What is BALANCE?

In a conversation with a client recently we were discussing the word “balance”. We hear this word often, suggesting that we find balance in our lives; most often referring to the balance between work and play. At first blush it seems obvious, work and play should play equal parts in your life, right? What often happens is we continue to struggle to define what balance is for US. How do we know when we are in balance? What are we measuring, hours, effort?

So, what I shared is that it may not be so much about time spent equally, as it is about how we FEEL each day in whatever we are spending our time on. If you are at work and you are feeling excited and passionate would that fall under the play category? Why not? it’s being experienced as fun, right?

Or if we are spending our non-work time doing things that we are not really enjoying, is that truly categorized as play?

A Solution to Balance

We came up with the word ‘alignment”. What if you were to approach each day and anything that you do from a place of alignment? Okay, then how do we know if we are aligned? Here is what I shared; when you know how it is that you want to FEEL each day, then anything that you experience that matches that feeling would mean that you are in alignment. When you are feeling in a way that you don’t want, then you can look to what it is you can change to get back in alignment.

Develop a Credo

One of the ways that you can define what alignment means to you is to create a personal credo for yourself. Here is the definition;

“A credo is a set of beliefs that drives thoughts and behaviors. A personal credo is one which is created by the individual, and not just one accepted from other people. The word “credo” comes from the Latin, and literally means, “I believe”.”

When you have a personal credo, you can then use that to assess if you are feeling aligned or not, in any situation. Does this situation feel good? If yes, awesome! If not, what do I need to do to change it?

Give it a try and see what’s possible for you!