Do you often feel like your torn in a million different directions at once?
Do you often feel that the PRESSURE on you is just unbearable and that you never really get any time to just ‘breathe’ and be yourself?
You’re not alone.
When I’m working with my coaching clients one of the biggest problems that I often see people struggling with is a lack of BALANCE in their lives.
Exactly what they’re trying to balance is contextual, of course, but it usually revolves around a combination of health, wealth, and relationships:
With the health stuff, people are often struggling to find the time to be able to do that workout that they keep telling themselves they’ll commit to because they have to go and dedicated time to their work stuff (so they can chase that wealth) or because they have to give time to their partners and families (and build on those relationships).
With the wealth stuff, people are often too busy with their relationships to focus as much as they’d like to on their careers and to get to whatever the ‘next level’ happens to be for them and bringing in that extra dough.
With the relationship stuff, they’re usually distracted by work or simply just have too many demands placed on them so they don’t get to spend the time they’d like to with the people they most care about.
It’s kind of ironic in a way:
For nearly all of us, the three most important areas of our lives that will allow us to live in the most authentic way possible are HEALTH, WEALTH, and RELATIONSHIPS – if we can get the balance right there then things will usually feel pretty REAL and we’ll feel that things are balance or in order in the way that they most need to be.
The problem, of course, is that we lose this life balance because – for whatever reason (usually some underlying emotional thing) – we end up saying “YES” to one of these areas way more than any of the others and it just ends up skewing or distorting the big picture.
For example:
Maybe we only say “YES” to the ‘health’ stuff more than anything else because of the following reasons:
-We have SHAME about the way we look and so we have to keep running away from it and think those bicep curls (etc.) will save us.
-We have FEAR about death and we think that working out can keep the inevitable at bay (hint: it can’t).
-We have some kind of GUILT and we think that working out like a maniac will distract us from our feelings (instead of working through them and – usually – realising that GUILT IS A USELESS EMOTION).
Maybe we only (or predominantly) say “YES” to the wealth stuff because of similar underlying motivations:
-We have underlying SHAME that makes us feel inferior and we think that money will mask this and kill the shame that drives us (hint: it won’t).
-We have an underlying FEAR that’s caused us to have a scarcity mindset and we think that we need to collect money in order to handle inability to handle uncertainty.
-We have a sense of GUILT and think that money will make us feel like a ‘better’ person or be able to buy affection and validation from others to assuage the guilt (hint: you can’t buy that kind of thing).
Maybe we only (or predominantly) say “YES” to the relationship stuff because of similar underlying drives:
-We have a sense of SHAME that makes us believe we can’t do better than a dysfunctional relationship and so we kowtow to a domineering partner at the expense of our own goals.
-We have a FEAR of being alone and so we try to put our relationship on a pedestal at the expense of the other areas in our lives.
-We have a sense of GUILT because we have our own goals and so we try to deny them (even though they’re REAL) and just sit around watching Netflix and secretly feeling like we’re wasting our lives (then feel even more guilty).
The point here is that the only reason we start to lose balance in our lives in the first place is because we start to say “YES” and give our time, energy, and attention to things that don’t really deserve it because of our underlying emotional ‘stuff’ (and by extension our relationship with ourselves).
As we discuss in the 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose, if we have UNREAL motivations because of an UNREAL relationship with ourselves, then we end up putting UNREAL things into our lives and getting UNREAL back out of it.
All of that emotional ‘stuff’ given in the examples above just causes us to have an inauthentic (or UNREAL) relationship with ourselves that causes us to make CHOICES that are a reflection of that inauthenticity.
As a natural consequence of that the results of those choices are also inauthentic or unreal.
What’s the solution then?
Well, if your life feels out of balance it’s a safe assumption that you’ve been making UNREAL CHOICES for some reason.
To restore balance, you need to get yourself back on the path of saying “YES” to the REAL stuff and saying “NO” to the unreal stuff.
The best way that I’ve found to do that (in my own life and with my coaching clients) is to start realising that your TIME, ENERGY, and ATTENTION are the most important things that you have and that you have a CHOICE about what you do with them.
If you’re not AWARE of what’s important to you and you don’t ACCCEPT it, then you’ll just slip into the cycle of being driven by your underlying emotional ‘stuff’ instead of using that stuff as fuel to get where you want to be.
A great starting point is to figure out what your REAL VALUES and INTENTIONS for your life are and then to start using your time, energy, and attention to say “YES” to these things and “NO” to anything that goes against them.
The ‘problem’, of course, is that you probably don’t know what your real values and intentions are – if you did, then you wouldn’t be reading an article like this trying to find balance in your life.
If you want to get started then go to the homepage of this site and start watching the Intro video for the 7-Day Personality Transplant.
This will get you on that path so you can start raising AWARENESS of who you really are and what you’re all about, ACCEPTING this deeply, and then ACTING on it.
You might not change your life overnight but you will start to shift into making REAL CHOICES that are based on the things you truly value and the goals that are actually important to you.
This will allow you to bring those three very ‘human’ areas back into balance: health, wealth, and relationships.
It all begins by saying “YES” to the real stuff and “NO” to the unreal.
A lack of balance just means you’ve got your priorities wrong because you haven’t yet realised the power of your own choices.
