Score a 7 and you are
seriously out of balance |
Interpretation
of your
score is subjective.
Scoring low in even one area of life can make you feel
completly out of balance.
See below... |
Score a 70
and
you are in perfect balance |
When You Are Out of Control,
You Are Out of Balance
Excerpt from the book "No Two People See the Same Rainbow"
by Bill & Joann Truby
See Work-Life
Balance for more information
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There are seven areas or categories within which you live
life. We’ll
list them with bullets, and haven’t numbered them because
each one has
as much importance as another. There is no ranking in this list, and
there is no prioritization.
Here are the seven areas of life within which you live and a definition
of
each:
- Mental: What gives you mental
challenge, what stimulates your mind.
- Spiritual: The area of life
wherein you live out
your spiritual beliefs; this can be within the context of religion
solely, your connection with a sense of beauty and nature, your
connection with life as a whole.
- Physical: Anything that has to do
with your physical well-being—from nutrition to exercise.
- Relational: Anything that has to
do with your
relationships with other people from family to friendship to community;
the distinction here is relationships with people not with events,
tasks, functions or work.
- Emotional: The ability to be in
touch with and express your emotions.
- Professional: What you do for your
work or
profession, not necessarily only what you get paid for; this is the
place where you exercise your work related or professional related
talents.
- Recreational: Where you re-create
yourself; what you do for fun and diversions.
Every one of these areas must be fulfilled for you to feel in balance.
But no one can tell you how to fulfill them. Fulfillment is a
completely subjective criterion. We know of one person that has to read
multiple books a week to have their mental area of life fulfilled. We
know of another person who doesn’t read at all but watches a
news
magazine television show once a week to fulfill the need for mental
stimulation and challenge.
These two people are quite different yet each has a personal criteria
for fulfillment. If the first person read very few books in a week
there would not be fulfillment. Nor could the second person read books
to feel fulfilled. We have to follow our own subjective criteria for
fulfillment.
You may ask, “Where does our criterion come from?”
It comes
through the same process that our inner "programs" come from. In
essence, you have “program-like” dynamics that
surround
your criteria. If you use the same processes we talked about in chapter
six on finding your programs, you can begin to understand where your
criteria came from.
(Note: The book No Two People See the Same
Rainbow speaks of "programs" in the context of the subconscious drivers
that cause your behavior and attitudes).
What is more important, however, is understanding what your criteria
are more than where they come from. Certainly, you can change your
criteria by choice anytime you want. But the crucial concept here is
this: If any one of these areas is not fulfilled, you will feel out of
balance in all areas.
What You Can Do to Obtain Balance
At the core of feeling balanced or not is feeling in control of your
life or not. Typically, when a person scores a lower number in one of
the seven areas of life, that person feels like they are not in control
of that area. The person subconsciously perceives that something or
someone has taken away the ability to fulfill that lower scoring area.
For example, if "recreational" scores low, a person may say, "My
workload has gotten in the way of my not being able to get away as much
as I used to." Notice "work" has taken away the ability to fulfill the
recreational area of life.
The key then is to take control back. If you make any decision at all
to begin fulfilling a low scoring area, no matter how small the
decision or activity, magically, in an instant, you will feel in
control again. When you feel in control, you feel more in balance.
There is additional information on our Work-Life
Balance page.
Need a coach to work through this issue? Click
here. |
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