What is balance when it comes to looking at your life as a whole? You might think of balance as allowing you time for everything, but the truth is that there are a finite number of hours in the day. Balance could just as easily mean learning how to be realistic about what you can accomplish in a day and figuring out what is most important to you. With this in mind, the tips below can better help you understand and achieve the balance that you need.
Prioritize
There is an interesting exercise that you can do that involves writing down the things that are most important to you and then the things that you spend most of your time on. When people do this, they often find that there is a big disconnect between the two. Of course, there are some things you can’t avoid. For example, you have to go to work because you need money. However, you may also be wasting time on things that really don’t have any value for you, like watching TV shows you don’t enjoy or spending too much time on social media. Think about how you can better get your values and your daily life to reflect one another.
Consider Your Financial Resources
The above exercise largely looks at the resource of time, but money can be a factor in finding balance as well. Having money can mean that you can work less, or it can give you the freedom to start your own business. You may have resources you have not really considered in the past. Your home may be worth more than you realize, or you may have an old retirement account that you forgot about. If you have a life insurance policy that you no longer need, you could potentially sell it as part of a life settlement. This can allow you to get cash for certain types of policies. You can learn more about the best life settlement companies and review a guide on how to identify them.
Learn the Word ‘No’
The word ‘no’ is an important tool in reclaiming a sense of balance in your life. If you are like most people, at least some of the time that you could free up for more important things is taken up with obligations you didn’t know how to get out of. While you can’t say no to everything you don’t want to do, there are almost certainly things that are not necessary and that add no value to your life or that are actively detrimental that you could drop.
Accept Imperfection
It may seem like a paradox, but one of the keys in achieving balance is accepting that balance doesn’t really exist or at any rate that there is no perfect version of it. The idea behind finding balance is not to endlessly expand how many things you are able to do but to be comfortable with what you can accomplish and at peace with the fact that some things are going to fall by the wayside and go undone. Are you doing the things that matter most? This is what you should be striving for.