What is Missing From Your Life?
There are two questions I want you to ask yourself.
- What’s the most important thing in your life right now and
- What’s missing from your life?
Before you continue reading come up with some answers. These answers will be unique to you and once you know what they are, hold them in your mind whilst you read on.
A Successful Businesswoman
I asked the same questions of a client recently. She’s a very successful businesswoman who was working flat out both in and on her business. Often she’d get up at 7am to work on emails and she’d still be working at 10 o’clock at night. She loved her work and got a real buzz from her success, but she found that the sheer volume of time it consumed left her feeling tired overwhelmed.
Together, with me her coach, we took stock of her life she asked herself the two questions I’m asking you. “What’s the most important thing in your life right now/What’s missing from your life?” Without hesitation she said that her relationship was the most important thing in her life and the things that were missing included keeping fit and playing music. Just by saying these things out loud she literally breathed a sigh of relief and began to give these areas space in her life again. Her work could fill up 24 hours a day quite easily – however she realised that by putting boundaries around pockets of time she was able to do the things that were important and as a result she regained balance and felt re-energised.
What is Work/Life Balance?
So what is work/life balance? It could be that you’re a full time parent and you never find time to recharge your batteries. It could be that you’re in between jobs and you spend hours watching day time tv. The fact is that if your life is lop-sided in any way then it’s time to readjust.
I often imagine work/life balance to be like a set of those old fashioned scales. The picture I have is of sand forever dribbling into one side of the pans – which means that the weights on the other side have to be constantly adjusted to make things balance. You can’t tick work/life balance off your list for good – it’s something that needs constant attention.
Work Out What is Important
It’s often assumed that as a coach that I’ve got life sorted. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am acutely aware when my life is out of balance and I’m acutely aware when I have to do something about it. Luckily I often do some ‘self-coaching’ and indeed I did so recently when my life started to feel unbalanced. If you haven’t already guessed I am the ‘client’ I was talking about earlier.
So what do you have to do? Simply work out what’s important and what’s missing in your life and then start to take steps to regain the balance.
