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The Balancing Act Part 2

Written by: John Toomey

Article Overview: Finding Balance between Work, Family, Friends, Self and Community in a Deadline Driven World is a tough task. How is it that some seem to find it easy whilst others seem to find it impossible. If it was as easy as a 1, 2, 3 step process, no-one would have the problem. Y Read on...ou have read about the nature of life and struggle in The Balancing Act Part 1. Now, what is your next step? Read on...

The Balancing Act Part 2

What is Life all about?
For centuries, people have used their religion as a strong guiding force in their lives. Throughout the last 40 years of the 20th century, people have been abandoning religion in droves, seeking to break out from what was perceived to be patriarchal dominance and a lack of personal freedom and expression of free will.

It is probably fair to say the many religions lost their way too. Instead of being an inspiring institution that encouraged people to explore their limitations and to live a virtuous life, many religions became controlling, using fear and retribution as motivation to keep people in line.

A nurturing and positively motivated religious practice gave people a “code” to live by. Whilst many religions used liberal doses of fear to motivate their followers to ‘remain on the straight and narrow path’, a study of the pure essences of the teachings of the great masters like Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammad, Krishna and others reveals something much deeper and yet something quite simple.

Life is a Journey, a quest of discovery. It is a journey of learning about the self and seeking to live out ones potential and to maximize the learning this life provides. Along the path we face a variety of challenges, some small and others quite large. These challenges are perhaps designed to provide us the impetus for growth as people. Without growth, we wither and die.

Challenges create struggle. Struggle builds strength and stimulates growth.

Certainly with challenges and hardship, we learn about ourselves. We learn our strengths and weaknesses and we learn about our capacity to endure. It is interesting to note that we all start out at school at the age of five or six, on a fairly level playing field. We all do the same educational lessons daily for years. Yet some of us turn out to be doctors and others concreters. Some become amazing athletes and others talented artists. Some have many difficulties in relationships while others find a soul mate for life and become loving parents. We all respond to life’s challenges differently. We all learn different lessons and we all progress at different rates with varying degrees of resistance and/or enthusiasm.

As these challenges face us, the ego will often scream and shout about how unfair it all is. It may take on a victim mentality. The true self will see the challenge for what it is, realise the importance of standing up to the challenge and be prepared to endure whatever pain and suffering the challenge holds.

Many of these challenges are really difficult. Consider some of them.


• Starting a Training Program when you are really unfit
• Leaving a bad relationship
• Starting a new job
• Moving to a new city
• The loss of a loved one
• Financial failure
• Illness or injury
• There are many others


With a difficult challenge comes a degree of pain and suffering. But pain is nothing more than fertilizer. It is fuel for growth. When you are feeling pain, you are growing. These challenges provide the impetus for growth as people. Without growth, we wither and die.

One of the great tragedies of modern life is drugs that dull or remove pain, especially mental and emotional pain. We are often taught to suppress pain and find immediate comfort instead of exploring the pain and using it to help us grow. How often do you use pain killers to treat a headache instead of sitting quietly and exploring the reason for the headache?

Love versus Fear
Human beings are born out of love. Apart from a very small number of seemingly accidental births, human life is created from an act of love. A baby engenders a strong feeling of love in all of us. When we were born, all of us, we were an example of pure love.

Some of us have been lucky enough to have extremely wise, patient and caring parents and grand parents to nurture us and never allow us to lose this sense of love.

For many however, fear crept into the equation and never really left. Consider a small child becoming lost in a large crowd, perhaps in a shopping mall. The child is stricken with terror. The child experiences fear for the first time. The child experiences emotional hurt for the first time.

The events that follow this experience are critical. The child will feel insecure and will not want to experience a reoccurrence of the hurt. Next time the parent declares that another trip to the mall is about to take place, the fear may return, resulting in perhaps a tantrum or some other sort of “bad behavior”. If the parent is aware of the reason for the behavior, reassurance and a promise that the child will be carried the entire time may relieve the anxiety.

