Find Balance in Life
Overcome Work Life Imbalance with a Strong Personal Foundation
The five components of a strong personal foundation will help bring life balance.
Is it possible to live a balanced life, effectively juggling responsibilities and roles to keep a work life balance? Life imbalance can result when we fail to build a strong personal foundation. Unbalanced lives are also an effect of people taking on too many responsibilities without protecting the roles and responsibilities most important to them. Conscious attention to the five building blocks of a strong foundation can counter overwhelm and return life balance.
Work Life Balance
Employees are being asked to do more, to take over the responsibilities of others due to layoffs and consolidations. Many households are two income units, adding childcare, family responsibilities, and household duties to work responsibilities of the family. Technology enables people to connect to work around the clock. And many employers expect it; there's no need to cover for someone on vacation, they're always reachable. It's easy to expend one's time and energy on work and end up feeling guilty about neglected aspects of life.
What Is Life Balance?
Balance is a feeling of fulfilling all of one's important roles appropriately. Life balance isn't so much about the time spent among various roles, but is more related to the degree of engagement we feel in each role and the importance of the role. Balance isn't about what we do, but the fulfillment and meaning we get from what we do. We don't balance our lives by using more gadgets to multi-task. We balance by focusing on what's important to our happiness.
Foundations of Life Balance
Consider these five components of a strong personal foundation resulting in a happy, fulfilling, and balanced life:
- Strong Relationships
There may be nothing more important to a balanced, fulfilling life than strong relationships . Relationships are how we experience ourselves. These are the mirrors in which we observe ourselves being who we are. Research studies confirm that strong relationships are important to happiness, longevity, and good health.
- Life Purpose and Priorities
Without purpose and meaning, life becomes boring, unfulfilling, and unrewarding. Studies show that meaningful activities are crucial to happiness. With clarity of purpose, we're able to effectively prioritize our activities and concentrate our energies on roles and efforts that are truly important to us.
- Meaningful Activities
When the activities we engage in are meaningful to us, we engage ourselves with passion, energy, and purpose. It's important that we take on roles and responsibilities that feel "worth doing." What is meaningful is unique to each individual, based on purpose and values.
- Interesting Activities
We each have certain unique strengths and competencies which set us apart from others. When we engage these strengths in our daily routines we are interested, engaged, and involved. Life feels balanced when our activities are meaningful and interesting.
- Values Consistency
Stress results when we find ourselves in a conflict between what we value and what is asked or expected of us. A person valuing honesty will be racked with stress if placed in a position of being less than fully honest.
Balance Life
Balance your life on a strong personal foundation by focusing time and energy on relationships, purpose, and meaningful and interesting activities which are congruent with your values.
Related Article: Five Steps to a Balanced Life
For more on Relationships, Purpose, and Values, see the topical index.
