Have you ever done an exercise where you take a number of areas of your life and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10? The areas might include your health, relationships, finances, family and often number up to 8. You then place these areas around the spokes of a wheel and you join them up to see how round your wheel is. The conclusion is that if your wheel is not round then your life is out of balance and you are heading for a crash. Let me state that for the record I have done this exercise a number of times and I am yet to come up with a round wheel. So, is my life or your life for that matter, out of balance?
We go through a number of stages in our lives. First we are going through school, then we leave school and go to college or get a job, then we advance our career, then a special person comes along and we get married, then children come along, and then we are raising our children, and then our children leave home and we get ready to retire, and then our children continue on the cycle. During these stages the focus of our lives will change, and so it is reasonable to assume that our life balance will also be changed by these circumstances.
One of the ways that you can get your life in balance is to live small. If all of your areas are 1 out of 10 then you will have a perfectly round wheel. Will you go very far in life? Probably not. However there are people who live their lives like this. However they are missing one of the key elements for human survival, growth. As human beings we are either growing or dying. One of our basic human needs is to grow. Live and learn they say, well I say Live and Grow. So, wherever you are on your balance wheel, make sure you are growing.
How do you change the balance? First you must decide that for your stage of life if the makeup of your wheel is appropriate or not. If your life is your car, you must make sure that you have the right wheels on your car. Otherwise your car is not going very far. A young college graduate trying to advance their career needs to have a very different life balance to a father of two children that are growing up. A retired couple will have a different life balance to a young single mother. Make sure that your life balance is appropriate for your stage in life.
If you want to change your life balance, you need to identify the areas in which you want to grow, and you need to set some goals in this area. Or you need to set some bigger goals in this area. As human beings we are wired to grow and improve. So, if you want to change your life balance set some big goals in the areas that you want to improve.
In terms of life balance, the important things are to not get too carried away with having a perfectly round wheel. This exercise is simply to identify areas that you may want to look to improve in your life. Make sure that your wheel is appropriate for your stage in life. And if you want to change the balance then use goal setting to improve the areas of your life that you seek to focus on.
And, the holy grail of life balance is the perfectly round wheel with all areas 10 out of 10. Good luck on your quest!