Your life is busy. You’re constantly running from here to there. You feel overworked, unappreciated, exhausted, and unfulfilled. Most days you try to just get one thing right, but often you feel like you are failing at everything. A balanced, enjoyable, flourishing life sounds like a pipe-dream, wishful thinking, or something you might get to experience when you’re retired.
What a Balanced Life Looks Like
Imagine for just a moment though what a balanced and flourishing life, in your present season, could look like. You wake up feeling rested and prepared for the day ahead. The work you do during your day is fulfilling, enjoyable, and gives your life a sense of meaning and purpose. But your work does not overwhelm you, you work hard when it’s time to work, and walk away when the work day is done.
You have goals for your personal and work life and you are making regular, intentional progress toward those goals. You live a life of gratitude, generosity, and enthusiasm. Your relationships are important to you and you regularly spend time connecting with your kids, your spouse, and friends. You also take time for yourself, prioritizing your needs above the needs of everyone else at times to make sure that you are able to serve others from your fullest potential.
Choosing to live a balanced life.
I recognize that if you are currently living a life that is overwhelming and unbalanced these last couple paragraphs sound impossible. It might be nice for someone else but it’s just not realistic for you. My friend, your life is what you make of it. You have the power to change course at any moment. If you don’t like how your life currently looks or more importantly if you don’t like how you regularly feel and experience your life then it is time to grab the bull by the horns and create an intentional life you love.
It is possible. It will take focus and intentionality. You’re going to have to work hard and fight for your dreams. But you are worth it.
You’re not going to get there by tomorrow, but you can take gradual baby steps toward developing not only a life you love, but also a life that allows you the chance to make an impact on your family, in your career, your neighborhood, community, and the world. Here are the four elements you need to start moving from overwhelmed to balanced and flourishing.
1. Health Focused Self-Care
The very foundation of everything we do revolves around our physical, spiritual, and mental health. You get one body and one mind. If you aren’t taking care of them you are doing yourself and the people around you a major disservice. You won’t be able to impact the world to the fullest extent possible if you make poor health choices. So first things first, we prioritize our health by taking care of our body, mind, and spirit.
This isn’t the frilly #treatyoself style of self-care that involves things like daily lattes, pedicures, and buckets of chocolate. When I talk about self-care I actually mean doing the things that are good for you, even when they don’t necessarily feel great in the moment.
This means eating nutritious foods that fuel our body well and being physically active to keep our bodies strong and able. It also means we get proper rest, we take time for relaxation, and we regularly participate in activities we enjoy that fill us up.
Beyond our physical bodies, we also pay attention to our spiritual health by taking time to pray, study the Bible, meditate, practice mindfulness, and live a life of love and compassion.
And finally, we focus on our mental and emotional health. This can involve practicing gratitude, journaling, being open and vulnerable with those around us, and getting professional help from a therapist or psychiatrist when needed.
Additional resources for this element of a balanced life
- Real Self-Care is Often Uncomfortable
- How to Make Time for Self-Care
- 8 Ways to Sneak in Exercise
- Four Pillars of Healthy Eating
- Five Steps to Refresh Your Faith
- 12 Daily Habits to Improve Your Mental Health
2. Mindset
Your thoughts and belief systems lead to your results in life. If you’re not getting what you want out of life it is literally all in your head. To practice this element of a balanced life, we work to develop a growth mindset, we learn to focus on the positive, practice gratitude, and work to create the thoughts and belief systems that will guide us to the results we seek to achieve in our lives.
Your brain is what it is and tries to do what it wants. Fortunately, God also gave us a mind. You can have control over how your mind operates and thinks. Don’t live on autopilot allowing your thoughts and beliefs to run rampant. Choose your thoughts on purpose and stop believing lies that aren’t serving you.
Additional resources for this element of a balanced life
- Direct Your Thoughts to Change Your Life
- The Mindset You need to Do Things that Blow Your Own Mind
- How to Use Your Mind to Calm Your Anxious Thoughts
- 10 Tips to Develop a Growth Mindset
3. Productivity and Organization
Once you’ve got your health and mind on track, it is time to get organized. This is where we leave the hot mess life to develop systems, habits, and routines that will set us up to succeed. We create goals, plans, and develop time management skills to focus and do the things we need to get done. We don’t let busyness and stress run our lives.
One of the biggest struggles I hear from other women is that it is so hard to find motivation, self-discipline, and willpower to do the things you know you should be doing. We’ve all been there, but we don’t have to stay there. Action begets motivation. A woman with a balanced life knows that the real secret to success and flourishing is just to get to work. (I’ll be sharing tips and tools in future posts on practical ways to actually do this.)
Additional resources for this element of a balanced life
- Quarterly Goal Planning Workbook
- 10 Tips on How to Create New Habits
- 4 Tips for Finding Laser Focus
- How to Keep a Clean House as a Working Mom
- 5 Lessons I’ve Learned about Self-Discipline After Running Every Day for Two Years
- Develop a Daily Habit through a Streak Challenge
4. Impact
You weren’t put on this earth just to live an awesome life for yourself. I have a hunch that somewhere inside of you there is a desire to make this world a better place than when you arrived.
Most of us probably won’t make a famous and global difference, but all of us can make our corner of the world better. We start small and we start in our homes, our neighborhood, and our community.
For this element, you will want to take some time to examine what sets your heart on fire and keeps you up at night. Then take those passions and work to discover ways to do something about them, even in the midst of your full and busy life. When we focus outside of ourselves to make the world a better place we are able to feel fulfilled and find more meaning in our lives.
Where to Start
These four elements are exactly what we focus on at Working Mom’s Balance. The truth is that living a balanced life requires constant focus, attention, and adjustment. When we live with intention we will always be learning, growing, and changing.
There will never be a day that you can proclaim that you have arrived. But you may find that one day you wake up and look around to realize that you really are flourishing and enjoying your life. You’ll realize that your days of exhaustion, burn out, and overwhelm are over. You now live a life of contentment, peace, and joy. You feel fulfilled and purposeful and you know you are making your world a better place.
If you’re ready to begin this journey toward a balanced and flourishing life then start taking small steps today. I’d suggest you start with the first element of health-focused self-care. This is the foundation necessary for everything else. Once you have implemented some healthy changes in your life and started making progress on that element you can move on to working on your mindset.
You’ll revisit each element over and over again as you grow so don’t try to get things perfect. Pick one small change, work on it until it is well established and then focus on something else. I’ve included links for each of these elements that can help you get started. The most important thing is forward progress, not picking the right thing or perfection, so pick something and get to work.
I’d love to hear about one small change you are making related to these four elements in the comments below.
Great article!
Every single resonated deeply with me.
Thanks for writing this up!