Life Balance - How to juggle work, home, personal and spiritual health

A balanced life. Is it possible? Yes! Is it automatic? Maybe for a few lucky souls, but for the rest of us, its a like learning how to walk on a tight rope, it gets easier and easier and eventually you can even do it blindfolded but there is still the potential of falling off. I would like to share with you some ideas to make it easier you walk your tightrope easier and to have a safety net when you do fall off.

A balanced life. Is it possible? Yes! Is it automatic? Maybe for a few lucky souls, but for the rest of us, its like learning how to walk on a tight rope. It gets easier and easier and eventually you can even do it blindfolded but there is still the potential of falling off. I would like to share with you some ideas to make it easier as you walk your tightrope and to have a safety net when you do fall off.

Looking for life balance is a common quest in todays world. We live such fast paced lives now, with the speed of communication and transport, weve lost a lot of the buffers which gave us a bit of relief from the urgent & constant demand to respond to outside expectations. Nowadays we cant even use the old excuse that the checks in the mail since we can do electronic money transfers. Cell phone calls, instant messaging and emails scream for immediate response and we dont have time to mull over the situation before we feel pressured to give an answer.

And the amount of information we get now in less than a week is equivalent to the total information that people 100 years got in their whole life time. We feel pressured to respond to the numerous roles and expectations that our culture today exhort us to fulfill and oftentimes we end up exhausted, frustrated, confused and ultimately failing at some if not all the roles. And the worst part, we are unsatisfied and feel that something is missing from our lives.

I can tell you from experience that sometime you may be on this treadmill and not even realize that your life is out of balance until something catastrophic happens. The wake up call comes and literarily knocks us off balance. We cant believe that we were so blind to the unbalance before or worse still for some of us, we are befuddled at what happened. The wake up call can be something to do with our physical health, our personal life, our career or a spiritual or emotional crisis. When that shock hits, we feel devastated and we are faced with the fact that something is out of balance in our lives.

From our youth we are told to get ahead in the world that we should be a good student, play at least one sport and maybe a musical instrument, learn a foreign language, help around the house and be kind to the less fortunate. And also make sure you are doing enough extracurricular activities to be regarded as well rounded to qualify for the right schools.

This conditioning to do more and be more is enough to make a lasting imprint in your mind that by the time you reach adulthood you are programmed to do more, be more and yes, be even more than that. Introspection or asking the deep questions of what is the meaning for your life is discouraged. Achieve the modern dream! Thats what advertising and the media tells you non-stop. If you work hard enough you can get all the toys! Or in the philanthropists version of the dream: if you work really hard to help everyone less fortunate then you are living up to expectations. Or the womens version: if you juggle career, family, spouse, home and personal life then you are the new super woman.

So what do so many of us do? We bravely try to juggle many more balls than we have hands. Many more balls than you have hands, anyone of you feel that youre juggling more balls than is comfortable?

Theres a saying I see on bumper stickers in California where I live: The one who dies with the most toys wins. But the one who dies with the most toys still dies. So we should consider what we really want to accomplish with this time we have on earth. What is your mission in life? What really makes you happy? What makes you feel alive? Ill bet once you seriously consider that question the priorities become clearer.

The first thing you need to do is to find out what is important to you, not what Madison Ave tells you. Know your personal mission and use that as your north point in your personal compass. Use your mission to gauge whether your decision or action is going to either lead you closer or further from your mission. When you are moving towards your mission, time is unimportant, you are energized and that noise inside your head which says you should, could and ought to quiets down. You are at peace.

Here are some practical action steps to help you achieve this life balance:

1. Know your life mission, go inside and ask whats most important to you and then make your decisions based on that.
2. Take time out to meditate, journal, walk or do some activity which gives you space and time to allow your inner wisdom to come through. Each moment spent listening to your inner wisdom will save you so much more time in busy work later on.
3. Listen to your body, your body is wise, and without our conscious interference our bodies know whats in harmony and what isnt.
4. Do the important not the urgent; the phone can ring, you dont have to answer it, you can always get the messages later.
5. Share your values with people around you so that they can support you in achieving it. When you have a work deadline, or have an extra busy period, enlist your colleagues, family and friends to help. Show them how your achieving the goal will be of benefit to everyone.
6. Tell the truth to yourself and others, youll be amazed how freeing that is
7. Take time for you
8. Take time for people and causes that you care about
9. Find things that make you laugh
10. Spend time with people that make you laugh

Live each moment, be present, have fun!

Marilyn Tam is an influential corporate leader, speaker, consultant, author, respected philanthropist and social activist. www.HowToUseWhatYouveGot.com

Marilyn Tams book, How to Use What Youve Got to Get What You Want, receives an average 5-star rating from Amazon.com customers. In her book, Ms. Tam talks about how to discover your own inner North Star, and how to use it to navigate your efforts to achieve maximum personal success. The hardcover is just $14.00 on Amazon.com. Check it out! Click here