In the beginning it’s easy to feel excited for a better life balance. SO exciting!! Isn’t it?!
We go ALL IN and we’re SO excited to start the process towards greater life balance and personal growth, LET’S GO!
We’ve invested in that new program that is going to solve ALL your problems (it feels).
We’re on a roll!! We have energy and motivation.
But…THEN…something happens?
After a few weeks we get distracted, derailed and something else is taking priority.
Do you recognize this pattern in your life? This is an opportunity to learn how to stay consistent.
That feeling of being on a roll is long gone… our energy is low and it’s like starting all over again…
Do you recognize this pattern in your life?
It’s an awesome feeling to make progress and enjoying it. The rush of excitement and motivation when we’re starting to see the results and we instantly feel better and ALL is good.
Hear me out some more.
What comes next…?
One of the biggest disappointments on the path to living a life in balance between work, family, friends and other commitments, is that we STOP in our tracks.
We don’t commit any longer, we let things slide and other things take priority when it gets tough.
We let yourself get distracted. And as fast as we made progress earlier, we’re back to being overwhelmed.
What happened?
Listen up!
First of all….
Realizing that you’ve lost your focus is a golden moment, because in that moment you have a choice.
It’s either to get back into that momentum, and what our soul knows as being the right thing for us, or ignore it and get back to where we were.
It’s so common to drift away from the reason for it all, the WHY that was fueling that energy, inspiration and motivation we felt in the beginning.
What is it that makes us distracted and say No to what we know is right for us?
Interesting question. One reason could be that our ego is telling us that other things are more important than our Self.
This belief can come from the way we were raised and what values were expressed. For example, it’s very common amongst women to believe that everyone else’s needs need to go first before own needs.
In this example, where we may have started off great, really put ourselves on a path to growth, but now the voice of the ego is telling us that we don’t need this personal growth stuff.
The ego that says it’s all going to be fine and that we don’t need to continue (but our intuition and gut is telling us to that taking time for reflection and inner connection is exactly what we need to continue to do ).
This is an example to show us that you have a choice. The choice between the ego voice and the voice of our intuition, our true self.
You have a choice to go with your true self or your ego.
Our true self wants us to live in balance and ease in our life.
No more exhaustion and drained energy.
Aligning with the flow of your life and the universe is not an effort. It just is.
What the universe has in store for you, is something you don’t have to push for or get.
It’s already available to you.
On the other hand, our ego wants to us to strive and push, fight and do what we were told is the best for us, or how success looks like when it’s hard earned.
The harder it is the better says the ego.
Here is your chance to align with your true self to maintain that life balance.
First, take a step back and slow down your energy right now.
Take a deep breath and let the universe know that you’re welcoming life balance into your life and ask the universe to show you how it looks like for you?
And then let it all go for a moment.
For me life balance was a foreign word for many years. There was no such thing as time for Me or a thought of that self-care is everyone’s enabler to feel good and stay healthy.
In my darkest moments when I felt the most exhausted, which often happened late in the evening, it all started with that a tiny bit of willingness to ask myself the question:
“Why am I struggling so much?”.
My Being was tired of struggling and feeling exhausted and at that point it was easy to welcome that question. I had pushed that question away for so long.
I was FINALLY willing to let ease come into my life.
Fast forward, unraveling from there, I was ready for an experience of a lifetime. I created momentum for personal growth and could feel that my soul was growing.
I started to see my life in a new light literally.
All that momentum was awesome and wonderful and people commented “You look so HAPPY”!!
But once it was time to make a commitment to keep going with this newfound ease and flow of my new life balance, the ego came back at me telling me I since I feel so good, don’t need to stay consistent with my new routines.
The ego told me that I didn’t have to be setting yet another intention, not write in my journal, not meditate another minute, and definitely not go to that next yoga class.
I was on the verge of making a u-turn back to my old patterns of overworking and zero self care.
That’s when I realized I needed to find continous support to carry me through to the next level, instead of going back to my old tunnel-vision, autopilot self that preferred working non-stop instead of living life to the fullest.
Making life changes stick is not easy, and if there are changes that you want to make but they’re not happening, you may have to ask yourself why?
If you have to struggle and push to make the first step, to even make the changes, it may not be the right changes to make to begin with.
But what we’re talking about here is when you’re beyond that first step, let’s say you are really excited, you have made the changes and you know they are right for you.
For example, when we start meditating we’re keeping a regular schedule, we’re consistent and we don’t down prioritize it. We’re making progress and we feel the benefits of it in our life and our stress level.
But after a while we’re falling off the bandwagon, we’re not as consistent as before, or we eventually drop it entirely.
Back to where we started…it feels.
Here are 4 essential tips to keep that life balance going & avoid going back to feeling overwhelmed and overworked again!
Life balance for You may not be life balance for someone else. This is important because we can’t copy someone else’s life balance based on what they do.
Your gauge is your feelings. Right now you may feel overwhelmed and stressed out. That’s not life balance, right?
