Is Your Life Out of Balance? Take Back Control Today!
In the last article I focused on the short-term strategies to raising your Resilience when faced with issues that stress you in the fourth quadrant of the Four Quadrant Approach to reducing your Stress Gap©.
Remember the Stress Gap© is the GAP between the Stressor or Demand placed on you and your ability to handle the demand, which I refer to as your Resilience. The bigger the gap, the more stress you will feel. So the idea is to either reduce the stressors placed upon you in your life or raise your resilience.
I will begin to focus on lowering the stressors that you place on yourself by using some long-term strategies. A key strategy is to first take stock of your life today.
Do you have balance in your life or are you spinning out of control in one area?
Balance may be an overused word in society today. It is used to describe diets, stress, people’s financial portfolio as well as their exercise programs.
In spite of this, I have found the broader meaning of the word to be very useful in helping my clients change. I use it to describe the different areas of people’s lives, how much they focus on the negative aspects of past and future events versus the positive and how much time they spend doing what they want to do versus talking about it.
Take the pulse of your life right now.
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Wheel of Life
Do this exercise and discover the balance in your life.
The wheel on the right is divided into 8 sections, each one representing a different aspect of your life.
On a scale of 0 to 10, where ‘0’ is no satisfaction and ’10’ is complete satisfaction, draw a line in each part of the wheel that represents your current level of satisfaction. Beside the line write in the number the line represents.
Consider the outside of the wheel in each section to be a “10” and the centre to be a “0”.
Are you surprised by the results? Is there any part of your life that you have been neglecting for a while? Perhaps that is contributing to your stress.
The following long-term out of balance scenarios will leads to various levels of stress:
- Burying your head in your career because of marital problems
- Living day-to-day and ignoring your future financial needs
- Working hard but not taking time for fun and recreation
- Earning a very good income but neglecting family and friends.
- Having a lot of fun and friends but ignoring your physical health
- etc…
All parts of your Wheel of Life do not have to be equal in order to be in balance. Because of different kinds of personalities you will be attracted to some parts of the wheel more than others.
In addition, in different times of your lives we enter programs, take courses or develop new relationships that are going to temporarily put your wheel out of balance.
The problem arises when one or two areas are consistently neglected. You may not even be aware that you have been avoiding certain parts of the wheel. It may be your subconscious mind, which I refer to as your Personal Body Guard© that is trying to protect you.
However this kind of avoidance behaviour usually leads to increasing the stress in your life. What you avoid persists and grows in strength until you deal with it.
It is wise to put some energy developing all parts of the wheel. Look at the areas of your life that you have been neglecting. If it is a “1”, you don’t have to bring it up to a “9” by next month. That would also put your life out of balance. Start slowly by putting some attention on this area and taking some small baby steps.
Becoming aware of your whole life will help you put things into perspective. By thinking about it and taking action, you are in effect getting your life back into balance.
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