alwaysshinebrightlFinding Balance
What is balance? Why is is so hard to find? And why can it be harder for empathic women to find?
Balance can be a very nebulous idea, with as many different definitions as there are people.
So I decided to focus on a fairly mainstream way of looking at balance, and talk about a coaching tool called "The Wheel of life".
The idea is to look at the different areas of your life like pieces of a pie. So you might have business/career, family, fun, health, love, money, personal development, spirituality as the slices of pie.
Then you rate how you think you are doing in each area of your life from 0-10, with 0 being "I have none of it in my life" or maybe "I am crap at this" and 10 being "I am a complete success" or "I ace this".
Then you colour in each pie section to the level you rated it. And you usually end up with a wonky wheel that you couldn't drive on (see picture).
(You can find a template to play with here. I like this one because page 2 allows you to choose your own categories to assess.)
Ok, now you have (perhaps) given yourself a bit of a shock, what next?
You can look at each section of your life and ask a couple of questions:
"What could I start doing that would help bring balance to my life?"
"What could I stop doing, reprioritise or delegate?"
Empathetic women can have trouble with this for a few reasons, including:
you may have been "trained" to always put the needs of others above your own,
you may not actually value one of the pie pieces (eg money),
you could be internally rather than externally motivated (ie success can be hard to measure by what is happening on the outside)
you find it hard to focus on more than one area of your life at a time
All of this is ok. As I said, this is a mainstream tool, so it may not take into account your full experience. However, it can certainly help to identify issues that could be explored further, in perhaps less conventional ways.
I encourage you to have a play with the tool and share your experiences with us.
And you are welcome to reach out to me if you want some help.
Karen Howard is one of the co-founders of The She Oak Collective, the Vice-President of her professional association the Australian Holistic Healers & Counsellors Association, a Counsellor, Coach, Energetic Body Worker and teacher of gentle yoga. She can be contacted via email - alwaysshinebrightly@gmail.com