So when you think about the concept of life balance for you, what comes up?
Paint the picture of how you want your life to be. What is life balance for you?
Is it more flexibility with work hours? Or is it to have time in the morning just for You? Is it to get out in nature for a walk when you get home from work? What you want is the right thing for you!
Whatever it is for you that comes up first is probably the most important aspect for you regarding life balance. Add other things that come up that represent life balance for you.
But it doesn’t stop there, paint a full detailed picture of who you want to be when you live your life in balance, how you feel when you’re there and how are things different?
When you have all of that envisioned and written down in your journal, you have taken steps to get there and you feel great!
That’s when the work starts…The work to keep going and maintain your life balance!
It’s very common to simply believe that the momentum we created in the beginning of making a life change is going to last. Unfortunately the romance of finding our life balance fizzles out after a while if we don’t pay attention!
To not put safe-guards in place and ensure that we surround ourselves with extra support to maintain our self care and love for ourselves in the long term is a big mistake.
Here are 4 essential tips to give support to keeping life balance for the long term to avoid going back to overwhelm.
1. Set intentions and find a way to get reminded about your intentions for life balance daily.
A lot of people miss this step and focus on the end goal instead. An intention is pointing to something that you want to welcome into your life daily (ie. your definition of life balance), while the end goal is what you believe is the ‘end product’ of all of your efforts (honestly, when is life balance finished??)
So you get the point, with an intention you fuel your big picture vision, but you need to get reminded about it, because otherwise it’s so easy to revert back to zero and end up overwhelmed again.
Simply, you can use any personal item that mean something to you and carry it with you during your day as a reminder of the intention and vision you have set.
I personally use what I call an Intention Reminder bracelet. It’s made of natural crystals and I get reminded about my intention(s) every day when I put it on in the morning.
Wearing the bracelet helps me reminded about my vision for life balance.
Another way that is very effective here is the use of essential oils. If you’re not familiar with essential oils they are from plants and all have different properties that may promote health and well-being from both physical and emotional perspective.
Interested in learning more about essential oils?
I personally find it powerful to use essential oils to remind me about how I want to feel every day. Some oil blends are specifically formulated to be easily applied or diffused when needed for an extra energy or emotional boost depending on the day.
2. Create a new daily routine that completely supports Your life balance.
One of the most powerful ways to support ourselves long term is to create a routine that works for us. This sounds counteractive to all the routines that may already exist in your life, but this is different.
This is a routine you CAN’T WAIT TO GO BACK TO every day.
There is nothing boring about this routine. It’s a routine that enables our life balance. I recommend to create a short morning routine to start with.
You may think “Oh boy how on earth am I going to add another routine to my life?” but I’ll tell you this routine may only be 10 minutes per day, but it’s like pure gold, because it makes an impact on your entire day.
The key here is to bring in practices that are focused on you and your time with yourself. Practices like meditation and journaling even for a total time of 10 minutes per day can be life changing.
A morning routine can include many different things, and as long as it’s practices that nurtures your body, mind and soul, it’s all related to increasing your self care and life balance..
Your new routine becomes the time of day where you feel your energy gets re-charged.
3. Take realistic action every day.
I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to take realistic action. A too big of a goal or expectation for change right away is going to put you off track.
The momentum we’re feeling in the beginning is going to bring us leaps and bounds forward (because we feel it’s realistic at that time).
But when we’re not feeling the momentum any longer and we just want to quit, that’s when we adjust, course correct and stay consistent with WHATEVER action that feels realistic to us now.
This is key, without realistic action we won’t keep going and experience life balance long term.
How do you take realistic action?
Well, in my experience we usually loose some momentum a couple of weeks or months from when we first started to make the change. It’s about keeping our intentions at the forefront of our mind, but scale our actions down to bite-size chunks all the way down until we feel they are realistic and we can say:
“YES! I can do that!! That feels realistic to me.”
This bite-size realistic action approach will keep us going instead of stopping.
4. Partner with someone and/or join a community of like-minded for long term support.
Nothing can replace the support from another human. If that person is into the same thing, that’s double the benefit. So find someone who wants to keep going just like you!
Or find a group or community that shares what you believe in and has the same focus.
This is how we pick ourselves up on the days when we want to quit, this is how we’ll get new ideas and inspiration from people who are in the same boat.
A new lifestyle and life in balance is created and maintained.
In summary, the four tips to maintain life-balance in action are:
- Set intentions and find a way to get reminded about Your intentions for life balance daily.
- Create a new daily routine that completely supports Your life balance.
- Take realistic action every day. Period.
- Partner with someone and/or join a community of like-minded for long-term support.
So, now it’s time to stay the course and keep going.
The value of truly making the changes you want to make to live your life in true balance starts with you and how you define what life balance means to you.
Then with realistic action you can create it and maintain it.
How can you maintain your life balance to avoid going back to being overwhelmed?
Related:
Want to Stop Struggling. 3 Easy Steps to Create Realistic Action
