The Myth of Balance
Work and play. It's a balance.
Except…
It's a myth that everything should be balanced at all times. The idea that you can allocate a certain amount of time and energy to each area of your life equally is flawed.
If you have children, you know that life as a parent is anything but balanced, that kids take up a good portion of your time and focus.
If you're aiming for a goal or building a dream, it takes very dedicated focus to make that transformation happen. That requires energy be taken away from another area of your life, or multiple.
The truth is that to balance everything perfectly and to package it in a nice, neat little box doesn’t qualify as success, unless that’s exactly what you’re after. Instead, it’s denying the very creative power that makes you human. In order to live a wildly fulfilling life, things have to be unbalanced once in a while to give your energy a chance to amplify. If you split Niagara Falls into a million trickles, it’s not going to amount to much, is it?
When I was building The Resilience Method©, my life was anything but balanced.
I woke up at 3am. I did what it took to build as much of the program as I could while my focus was fresh. I connected with my community, checked in with my clients and threw myself into creating the best program I could.
I followed that up with an often 10 hour work day at my corporate job. I came home, worked on TRM© a little more, hit the gym for my training, threw down some dinner and studied until I fell asleep on the couch with my textbooks in my lap. I slept 3-4 hours a night for a long time.
This isn’t balance. But let me tell you one thing…
Laser focus and relentless pursuit of a goal will move mountains that look immovable.
If you’re always seeking to find balance in your life, you’re going to put everything that’s important to you on hold. It will never move you forward. When you split your focus, your energy will never be united enough for your target to feel the full, powerful force of your creative abilities. You have simply spread your energy across too many things. “Balance.”
There is, however, nothing wrong with balancing times of relentless pursuit and productivity with downtime. Everything in life ebbs and flows. If you have sacrificed time with your family to focus on writing a book, then once it’s published take some time and enjoy coming back to them. If you have worked night and day to hit a milestone, take some time and celebrate that. If you didn’t have intermittent, strategically placed downtime, you would head straight into burnout, which is totally counterproductive. He who stops to sharpen his axe chops down more trees.
Life is a constantly shifting, fluid situation. It isn’t balanced.
One thing is certain, however, there is no great accomplishment without sacrifice and discomfort.
Instead of seeking balance and stability, I suggest this:
Find your fire and amplify it.
They say if you find something you love, you will never work a day in your life. While I don’t agree with that, I want to bring your attention to how powerful it is when you find your fire, you ignite that passion, and no matter how hard that work is, you light yourself up by doing what needs to be done to create what you love.
It’s okay to be driven, it’s what you’re built for. Don’t turn down the fire in your heart because the world tells you it’s wrong to pull energy from one area of your life to inject it in another.
Work hard. Play hard. Love it all because the process really is what it’s all about. Action creates unlimited healing opportunities and you grow when you build. Service to others is the ultimate gift in this world and that takes imbalance and sacrifice sometimes.
Build your legacy. Not a balanced, stagnant life.
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