Creating Balance in Life

The Four Arenas

There are a few areas of life which I use to assess my stress levels:

1. Work and Business

2. Health and Fitness

3. Relationships

4. Life at home

I think these are the 4 major arenas of life. Most of us spend a good chunk of our day at work. When we're not at work, we're either with our friends/family/significant other. When we're not doing that we're taking care of things at home and taking care of our mental and physical health through some type of activity. Over the last two or three months, I've slowly created a really good balance between these four areas. I want to share with you what I think has helped me create this balance.

It seems to be very difficult to create balance between these 4 areas. I changed my wording from 'finding' balance to 'creating' balance. I like this wording because we are in charge of our lives - for the most part. A lot of things are out of our control but as humans, we are very skilled at dealing with the unexpected. I think most of us live 'out of balance' for the majority of the time. I don't think it's necessarily our fault because life is really good at shitting on us. But I do believe that working to create a balance is very doable.

Sometimes, things are going really well with our health but our relationship with our significant other might be off. Or things might be going really well with our work but we catch ourselves neglecting our own health. I think this is fairly common because we're all just trying to do our best to create that balance that will make us feel good about ourselves.

Creating Balance

I think the #1 thing that has helped me is figuring out how much time, resources and energy that I want to realistically put into each arena. I sat down and mapped out my weekly schedule and hours that I was allotting into each area. I realized my work hours were climbing rapidly while my own workout time was almost non-existent. I was also starting to neglect my responsibilities with my family and home life. So I set out an appropriate amount of hours that I'd spend with clients and I made my own training sessions very minimalistic so that I could complete it in 45 minutes or less (I used to spend 1.5 hours in the gym). By making these changes and being aware of what adding more hours into my work week would do to the other areas of life, I am able to maintain a good balance between my work, family, girlfriend and my own training. For me, these are the most important things in my life.

My suggestion for you is to figure out what areas of your life are most important to you. Then sit down, audit and map out how you are using your time. From here, you'll be able to see whether there is a severe imbalance between certain areas of your life. Now all you need to do is figure out what changes need to be made in order for you to be more content and happy with the way you are living your life.

Make no mistake, I have not figured it all out. I think I've simply figured it out for the time being. Life changes very quickly - much quicker than any of us can anticipate. Maybe I will end up adding 5 more hours of coaching every week. Maybe my family needs me for a few more hours on certain days. With that being said, I think striving to create balance is something that we all do - whether it is a conscious or unconscious pursuit. I think we will be successful in creating balance for certain periods of time, then something happens and we'll need to figure it out all over again. Such is life.