If work life balance is getting you down and you feel guilty that you're shortchanging family, fun, and your own health, you're not alone. Learn how to balance life, reduce stress, and feel fulfilled while balancing work and family.
Work Life Balance
Work/life balance is not just a matter of the number of hours you spend at work or with family, though that is important. A balanced life feels right even when you're very busy. The trick to life balance is to honor your fundamental components of a well balanced life.
How to Balance Life
1. Balanced Life Survey: Life will feel balanced when you are relatively satisfied with all the important aspects of your life. To see a visual representation of your current balance or lack of it, get your free Balanced Life Worksheet.
2. Values and Life Balance: No matter how busy you are, life feels in balance and you'll feel less stress when you honor your values. To identify your most crucial values, make a list of what is important to your life. Not what's nice, but what must be in your life for you to be happy.
Examples might be love, fascinating work, honesty, or friends. When you finish your list go back over it and cut it in half. Now cut your list in half again. Repeat until you have five or six words or phrases remaining. These are your critical values. Life will feel balanced when what you do revolves around and includes these values.
3. Passion Brings Balance: What do you love to do? What activities so capture your attention and energy that you lose track of time while doing them? List these activities and divide it into groups based on the level of passion you feel while involved in them.
For example, it may be satisfying to organize your work space and shred old files, but it may be joyous to sing in the choir. Look for common threads among the activities. Perhaps creativity is common to many, or adventure, or learning.When you strive to include your passions in every day, you'll have fewer days feeling overwhelmed and out of balance.
4. Strengths and Balancing Life: Everyone has special strengths and talents. Your combination of special skills, interests, and inherent abilities make you unique. You have many competencies, but just a few unique strengths.When you utilize those few top strengths your life will feel balanced.
An excellent tool from a leading researcher in the positive psychology field is the VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire. Take this questionnaire to identify your unique signature strengths.
5. Say No and Retain Life Balance: Many people find it hard to say no, so they end up taking on tasks that interfere with the important aspects of their lives and then they feel resentful and guilty. Learn to say no politely and firmly, simply indicating "I'm so sorry, I can't take that on just now and give it the attention and energy it deserves. Thank you for thinking of me." Then recommend someone else who might be qualified to do the task.
How to Balance Life
Learn to cultivate these five fundamentals of life balance, devoting attention to them each day.
Related Article: What You Need for a Balanced Life
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