Show Notes:

Balance is a very polarizing word, isn’t it? Some people claim it’s not even possible. Or they say things like “balance is a myth.” Or “balance is a unicorn…pretty but fake.” I believe that balance is not only real, but very possible. It’s neither a myth nor a unicorn. I think where we get tripped up with balance is in how we define it.

So before we dive in today, i want to define balance for you by telling you first what balance is not. All of this by the way is in the introduction of my book Finding Your Balance.

Balance is not doing everything
Balance is not doing everything your friends are doing
Balance is not doing everything your friends think you should be doing
Balance is not doing everything you see people doing on social media
Balance is not doing everything well
Balance is not doing everything by yourself, without help
Balance is not doing a little bit of everything each day
Balance is not spreading yourself equally among every person, task, responsibility, and expectation
Balance is not the absence of stress or conflict: Stress and conflict are part of life.

After 20 years of trying to do all those things and defining balance in those ways–and of course, failing, because no one can do those things–I realized that a better definition is this:

Balance is the peace I have when I know my priorities (what I should be doing) and I live my priorities (how I should do it), through freedom in Christ (operating in my gifts and strengths and I have right attitudes and right thinking.)

That is a loaded definition. I spend my entire book Finding Your Balance unpacking it and leading you through a process to discover true balance. But today I want to just zero in on a very specific situation. What happens when you had balance, but now you feel like you can’t quite get your footing. Like you had it for a time, but now you’ve lost it. And not just for a little while, but you realize that you actually lost it-lost it! And you need to make some real changes.

That’s me right now.

So in this episode and the next one (and maybe more, we’ll see) I’m going to use my current life as a case study–not after I have it “all figured out” and then look back and tell you what I did. That’s what I usually do. That’s basically every blog post, podcast episode, and book I’ve ever written: “Let me teach you what I learned after I walked through this thing”

But today, I’m taking you through the beginning of my process of finding my balance in real time so you can find your balance too.

I’m beginning by asking three no-judgment questions:

Question 1: What feels off-balance or what is wrong?

Question 2: Why is this happening? What has shifted to cause this loss of balance?

Question 3: What do I expect right now?

Come back next week for practical action steps to take from here.

LINKS

Finding Your Balance is available on Amazon

EP149: Unmet Expectations

27 Real Ways to Grow Your Audience Outside of Social Media

Carrie Crutchfiled, Photographer

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