Are you in balance?
I am a true believer in looking at our life with a holistic view. You can't really enjoy anything great going on without having all your life areas together. Of course, there are always areas that work better than others, for example when your relationship and family area is working great, you might struggle with the friends or work area, that is just life bringing some bumps in front of us on our journey. But on an overall level, you can get so much power and energy from the stability of having your core areas in a great state. Problems and challenges come and go, but it is way easier to deal with them if you can have a positive mindset - and to get there, it is key to have a stable foundation in your life and focus on the key things for your mental wellbeing and overall satisfaction.
This is me, trying to find my balance :)
To reach this stability, one of the best tools to use is The wheel of life. This is a coaching tool used for so many purposes, I personally love to use it to have a temperature check on your whole life or on a specific, problematic area like self-confidence.
First of all, you need to define what are the most important life areas that you want and need to have in a nice shape to be in balance. Use for this purpose the 10 sections of the wheel, identifying those life areas and naming each section accordingly. Typically these can be life areas like Health, Work, Kids, Friends, Romantic relationships, Me-time, Sport, Sleeping, Eating, Laughing, Finances, Hobbies, Self-esteem, Personal growth, Spirituality, etc. As we are all different, there will be very different life areas identified for the wheel, so add here what YOU feel important and not what you SHOULD feel important. Life areas also change over time, so it might be worth checking this tool every now and then to see how we change and evolve and how our own necessities change with us. Since I am a mum, I have realized how much do I need to connect with myself, otherwise, I lose my balance way more often than I would want, so one of the life areas would be definitely Me-time, while 10 years ago this was not that important, I was happy without this. Also, health is super important for me now, while in my twenties obviously, this was not in focus.
The next step is to actually rate these areas, so draw a line across each segment that represents your satisfaction score for each area. The center of the wheel is 0 and the outer edge is 10, so choose a value between 1 (very dissatisfied) and 10 (fully satisfied) to rate how happy are you with that area and draw a line to mark it on the wheel. Just use the first number that pops into your head, not the number you think it should be!
this way you will get a wheel that might not be equal and round - now imagine if you had to use your wheel in a car, how well would that function actually? Would it take you far away or you would have a flat tire quite soon?
With this little activity, it can be quite visible how well-balanced are you in your current life phase. What is left is to see, what can you do to actually be stable and balanced?
Look at each life area and think it over, what do you really need to get the balance that could help you to navigate through life with a smile?
What is it that you could do already, today to get closer to a nice and round wheel? Make a list of all the actions you can think of, write it down, say it out loud. Remember that transforming thoughts into words is magic, that way the actions rise up from your subconscious into your conscious, logical level, and that way your brain can actually start to deal with the problem effectively.
You don't need to fix everything overnight, start with one area that feels best for you, sometimes quick wins can help you to gain more energy and motivation for further changes, and for others getting rid of the biggest problems would be extremely elaborating, so as always, just follow your instincts, but make sure that you do choose an area to work on first.
If you need support on how to understand the tool or how to analyze your options and possibilities, feel free to reach out, I am happy to support you! :)