While most people I speak with believe that balancing their time will balance their life. Balancing your life is about stopping, gathering all the areas of life together, and prioritizing your life around your values.
Personal Growth
Personal growth allows us to have a balanced life. Having a personal growth plan helps you fit all the things listed below into your life. It helps you improve your relationships. Develop a financial strategy and grow in the career of your choice.
A personal growth plan will stretch you and challenge the way you think. We don’t want to wake up in twenty years wishing we had done the things we loved. Personal growth, along with every other item on this list, requires you to set goals. If you are not willing to put what you want on paper, then you do not really want it.
Relationships
You act like the top five people you spend time with. Look at your friends and watch their mannerisms, then watch yourself and see if you make the same motions as them. I fit in so well in my circles, I almost disappear. If you do not have good relationships, then find some. Go to places of worship, go to seminars where people who think like you are going to be. If you are in a remote place, download audio books or attend online seminars from people who live how you want to and learn from them. Good positive relationships give you energy and focus, and good friends encourage you. Do you spend time with energy givers or energy drainers?
Financial
Many of us have been told that having success in life meant having money. I think many of us who have shot for the brass ring have come to see that money isn’t everything. We want more than money; we want to be happy and our families are becoming what we long for. Money is a tool when used wisely can give us opportunities to live full lives. It can also become a god always calling to us but never allowing us to grasp it completely.
The more we give to help others who are truly in need, the more we get back. Not necessarily in monetary increase, but in peace of mind and the knowledge we’re not just focusing on ourselves.
Career
While work is not an end in its self, it is a means to allow us to do a lot of other things. Like helping others.
The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.
James Michener
If what you are doing what makes you happy it may be time for a change. I am not saying to jump blindly, but you may need to start looking. If money is the only thing keeping you at a job is it really worth it? If you hate to go to work every day and are living to retire, why not start exploring your hobbies and see if you can make a living doing something you love.
Spirituality
Spirituality is the most overlooked aspect of living a balanced life. All of life is tied to your spiritual life. We are spiritual beings. We can’t put the spiritual p[art of our lives in a box and pretend it’s not there. We have God inside us and still yet we act as if he is nowhere to be found. Between our busy lives and a world that runs at a thousand miles an hour, we race around because FOMO has not only gripped us, but we have let it grip our children as well. Spirituality is about slowing down and making time for God in our lives.
Making a morning routine, no matter how short, will allow us to begin to let God in a little. Prayer, a five-minute meditation, and some spiritual reading will only take 15 minutes. This can be the beginning of a relationship that grows over time. A relationship that you never knew you could have so good.
Legacy
You have an obligation to add value to people that cross your path. To pass on what you have learned to the people who are following you. Whether it is your family and friends, partners, coworkers, or through volunteering, you must pass on the knowledge you have. You can’t take anything in this world with you, but you can leave behind more that you make. Pass the torch. Find someone to invest in.
Next Steps
- Look each one over and rate yourself on how you are doing.
- Take time over the next week and think through these issues. Do you have long-term goals for these areas? Do you need to make changes? How do those changes look?
- You only get one shot at it, so make it count.