How To Create A Balanced Life

How do you measure success? Wealth, Career, Family, Recreation, Health, Spirituality, Personal Time… Life is all about balance. Often when we have success in one aspect of life, another may suffer. Here’s a fun exercise to help bring more balance to your life.

I want to talk about How To Create A Balanced Life.

If you’re like me, and if you’re like a lot of the people that I come across on a day to day basis, you might have a lot of different aspects of life pulling you in a whole bunch of different directions. So what I want to do for today’s video is I want to help you walk through an exercise that I learned from Tony Robbins to help you put all this together and create some balance in your life.

What I’d like you to do is to go grab some paper and something to write with.

1. Write down these seven key areas that all of us have in our life…
2. Your family and friends.
3. Your religion or your spirituality.
4. Your finances or your wealth.
5. Your work and your career.
6. Your recreational, your hobbies, some of the fun stuff.
7. Your health.
8. Personal time.

And those are, generally, the seven key areas that most of us have.  What I’d like you to do next is, next to each one of those seven items give yourself a score ranging from one to ten as to how well you feel that you’re doing in that particular category. So if you feel really good and you really feel like you got it nailed down, really doing a great job, give that a pretty high score, an eight, nine or a ten. But if you think that’s something that really needs to see some improvement, then you’re going to give that a low score, maybe a one or a two or a three. And what this will do is it’ll help give you some visualization or some context to see how you might be doing in some of those different areas, and give yourself some perspective.

One of the things I’ve talked a lot about here on my blog as well journaling.  This is something you might want to make part of your routine to come back and see what you could do to improve. And as you’re going through and looking at these seven different areas, in some of the areas that you may not be doing very well, kinda do a little bit of brainstorming and see, maybe why is that area lacking a little bit and what are some ideas that you could do to help improve that situation?

I know all of us go through periods of our life where we’re going to be a little bit more healthy or a little bit less healthy, we’re going to have times where we’re going to work a little bit more or a lot more, we’ve got projects going on, and life is going to be a balance. We’re going to have things  pulling at us in a bunch of different directions, so, it’s important for us to regroup and look at this and analyze, what is going on in your life.  This is something that could be the source of some stress for some of us, if there are some areas that may be lacking a little bit, that might be something that is causing a little bit of stress.  One definition of stress is that you are here but you think you should be doing something else, so if you’re working a late night or you’re working on a Saturday and you feel like you should be spending that time with your family, it’s going to do a couple things. It’s going to cause some of that stress but it also may hinder your performance at work, you may not get that project done as quickly as you need to because you’re sitting there worried that you should be doing something else. So putting this in perspective is important.

The last thing I want to touch on here is that many of you may be going into retirement, maybe you’re starting to do some serious planning and that’s coming up in a few years, maybe some of you are already in retirement. This is a perfect transitional period of time where you can do some of this planning and do what I like to call designing your life. Really think about what you want your life to look like, and where you want to be spending your time. So going through this exercise, for those of you that may be getting close to retirement, I think is especially important because it’ll really help to give you some perspective. One of the things I like to talk about is that semi-retirement is a way for you to reduce or eliminate some of those stresses from the day to day work where you’ve got deadlines and you’ve got bosses and things pulling you in different directions, you could kinda go into that semi-retirement, help yourself out from a financial standpoint and start to ease into that new role and like I said, designing that life and balance that you want to create. I hope this has been helpful for you.