I’ve been discussing the Natural Success principle of “I am” and the “Truth”. Once you have a foundation in who you are and how your ideas affect your life, understanding balance is a logical next step. Balance is the third Natural Success principle.
Balance is adjusting more or less of something. Stress is a great indicator for the need to balance in your life. When you are stressed, you need to do more of something and usually less of something else to get yourself out of your predicament. For example, if you are having trouble with your boss, you need to find a way to resolve your differences and to create harmony in your relationship. That is what you need to do more of. What you may need to do less of is to have an attitude that it is impossible to get along with your boss. That kind of attitude sabotages any attempts to improve your relationship.
Often people think of balance as a fifty-fifty proposition. It can turn out fifty-fifty, but it is more important to think of balance as the proper adjustment that will work and give you the results that you want. An obsessive person concerned with technical precision might approach his evening shower by noting where the hot water knob is halfway open and where the cold water knob is halfway open; for him, this adjustment of the knobs is a balanced shower. For most people, we adjust the hot and cold water according to the situation. When we come in from a jog and are hot, we lean towards a cold shower. If, on the other hand, we have been working hard and want to relax our tired muscles, a warmer shower works better. Balance produces the result we want. If we think we are living the “balanced” life but we still aren’t getting what we want out of life, then we are not balanced enough in the area where we are failing.
The great thing about balance is that it is so simple. You just do more of something and less of something else. That’s simple enough, but sometimes not so easy. Ever been in a financial crisis? What can you do about it? What’s wrong with the balance? Money is a great monitor because your bank account tells you right away what your balance is in regards to money. If you’re short of money, you can do more of: 1) working to make money, 2) saving and not spending, or 3) investing. There are other things you could do as well, but let’s suppose you just decided to work more. What would that entail? You do more in the way of : 1) working more hours at your job, 2) getting more jobs, 3) going to school to get another job that would make more money. There are many options, but let’s say you chose to work more hours at your present job. Of course, some jobs don’t allow that, but even if you could, you may not have enough hours in the day to make enough money to accommodate your financial obligations. You would then have to become an expert at time management to free up more hours in the day. After you created more hours for work, you might not have the energy to keep going. You would then have to be skilled at stress reduction. As you can see, balance is simple enough to talk about, but putting it into practice takes some effort — more or less.