To have balance in your life you have to create space for you.
It may sound silly, but a great way to do this is to make an appointment to yourself. Treat it in the same way that you’d treat any other important appointment in your diary – i.e you honour that appointment and try to avoid cancelling it unless it’s an absolute emergency.
All you have to do is set aside 15 minutes each day to meditate, do some yoga or just relax and reflect; allocate a couple of hours a week to do some exercise, have a lunch with your friends, have a nap, have a long bath, or watch a movie that the rest of the household would hate – whatever makes you feel relaxed.
Pro-tip; for anything that needs peace and quiet, you may need to make sure you have an empty house, it’s hard to relax to a constant soundtrack of computer game music and shouts of “Muuuuuuummmm, I can’t find any clean socks” – get your partner to take everyone out to the park or time your downtime to coincide with activities that you don’t have to collect people from.
Take control
It can be stressful to not feel in control of your own life. If you’re constantly running around after everyone else or so stuck in a routine where it feels like there’s no room for manoeuvre, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and as if you have no say.
Design your life; don’t let life take over as default; you can control your time – be the driver, not the passenger.
Just say no…
If you’ve ever spent time on certain parenting forums online, you may already be familiar with the phrase “‘no’ is a complete sentence” – embrace this. Learn to say “no” – better still, learn not to add on reason for saying it, there’s power in a simple “no, sorry I can’t”, plus it doesn’t give anyone any room to try to argue with your reasons for not doing the thing. You don’t have to bake for every cake sale, you don’t have to stay up until 3am creating a model of the International Space Station out of yogurt pots because your kid forgot about their homework assignment, and you don’t have to go out for coffee if you don’t feel like it.
Do the things you want to do, have time and energy to do and which make you happy – don’t add to your stress with a default “yes”.
I’m not suggesting that you go out of your way to make other people’s life difficult or start being rude to people (unless you have the urge to reinvent yourself as a Dynasty-style Diva, in which case, fine, but do remember how many times they end up in cat-fights, and maybe reign it in from time to time), just don’t say “yes” to something you can’t realistically do just because you’ve been asked to do it.
If you like to have a free breakthrough call you can contact me to start a better balanced life!
