BALANCE — IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUR VALUES

She handed me a deck of 100 something cards and told me to pick 25 values — words that called out to me or felt applied to my life. I began going through the cards and read things like accountability, balance,integrity, unity, or summer.

Jaclynn and I were doing a values-based exercise that completely changed the way I looked at my life and balance.

After some time, I settled on my top 25, told her I had settled and waited for her next instructions.

“Cut it down to 15, 10, and then 5” she said.

“Five!” I remarked. “How am I going to pick 5!? What are we doing?”

She smiled and said, “You’ll see. I know you’ll be able to do it.”

I picked my top 5 as kaizen, leadership, relationships, spirituality, andgreatness. My next task, to evaluate the amount of energy[1] is spent in each value. For example, I would think of the previous week and ask myself “do I feel complete with the amount of energy directed towards leadership” or “how do I feel about my relationships last week?”

What I realized, quite frankly, surprised me. I discovered that, for the most part, I was over 75% of time I was living in these values. As a result, I was feeling pretty darn good about the week. I felt accomplished, fulfilled, and happy. I was happy and I finally understood why!

It clicked, an epiphany, or “ah-hah” moment as my girl Oprah would say. I felt happiest when I was living in the areas I valued. A smile reached across my face and I sat in my seat with disbelief. It was such an easy concept that I was shocked I hadn’t come across it before. Of course I would feel happier if I was doing the things I actually wanted to do.

This was the secret to the elusive “balance” concept. I always thought that balance meant we spend equal energies in heath, career, andpersonal. After all, these were the areas that had been laid out before me, and despite my struggle to find balance, I had never thought to question if it was right for ME. This struggle ultimately lead to me to reject the notion of balance and file it away as something wishy-washy, hippie-dippy, and plain stupid. After all if I wasn’t able to see any measurable difference, it wasn’t worth my time.

When we live in our values, we live in our strengths. We are doing what comes easily and naturally to us. Because it comes naturally, it is something we intrinsically want to do. Think about it for a moment, how do you feel when the majority of your energy is spent on things you don’t want to do?

Drained? Spent? Fulfilled? Irritated? Excited? Anxious?

My guess would be that you probably feel annoyed, drained, and at the end of the week spent. You likely live for the times in your week when you can do the things you WANT to do. If that’s you, you’re not alone. Below are a list of actions I have found helpful in maintaining balance in my life:

Understand Your Values

If you haven’t done so yet, complete a similar values exercise. It can be as simple as looking for a list of values and picking your top five. I like the way of picking 25, then 15, then 10, then 5, because it helps you understand what is really important to you. As you move through your own lists, you’ll likely start to see some overlap between some of the words and be able to choose the ones that work best. After all, these words are a limited symbolic expression of something that is intuitive and difficult to contain.

It is helpful to know that the list you choose might not contain what resonates for you and that you can add or remove values at anytime. The value of kaizen wasn’t on my list originally but when I read about it’s meaning in The Leader Without A Title, I knew it was for me.

Examine Your Weekly Snapshot

Take a moment and reflect on these values and how they played on in your life last week. Just last week, don’t over complicate it.

Be honest with yourself. There’s nothing to be right or wrong about.

Decide if the areas you feel low in are areas you value and want to spend more time in. This is another opportunity to be honest and claim the values that are yours. The most common trap I have seen people fall into has been in choosing values that does not represent who they are.

Plan to Succeed

Based on the snapshot and your vision for your life, what do you need to do now to be more in balance? Where do you need to create space for the things that are important to you?

Related: Vision and Dharma

My suggestion: buy a day planner and create a section that is divided into 5 (one for each value) and write what you plan to do that is related to each value.

You will start to see what areas are truly important by observing what you naturally gravitate towards. Again, reevaluate your values and ask if they need to be reworked.

I began condensing my focus to a “Top 3” and focused on these. Some weeks I was feeling low in leadership so I would plan for the next week to include leadership and leave spirituality off the list. I learnt which ones were really important to me and which ones I was ok alternating.

Do it now! Do it now!Do it NOW!

This is the worst one, right? I struggled with this for the longest time. What I came to realize is that, on some level, I believed I wasn’t worth the time or effort that would be required.

I believed I wasn’t worth the effort to be happy.

Here’s the secret to all of this: when you do the things you want to do, life isn’t effort. The effort is in finding time for the things you don’t want to do. I’m not talking about doing things like taking a year off and being a yoga gypsy (that does sound exciting).

The lesson is this, when you balance the things you want to do (values) with the things you’re not so stoked to do, you will find a deeper level of fulfillment and happiness, because you are continuously expressing your reason for being.

Related: Dharma Based Lifestyle Design

[1] Energy understood as perceived effort, time, or focus.