However, if the parent, rushed and stressed, decides to “put the behavior down”, they are simply forcing the child into a state of anxiety. At this point, the child feels anger and resentment. Unable to communicate this clearly to the parent, the child begins to behave in rebellious and somewhat objectionable ways.

Again, the aware parent will move to correct the problem through understanding and reassurance. The unaware parent may then become angry at the child. When the parent becomes angry, the child then becomes confused and then may perhaps begin to think that they are in fact the problem. When this occurs, the child begins to recognize the behaviors they demonstrate that bring a positive response from the parents. The child learns to “tap dance” to get the positive reaction from the parent.

Soon, the child builds a “personality” that is acceptable. It is important to understand the needs of a human being. Simply, we need:

• Clean Air
• Fresh Water
• Nutritious Food
• Shelter (including clothing)
• Love (which means to be able to give and receive love and to be included in a community)
• Purpose (to feel that one is making a valid contribution to that community)

These needs are the foundations upon which our life is built. If you imagine your persona as a house, these are the stumps.

When we take this fairly typical journey through our growing years, we often build a persona that is very different to the one we started out with. The damage caused by emotional hurt has forced us to construct a façade that tells the world we are okay, that it is alright to like us, to love us and to include us in the community. This façade is created out of fear.

Just like a person who thinks their house is unimpressive and chooses to build a major façade out front to make it look more impressive from the street, we too build this façade we call our ego, hiding our often frightened and unsure (and seemingly unimpressive) side from the world. And like the house, this façade is heavy and needs foundations. So, we have to put a few more stumps in place.


Love -> Hurt -> Anger -> Shame/Guilt -> I’m Okay

Fear interferes at this point ………………………Ego is built on Fear

When we construct this façade we call our ego, we need a few more stumps to hold it up. We develop a few more needs. These needs can take all sorts of forms. Some may include:

• The latest mobile phone
• A new outfit every week
• A house that we cannot afford in an “impressive suburb”
• Perhaps it is a car or similar asset that we cannot afford
• Living an up-market life on credit
• For some, it is a new relationship with a younger partner when we hit our middle age

When these things are challenged or perhaps taken away, we can react with a similar stress response to the one we might feel when we lose love or cannot get enough air. This is the source of a great deal of modern stress.

Once we arrive at the point in our lives where the ego is fully developed, we struggle through and then eventually, by facing our challenges, we start to break down the false façade we have built to find our true self that was born into the world so many years ago.

There are only two basic human emotions. All emotions grow from these. They are love and fear. Ask yourself. Are you motivated by Love or Fear?

Fear is the emotion that makes you tap dance. It makes you seek approval and it makes us keep on placing ourselves in positions of high stress simply to feel loved or accepted, to feel secure. It is a bazaar twist.

A relationship cannot be healthy if one partner lives in fear of losing the other. Soon, their insecurity will destroy the relationship. A team leader cannot survive if his/her team is in fear of him/her. If they are fearful, they will not speak their mind. Hence, the leader will never have his/her views challenged and will not grow as a leader.

The true self acts out of love. Love comes in many forms from romantic love to nurturing love to tough love. Sometimes, we need a bit more tough love, to stop the ego taking over with its victim mentality.

The ego acts out of fear. It does not want to be challenged at all, so it will always be watching for a challenge and will make its judgments based on the fear of being challenged. Try not to act out of fear

As challenges confront us, the ego will scream and shout about how unfair it all is. It will take on a victim mentality. The true self will see the challenge for what it is, realize the importance of standing up to the challenge and be prepared to endure whatever pain and suffering the challenge holds.

Are you a victim? Are you blaming others for making your life difficult? Where you are in your life now is a product of the decisions you have made on the way to arriving here. You are here for a reason. So what do you do? Do you continue to play victim, or do you get on with the business of living?

You have a choice

So Warrior or Victim
Are you going to learn your Lessons in life or are you going to be a victim and blame others for your misery? It is up to you. You can be a modern warrior, forging a path through life, taking your challenges like a mature adult and setting an example for the people around you.

Or, you can just go and have another beer, fold your arms and wait for someone else to take the lead.

Read on to The Balancing Act Part 3

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