Finding your Balance - Part 1

Balance

Many Americans find themselves at the very least mentioning the term “Work life balance” in discussions at work.  Some work forces even have training seminars or sessions covering this very philosophy.  Sometimes they will term the course something like Avoid Employee Burnout, Burnout Prevention, but in the end no matter how they spin the title what they are talking about in the end they are mostly talking about work life balance.  Many of us go to work everyday and we find ourselves living that job both in and out of our daily work hours and certainly that is a bad thing.  That by itself has a negative impact on our daily life balance but for many of us there are also other things that have that same negative impact.  Is work life balance really what we should be focusing on or is there a larger more menacing enemy in many of our lives that is burning us out in record time.  In many of our lives it's not just a work life balance that is wearing us down but instead it's just a much more simple term and that is simply “balance”.  It raises the question we all should ask ourselves, do I have a healthy balance in my life to avoid getting burned out?

What is Off Balance?

For many of us the answer to that last question is simply no.  So next question, what is throwing off the balance of my life?  Well I mentioned above one big culprit in many of our lives is work but there are many others that can cause issues in the balance of our everyday lives.  For example, work is not a bad thing.  We do live in a nation that follows an economic structure of capitalism which means having work most likely means you're making money to help sustain your life.  Many of the items we typically list in our “needs for survival” in America most of the time can only be gained or achieved through spending money which we obtain through whatever we term is our “work”.  That being the case we can safely say that work is not completely a bad thing but, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.  If you have a job that causes you to think about or actually work most of your daily life then in that case our “work” may have crossed the line of being too much which is affecting that life balance.  This is exactly why so many times our fellow co-workers are looking for a new job.  It's not necessarily because they don't like what they do but sometimes they feel they have to work excessive hours to make the necessary money to get all of their needs and wants.  Even if they don't realize it, what they are actually trying to do is improve their work life balance or more simply put their life balance.

Like our fellow co-workers, many of us are actually crying out for a better balance and don't even realize it, especially when it's related to things outside of our “work life” which is what we always associate with the balance issue.  Sometimes those elements can be something heavily disguised as a good thing making it harder to distinguish.  It's because of that that we have to do a bit of personal self analysis to figure out what is throwing off our balance.  

We have to remember that anything can be throwing off that balance!  Other items can be the exact opposite of working too much but instead we play too hard!  Fun and recreation all the time causes us to spend large amounts of money and perhaps also causes us to go to work much less often than our bills require us to do.  That can be disguised as a victory against that work life balance issue but in actuality it may be that we now have the opposite balance issue where we are not working in our particular craft enough and our play balance has taken over.  Though it can be anything so this is not a complete list other items that can seemingly take over that balance are finances, family, health, friends, and so on.  Its up to your analysis to figure out what is affecting you.