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by
Bill Dueease
Copyright © 2004
We all face decisions that involve doing
things that affect competing priorities. We all have three different lives
or worlds that compete for our attention, energy and activity.
Our Three Lives
These are our personal lives, our
work related lives and our family lives. Our personal lives
consist of our health, our inner private likes and dislikes, our inner
beliefs, and our spiritual feelings. Our work related lives consist of
what we do to earn an income to provide resources to live and prosper.
Our family lives consist of our relatives and friends and our relationships
with each person.
As you can imagine, each of these worlds will attract our interests and
can create various demands on our time, resources, and energy. When these
worlds create demands that compete with the other, such that we must choose
one world at the expense of the other, on a continuous basis, we get out
of balance.
How do you know when you have achieved life balance?
People achieve balance in their lives when they are able to consciously
and subconsciously align their thoughts and activities with whom they
are and what they want to do, without conflict or guilt. People who are
in balance, experience being in the zone of life.
Life is good!
What are the steps to attaining life balance?
Discover who you really are.
You will want to first discover who you really are, what you stand for,
and what your beliefs and values are. There are two levels to research.
The easiest and most accessible is your conscious or rational self, where
you logically dissect then evaluate things. But the real you is where
your true inner values, beliefs and spirituality are within your subconscious
or intuition level. People can learn to rationalize almost anything, but
they cannot hide or escape from their inner core values.
Conflicts and personal stress occur when the rational self accepts and
conducts actions that are contrary to the inner values that have been
suppressed. Take the time and energy to discover your inner values and
beliefs and allow your intuition to take center stage in your thoughts
and action processes. When you follow your instincts in an environment
that embraces you, you enter the zone.
Discover what you really want to do.
We have all been told from childbirth what to do and what not to do. We
follow many rules because it is best for living harmoniously with others
and ourselves. But, along the way we are also told by parents, teachers,
advisors, and bosses what we should and should not
do to suit THEIR personal agendas and perspectives. These are the shoulds
that we carry with us and try to follow with very confusing and mixed
results.
Most people have inner passions that really excite and motivate them.
These passions develop early in life and change with time. Yet, you suppress
them. These passions are almost always good in nature and very positive.
The executive may have a passion to create a rose garden. The housewife
may have a passion to play the drums. But they dont, because they
do not recognize and accept their inner passions and if they did, their
conscious mind would rationalize that they shouldnt
after responding to all of the previously implanted shoulds
by others. Yet, both the executive and the housewife feel something is
missing and cant put a finger on it.
Everybody also has desires that are extremely important. These desires
begin with the basics of life like staying healthy, being secure, attaining
food and shelter, being socially accepted, and having a loving support
group. These basic desires are rather easy to determine. Once you recognize
that they exist you will see that they are almost required for a normal
existence. Once these desires are accomplished, you will develop other
desires, like living in a warm climate, working outdoors, raising a happy
and healthy family, and being acknowledged as special. These are more
personal in nature and are also less obvious.
This is where the shoulds" begin to enter the picture
and you find yourself following the desires you allow others to impose
on you. For example, you might go to law school to become a lawyer because
your parents strongly felt you should become a lawyer. Or
you might become a full time mom and raise a family early on in life because
that is what everyone did where you grew up.
Recognize and manage your conflicts.
Life is a bowl of conflicts and stress occurs when competing forces interfere
with your ability to decide what to do. Additional stress occurs when
you feel bad about doing some things, because you feel you should
be doing something else. So you end up not enjoying or even fully completing
what you decide to do because you continue to think you should
be doing something else.
The executive will certainly have conflicts between leading her company
and creating the rose garden. The housewife will experience numerous conflicts
between being a mother, a wife and an individual person when she thinks
about learning to play the drums and even more when she thinks about playing
the drums with a band.
Once you are able to be honest with yourself and discover what your true
passions and desires are, you will be in the position to determine what
priorities you place on each. It will be much easier and clearer to evaluate
and establish these priorities, since you will now know what the choices
are and more importantly you will be the only person involved in making
the decision. You will be free from having to consider the conflicting
forces of the shoulds which are based upon what others
want you to do. This will be a great relief, because you will not have
to live through the agendas or desires of others, which can be a very
tricky thing, even if you tried. Now it is only you deciding, and the
choices become much easier.
The executive can decide that continuing in her position is a high priority,
but that carving out four hours a week to work on the rose garden will
provide her the relaxation and personal enjoyment she wants and needs
to function better as an executive. She will be motivated to focus more
on her executive duties as she is doing them, knowing that doing so will
lead her to being able to exercise her passion of raising her own roses.
Now she will enjoy doing both and will be better at participating in both
functions with very little, if any, conflict.
Eliminate guilt imposed upon you by others.
People allow guilt to enter their world when they dwell on the fact that
they are at fault or to blame for things they did or did not do. People
take on the burden of being wrong and responsible for not meeting the
expectations of others. Even some religions appear to impose guilt because
followers are not perfect. Yet, the fact is no one is perfect.
When you set expectations or allow others to impose expectations that
you must be perfect and you inevitability fail to meet the pureness of
perfection, you feel guilty. Then you try harder to be perfect and feel
even guiltier because you dont reach perfection again. The cycle
continues.
Most people have an innate philosophy of life or spirituality that they
need and want to follow. The key is to discover your spirituality and
follow it. When you follow your own spirituality, you greatly reduce or
eliminate the artificial guilt you feel by letting others impose their
philosophy on you.
Eliminate guilt you impose upon yourself.
Another key to removing guilt is to recognize that you cannot always make
the best decisions all of the time. One great philosopher, Claude Lunsford,
said that you want to make decisions based upon your true inner beliefs,
purposes and the information you gather at the time. You evaluate the
options available and make the best decision, based upon the truth. Then
you want to accept the decision as being the best you could have made
at the time.
You do not want to impose guilt upon yourself for a less than perfect
outcome. You might not have been able to know about other factors that
would have affected your decision, or things might have changed that you
could not have foreseen that changed the results of your decision. You
do not want to look back and second-guess yourself. Instead, you want
to accept your past decisions and learn from the new knowledge you gained
to adjust your decision making process for the most important issue at
hand, which is to make better decisions in the future.
Follow the path YOU choose to achieve your future goals.
Develop life goals for yourself and start the process to achieve them.
Now that you know all about yourself, and how to make decisions without
guilt, you are poised to use this information to visualize your desirable
life and develop a number of life goals that will take you to where you
want to go. People reach life balance when they know where they want to
go, set the goals to get there, and initiate the necessary steps to achieve
their goals.
Conclusion.
Life is a journey and you now have everything you need to create the most
desirable, most enjoyable and most fulfilling journey for yourself. Once
you set your goals, you want take steps each day to reach your life goals
and you will not only be amazed at how well you will achieve them, but
at how enjoyable and stress free the journey will be.
Your desires, priorities, passions, and even sometimes your beliefs will
change. That is very normal. Once you discover what your new ones are
you will want to create new goals accordingly, using the same process,
and continue your life journey in the new directions that you choose for
yourself.
Enjoy the trip!
Provided as an educational service by Bill Dueease of The Coach Connection,
where connecting great people with great coaches is their
goal. You may receive a free copy of the article The Ten Paths to
Human Improvement by contacting The Coach Connection at 800-887-7214
or 239-415-1777 or coaches@findyourcoach.com, or www.findyourcoach.com/0o-career-coach.htm
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