I have been trying to find balance with home, work, and business. Although, I may sum my responsibilities up in three words lets be clear it ain’t as easy as three words. With home comes 3 kids, a husband, a cat, and my spiritual life. With business comes combining enjoying what I’m doing with trying to make money, which is a very thin line. Work is the easiest of them for me because I get to work from home, but what makes it hard is that most of the time I don’t enjoy what I do. So as I have been pondering balance I was wondering if balance is what I am really looking for or is it happiness, there is a very thin line between balance and happiness…
First let’s understand the definition of balance. Balance is an even distribution of weight to maintain stability. When I think of balance I always think of the ancient scales. Back in ancient times when you went to the market they used scales to measure your dry goods and they would put something they knew was an approximate amount of weight in one of the bowls and then the goods being purchased in the other bowl. So one bowl could have been 4 rocks, but the other bowl could have been a large bag of rice. Now to the physical eye they aren’t equal amounts but they weighed the same because the scales were balanced.
Personally, I have had a messed up view of what balance was, see I always thought that it meant you gave equal time to each item on your list. WRONG! Balance is when you give time to each of the items on your list, but making sure your give most of your time to the more important items. See that’s where you come in, only YOU can decide what’s the most important item on the list that day. I said “that day” because life plays a little dirty. We don’t know what twist or turns life has in store that day and we may have to take time from something else to accommodate those changes. As a mom, my children may get sick, lose their key,or bus pass, so I may have to cut out time to handle those issues. But if we want to gain and maintain happiness then we need to make our goals very clear to ourselves.
Some of us want to mediate, exercise, meal plan, eat right, take the kids to school, go to work, work on a our hobby or business, cook dinner, feed the kids , put the kids to bed, work on a our hobby or business again, take shower, spend time with the hubby, go to sleep just to do it all over again. There is only 24hrs in a day and we know off the top if you work outside the home that you will have to give at least 8hrs to that, which leaves us 16hrs and then we really should sleep at least 8 hrs, leaving us with 8 hrs to do everything else. Knowing that we want to handle all of these items on our lists then we need to PLAN. Planning is very important in balance, which results in happiness. However you plan, whether it be on a paper calendar or electronic calendar, you must write down your tasks for the day. In the beginner though, you should plan monthly. By planning monthly, you can include your family. See planning leads to delegating, that’s why planning should include your family/inner circle.
Before you include or delegate to your family, you need to make sure that you have your goals in place. With your goals in place you will get better support from your inner circle. When those who are close to you understand why you are choosing to do these things they will want to support you. Once you have support from your inner circle then you will begin to gain balance leading to happiness. Stress will be less when everyone else is on board.
Quick recap:
- Develop your goals
- State your goals to your inner circle/family
- PLAN
- Delegate
- Balance the “day” (What is more important that “day”)
- Be happy
So for me its not happiness vs. balance, but rather balance and happiness. These two should work hand and hand not against each other. Remember that “each day” has its own trials, so be FLEXIBLE! Balance is NOT giving each item on your list the same amount of time or dedication, but realizing what deserves your utmost attention. If you like to meditate 20 minutes every morning, but you have a meeting at work or your kids school, how about meditating for 5 minutes in the morning to get you focused and then meditate 15 minutes before bed. It’s ALL about what most important to you that “day”!
How your scales lookin???
Compassionately Creative 