What do you do when your life gets out of balance?
We all strive for “balance” in our lives. That is, balance between work and play, careers and personal lives; even within the non-work activities of hobbies, family, exercise, church. Balance is, of course, subjective and personal. A workaholic thinks he’s “in balance” if he arrives home before the stroke of midnight. Vanquishing weeds in the garden on days off might constitute balance for a nurse.
Entrepreneurs naturally have a tougher challenge finding adequate time for non work-related activities. Even when away from the shop or office, they’re probably working on the books, reviewing operational systems, or developing a new marketing plan. It’s easy to get out of balance, so the question is, what to do if your life equilibrium is fractured?
Trying to create what feels like balance between your business, family, friends, hobbies, and exercise is extremely difficult even under the best of circumstances. Owning a business can make “out of control” feel like you’re caught in the Running of the Bulls. Entrepreneurs need to find ways to tip the scales back, even if only slightly or temporarily.
Let’s face it. All of us, entrepreneur or not, feel out of balance at times. Perhaps more often than we’d like to admit. It’s not uncommon to fall into the trap of working too hard, skipping vacations, taking work home, and generally feeling the stress of being overworked. Maybe it’s the inverse. If your career isn’t progressing as well or as quickly as you want, you might be feeling the need to ramp up a commitment to that part of your life.
The actions that follow will help put the evaluation of career versus personal life in a better context. They can also be applied to sub-components of work or personal life. For example, if you’re personal imbalance is about splitting time between hobbies, faith, and family, the following will help recast those activities as well.
Action 1: Change the way you define balance
If you’re treating balance as a time factor, i.e. the number of hours you spend in each area, you need to retire your alarm clock. The math doesn’t work. Even if you could keep a tight schedule of eight hours working, eight playing, and eight sleeping, you still wouldn’t achieve the desired result. And, of course, that schedule isn’t really practical. Nor is almost any system of time measurement as a means to balancing your life.
Action 2: Measure the value of individual activities
Although counting the hours spent on any activity, work or play, isn’t a good measure, gauging the value of the activities can be. A long weekend vacation can counter working a couple of 70-hour weeks. So could taking a child to a ball game or a date night with your significant other. After a 2-week vacation, you may need to catch up by putting in a few long days or a weekend on work activities. Add up activity value (not hours) of hobbies, family, faith, and work. If they don’t seem in balance, plan, implement or revise appropriate activities to rebalance life’s teeter-totter.
Action 3: Make balance a mental game, not a physical exercise
Think about the saying “it’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” How you handle outcomes (good or bad) often determines your life’s success and satisfaction.
Here’s a simple example. You miss a client meeting to attend your daughter’s school play. Do you agonize over a lost career opportunity or feel good about being there for your family? You can think about it the other way, too and compare how you mentally process the choices. In either case, it’s not the choices you made that determine how you assess your balance. It’s the thoughts you garner after the choices have manifested.
Finally, to implement all of the above …
Action 4: Balance is best accomplished through goal setting
Define your goals and make a plan for how to achieve them. Your goals should be built around what you first determine is your desired life-style. When your goals include career and non-career targets, defining them automatically establishes a guideline of what balance is for you. Your action plans include concrete steps needed to reach your goals. You don’t dwell on any one step, instead keep your thoughts focused on realization of the outcome.
Keep these actions in mind and you’ll achieve the balance that works best for you.
Do you have some “tricks” on how you handle life’s balancing act? Let us all know with a comment. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts.