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How to Balance Work and Life

Guest post by: Guy Farmer

Article Overview: Do you need more balance in your life? Is your work life taking over everything in sight? We can restore the balance between work and life and live happier lives by doing some basic things. Learn practical ways to relax more and recharge your batteries.

How to Balance Work and Life

I was talking with a very high-energy and successful business person recently who told me she had a very full schedule but felt overwhelmed by the amount of activity in her life. She said that she felt empty and depleted at the end of the day and wondered why she didn’t feel happier. Upon further examination she confided that he had been juggling a great deal of different tasks and hadn't really taken any meaningful time to think about what really would bring her happiness and balance.

We become so engrossed or swept up in our rapid-paced lives that we forget that we can enjoy things more thoroughly if we pause occasionally to relax, recharge and reflect. There are some basic ideas you can apply to your life that will help you strike a balance between your career and your personal life.

The first is to relax. Relaxing is beneficial to your body because is helps your system recharge. Although we can endure frantic activity for long periods it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is good for our physiology. We weren’t designed to go one hundred miles per hour for every minute of the day. We aren’t build to process ten thousand facts per hour day after day after day. Relaxing means shutting down your motors for a period of time and not doing anything. This break should be long enough that you feel calmer and more rested. You can do this by taking a walk (not vigorous exercise), meditating or breathing deeply. The idea is to interrupt the frantic action going on in your life long enough to reset your system from its stress auto pilot mode. Practice relaxing for fifteen minutes at first and moving up to a half-hour or more. Commit to incorporating this type of activity every day.

The next idea that will bring balance to your life it to recharge. Recharging is the planning phase of creating balance. In this phase you can think about what you want to do to bring your life into balance. If you work too much you can ponder what you can do to incorporate more personal time into your life. If you have no work life you can dial in a little bit of work. The idea is to be somewhere in the middle between all work and all play. You don’t have to be perfectly 50/50 all the time but it is beneficial to spend the majority of time in the middle. When you spend time in the middle you will feel calmer and more relaxed because you won’t be living a life of extremes. The discomfort we feel when we are out of balance is due to the fact that we are missing an important part of our existence. If we have too much of any one thing it naturally takes over and puts everything else out of balance. To restore balance we just need to take the time to recharge our lives by incorporating what’s missing. If you work too much, relax a little. If you are always napping, do a few more tasks. Don’t go nuts, the idea is just to balance things out.

Our final idea is to reflect. This concept is directed at forming an understanding of what really matters in life. When we reflect consciously on what we are doing we can create balance in our lives. Decide for yourself where you really need to focus in your life. Will it really matter if you put in another ten hours at the office or do your kids need a little more attention? Will you regret in later years that you didn’t spend more time with your spouse instead of looking over reports? You have the ability to prioritize these issues and determine for yourself which require more attention. You get to decide what is really going to make your life fuller and better based on your beliefs and values. Reflecting on what’s really important to you will give you and idea where you need to spend more time.

Take some time in your day to not do anything. Look at a sunset, sit by a stream, go walking in the city with no particular goal. Life becomes more enjoyable when we take time to regain our balance.

Balance helps us maintain a generally positive course. It is the middle road we take that grounds us. We will always have highs and lows but, if we nurture the middle, we will always have it to seek refuge in.

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Article Tags: business coach, efficiency, finding balance, how to be happy, leadership skills, life skills, relaxation techniques, work life balance



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