WHAT DOES LIFE BALANCE MEAN AND HOW CAN WE ACHIEVE IT?
Life balance is all about striking adequate balance in various elements of your life, ensuring your growth as an individual and securing your mental peace and wellbeing. A well-balanced person is in a better position to focus their attention and energy on attaining their goals, taking productive steps and moving forward in a well-planned way.
It means that all areas of our lives have the adequate level of satisfaction that you want. Wellbeing areas include: Professional, Emotional, Financial, Health & Wellness, Spiritual, Intellectual, Relationships and Social wellbeing. Often, people focus on one more than the other. Wellbeing elements in life that require the most balancing can be divided into internal and external. Internal being the Emotional, Health & wellness, Intellectual, Spiritual and the external elements being the Professional, Relationships. Financial, and Social wellbeing. An optimum balance is certainly required between the Internal and External aspects of wellbeing to keep our Life balanced.
In today’s fast paced life, it gets very hard for many to reach the so wanted “Life Balance”. When our lives are out of balance, we feel stressed. We start feeling overwhelmed, over worked, dissatisfaction creeps in, low self-esteem, physical and mental burnouts, etc. We may be doing things so routinely that we lose track of our purpose, goals, happiness and fail to understand and acknowledge which area of our lives needs a reboot.
For example, we may be so caught up in our professional life that we have neglected other areas life our health/self-care, relationships. Another example: maybe as a parent we are so caught up with the daily routine with work, kids, schooling etc. it may be preventing us from having a balance in the areas of personal growth, fun and recreation. Other people sometimes may be concentrating only on the external elements while neglecting the internal elements or vice versa. While some others may be fairly balanced but might want to balance out some specific elements.
Finding balance comes from giving time and energy to the things that build you up and give you a meaningful life. And likewise, eliminating the things that bring you down and stress you out.
It is important to first introspect – look at your life, your state of mind, your feelings. Evaluate each area of your life that you need to improve.
Based on these, you can fix your goals. the action plan could be divided into short and long goals. I think working with short term goals with a larger picture in mind will work far better in terms of commitment and encouragement. Plan your work and work your plans, this will go a long way to boost our confidence and manage your stress.
Life balance is a feeling of satisfaction but also is about the basic human needs. Each person’s life balance wheel is unique to their values, beliefs, needs, aspirations. The main point to note is that “balance” is vital for our wellbeing.
Life balance!! Is it achievable? It depends on the priorities and choices we make in life and it is up to us to plan for it to happen. Just like accomplishing any goal in life, it takes time and effort to overcome your habitual patterns and create new ones.
