Have you heard the rumour about having a balanced life?
Me too. I find this an interesting idea.
What does having a balanced life mean?
It is not about equal time in all areas of your life. That wouldn’t work.
Imagine trying to spend the same amount of time on your hobbies as you do at work? Or spending as much time in personal development as you do with your partner. Add kids, health, social life, writing that book you’ve been putting off. And this list only scratches the surface.
No, spending the same amount of time in each part of your life isn’t practical.
You’d end up with only 15 minutes to spend on each.
You’d still need to eat and sleep.
Oh, and look for a new job, since your boss isn’t OK with you only working 15 minutes today.
As important as time is, it’s not the measure of a balanced life.
In my opinion, we can understand the balance that is right for each of us from the values that light up in our brains. Values are what motivate us. We’ll talk more about values later.
How do we make sure the right values are alight in our brains? We use a classic NLP tool that the life coaching industry has hijacked. I love this tool because it can work on so many levels. I encourage you to consider it.
It’s the Wheel of Life, and with your permission, we’ll explore it together.
Grab a piece of paper, turn it landscape, and draw a large circle.
I will wait while you complete your circle.
I am happy to sit here quietly until you’re finished. Don’t worry about me.
Here’s a template I made showing off my Photoshop skills. If you’d like one of these templates, NLP courses Wheel of Life and I’ll send it to you instantly through the magic of the internet.
Let’s continue. If you use my template, you’ll notice that it’s divided into a pie with six segments. If you’re drawing your own, please divide yours in the same way.
Pick six areas of your life, and near the edge of your drawing, label one area in each segment. I chose work, family, wealth, health, personal development, and career development. You may choose other areas that are important to you.
At the centre of the wheel write a zero. At the edge of the circle write ten.
Now, rate each area in your Wheel of Life on a scale of zero to ten. Zero is the worst this area could possibly be. Ten is the best it can be.
Draw a line on each showing how much of that segment you’ve filled up. In my example work is an eight. Family is ten. Health is four. You get the idea.
How does you wheel look? Which areas are going well? Which areas of your life would you like to improve?
Once you see your life diagrammed like this, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?
Now, in each of the segments write one action you could do to improve that area.
Look at your completed Wheel of Life. You know what to do now, to balance your life, don’t you?
Here’s what I’d like to do to make sure we’re all progressing. Choose one. Set a date and time that you’ll commit to to complete that one action.
And when that date arrives, email me. Tell me the area you decided to work on, the action you chose, and what happened.
I’ll send you a digital high five to help celebrate your accomplishment.
And look at how simple this exercise turned out to be. I told you it would be. With this simple exercise, you’re on the road to a much more balanced life.
Also, we briefly mentioned life coaching. There’s magic in its simplicity. If you’d like to find out more, <click here> and let me tell you about our new and updated Life Coaching Course.
Humm. I’ve just noticed that my six choices didn’t include things like fun, pleasure, dancing, or just plain messing around. But at the heart of transformation there’s a seed of all of these things. Let’s agree to come back to this later. OK?
- We started off today assuming that a balanced life is a good thing. What do you think now? Drop by our Facebook page and tell us what you’ve taken away from this exercise.
Until next time, have an outrageous week,
John “Balanced” Cassidy-Rice
P.S.
If you haven’t checked out our Facebook page recently, I recommend that you do. Poke around a bit and let me know what you think.
If you’re feeling kind, leave a testimonial for the world to see.
If you’ve noticed something we can improve, send me a very private email.
