It’s a Balance Thing.
By Michael Campi
For years I have been hearing about work/life balance. Almost all of the pieces I read were about balancing your time at work with your time not at work. The time not at work was almost always kind of randomly devoted to relationships or ill-defined leisure or just stuff to do when you are not at work. While they all had some good ideas they never really had a plan to achieve the things they talked about.
So I came up with:
12 Steps to a More Balanced You.
What this did for me was to make a balanced life more comprehensive and more understandable. The 12 steps are, actually, 4 steps repeated 3 times each day and it made a huge difference in my life.
The process is one of doing something spiritual, something physical, something practical and something creative and while that may seem daunting and time consuming at first it is, indeed, quite easy to fit this into your day.
As an example; when I get up in the morning I make my bed and put on the coffee and that takes care of the practical, then I write one page in a journal and that takes care of the creative, I meditate for anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes and that takes care of the spiritual and then I either go for a walk or do some mobility work and that takes care of the physical. This whole process generally takes less than an hour.
But how do I fit this in if I have to work?
If you work a full time job you can just slot everything in as follows: the second and third rounds of practical are the time before lunch and the time after lunch. If you are stuck at a desk and can get up and do five minutes of stretching or take a short walk on your lunch break you are golden. You can take five minutes for a brain refreshing meditation mid-afternoon and maybe keep your journal with you to jot down some ideas or just write stuff. During the course of your work day it is quite doable to finish the practical and do your second round of physical, spiritual and creative. To finish up the day you can do some joint rotations or stretching while dinner cooks, throw down another page in the journal and you can meditate your way to sleep.
So you can see with very little impact on your day you have now got a balanced range of things done. The psychological benefits of this are enormous because you can look at each day and know that you don’t really spend all your time working and sleeping.
There are many things that you can put in each slot.
In the categories, for example, anything that is not physical, creative or spiritual can go in the practical section, things like the above mentioned making your bed, or your work day, or cooking dinner or washing the dishes or even taking a shower.
The spiritual part of your day, which I consider vital, can be things like appreciating the beauty of nature, meditation, prayer or any of the outcomes of those practices like feeling more compassionate, although that is harder to categorize.
The physical aspect of this program has a wide range of choices from simple things like a 5 minute stretch to longer more involved things like a weekend hike, a trip to the gym or going to the park and playing.
I, like many people, don’t think that I’m very creative. But as I go through the exercise of doing creative things I am finding that I am actually quite creative (and pretty darn clever although that is debatable.) We can apply the same simple to complex criteria to being creative. A page in a notebook, a little singing, all the way up to spending a longer period of time learning or practicing a musical instrument or learning a new language.
This will add immensely to your life and your well being.
It may seem, initially, that this program will take time away from your busy day but exactly the opposite is true. As you become more adept at including these items in your life you will notice that rather than taking away your precious time it makes the time you spend more useful. There is a lot of cross-pollination. Meditating can keep you calmer throughout the day and balance out some of the highs and lows. Physical activity has too many benefits to list but some of them are a general feeling of well-being, which is also a result of meditation.
Including something creative in the day can translate into more creative thinking overall and can help with your job or other aspects of the practical. The practical part can help to ground you, also a benefit of meditation. It will help with focus and being able to stay on task and through that make your work more productive.
Balance is easy.
It may seem as though balancing your life is an insurmountable obstacle but I hope that after reading this you will change your mind. Having tools to work with always makes a job easier, like having a hammer instead of a rock when you have to pound in a nail. The tools that I have provided for you should allow you to achieve a more balanced life immediately. There is no long, tedious process or anything to buy (although a nice notebook and a good pen makes writing more fun.) You just have to sit up and say, “I’m in.” I would guess that if you applied these categories to what you have already done today you might find that you are already halfway there.
So why not go the other half and experience the true joy and fulfillment of living a balanced life. You will not regret it.
A caveat: there will be days when you don’t get all 12 steps in and you should not let that be an issue. Just get back on that horse and you’ll be fine.