5 Ways to Achieve More Balance in Life

Welcome to the Charged life. This is Brendan Burchall. How do you achieve more balance in your life? You know, have you ever felt like at the end of the day, you're just completely wiped out and you just came through a crazy storm and that you have all these obligations and responsibilities in such a way that you feel completely depleted, and you just feel like saying, why do I have to do so much stuff? Why can't I get my life balanced? Or has someone said to you, your spouse, your wife, your lover, your kids, someone you care for, hey, I never get to see you anymore. I miss you being here energized, because you've just kind of torn your life apart and given it to everybody all over here. But I'm not getting anything from you anymore. Or have you ever just sensed that your priorities are out of whack? That, you know, you've compromised so much for your career or for other things that you thought you were supposed to do at the cost of your health or your joy or your sanity or your time off? What do you do about all that? Well, let me show you a couple strategies and a couple concepts and ideas about balance and how you can have more of it. Now, first and foremost, if you are a person who's like, dude, there's no balance. This is stupid. I'm moving on. You. You really need to watch this video, because that's become part of the popular victim mentality of the world, this belief that, well, look, there's never any balance. There cannot be balanced. I'm like, come on, don't be an extremist in your life. You know, don't be the person who throws the baby out with bath water and who just makes globalizations like that, because that doesn't make any sense. The way I look at it is, have you ever seen a kid start to ride a bike? It's like. Like their first time on a bike, and they start going down the street, and they're just a hot mess. They're, like, all over the place. You know, they're falling down, they're getting back on. They're going this way and that way with the front tire, like, they're barely hanging on. You're just like, oh, please don't die. You know, if you've ever seen a kid ride a bike, you saw them over a period of time start with little to no balance and develop better balance and then proficiency. That's the same way that you manage your life agenda. You know, if you're, like, right now, you feel like you've crashed and you're just completely out of balance, or you just feel like you're in this constant sort of road rage of trying to keep everything together, well, then that's okay. There's always better balance. There's always the next level of proficiency at managing your life. So don't quit, don't get jaded. Never be that person who just says, well, it's not possible. There's no such thing as work life balance. That's become very popular in our culture because our culture gave away their lives to work. Our culture made lots of excuses and reasons and made it socially acceptable to give away their lives to career. But you don't have to do that. There is a way to achieve balance. And let's talk about that. First and foremost, if you're ever going to do it and you're ever going to get better at it, at greater level of proficiency, you needed to decide, why do you need it? I know that sounds so basic, but everything we know about so much of human behavior and motivation comes from that question of why do I care about this? Why is it important to me? Why is it meaningful to me? And a lot of people haven't really revisited their life for a long time, and so they're just kind of taking on more obligations, more projects, more things to do, diving deeper into sort of distraction without ever saying what's really important to me right now, why do I want more balance and what does that mean to me specifically? So, for example, you might say, you know what? More balance to me, Brendan, is important because I just want to have more sanity in my life and I want more time with my kids. And I would say, well, what does that mean exactly? More time with your kids, as an example. And you would say, well, I want to have more time at the dinner table that I'm not worried about. I had to go text something or respond this email. Or you might say, well, Brendan, I want to get two more hours of sleep every night because recently we had a kid and it's impossible and everything's going crazy. Whatever it is for you, you need to know, why do you want it and what specifically would it look like? A lot of people bemoan, well, there's no possibility of having balance because they've never set a goal for what balance means and worked diligently towards it. They said, this is what balance means to me. Here I go. For example, I said, for me, health and vitality, that is important for me. I need to have that in my life. But there was a point in my life where it went away. So I started instituting that. I was going to work out every other day for an hour. And some people say, well, that wouldn't be possible in my life. It wasn't possible in mine either. I had to make it happen. We're all gifted with the same amount of days in terms of the hours in each day, I should say, and if that's true, then it's on us to decide how we're going to protect those times. If you said you're going to have dinner with your family that night, have dinner with your family, if you said you're going to work out, work out, obviously things come up in our lives. And I don't mean to be so hard on people in that I'm not understanding, because the easiest thing to do is say, well, Brenda, you don't understand. You don't understand why my life is out of bounds. I've got 14 kids, four jobs, four mortgages, and everybody hates me. You know, I don't know what your story is, but a lot of people have that big woe is me story. And I go, look, your story's not that original. We all have big demands. We all have career. We all got to earn money. We all got to take care of family. We all got to stay healthy. It's just that some people block that and protect it more than other people do. So here's how you can simply get more of your life back. Number one, most important thing you have to do is why do you want balance, and where do you want it? Number two, the thing that you have to do is immediately remove distractions. Most people aren't out of balance. They're in distraction. It's not that there's a lack of balance that's available to them. It's that they're watching hours of television or hours of content that doesn't add value to their life. Doesn't like this video, I hope, is adding value. It's giving you content instruction for what to do. A lot of folks spend time just looking at lifestyle magazines or, you know, People magazines, or watching, you know, silly news that has nothing to do with anything but gossip and tripe and scandal, and that's not going to help you ever achieve balance. Get rid of those things that aren't adding value to your life, and you start to realize, wow, I got another three hours to play with the day. Matter of fact, did you know that the Average American watches 4 hours of television a day? Now, you might not watch four hours of television Day. But let's say you consume four hours of media between Facebook and Twitter and Instagram or Pinterest, between the television, between magazines, between all this random stuff that you pay attention to. If you didn't consume that and you got, let's say four hours a day back, that would change everything. That four hours a day over the average adult lifespan is 13 years, 24, 7. If you got back more than a decade of your time, would it be worth it? Well, then all you would have to do is get rid of more distraction each year of your life, each week of your life, each day of your life. I really look at it very closely each day and I go, what could distract me? And I'm aware of when I'm in distraction because that time going to distraction is stealing from opportunity or joy or balance in all these other areas. Right? I know that makes sense to you, so make sure you do that. The third thing you have to do is say no. It's time to set some boundaries and stop saying yes to everything. And this is the point where Brendan says, people say to me, well, Brendan, you don't, you don't understand. I can't say no to these projects. I can't say no to the meetings. I can't say no to these things. I can't protect my time. I can't do these things. As an example at work because you know, my boss wouldn't like that. And I always go, hey, there's probably a lot of things your boss doesn't like about you already, right? So who cares? It's one extra thing your boss might not like about you when you start setting boundaries, at least it's protecting your sanity. Set the boundaries, start saying no to people and don't apologize for it, just be real about it. Say, you know what, I'm sorry I can't do that because I've previously agreed to these other things. Sorry, I can't do that because. Because I have this, I must go, do I have this email response in my life that I send out to people? I always get these requests, brendan, can you do this? Can you do this? And they're always last minute requests. So I write to them, I say, you know what, thank you so much for thanking me. I'm sorry I can't participate. The reality is that I have projects and priorities that have been scheduled for months and some of them for years, and I can't drop those off or cut in line for you because your last minute request, because that would be unfair to the other people who Were thoughtful and scheduled a long time in advance. I know this is important to you, but unfortunately, I'm already scheduled and unable to participate. I wish you all the best, Brendan. No apologies. Sometimes you have to learn to say no. Because where you've said yes in too many areas, that's all these hours you're handing out, right? That's the way I want you to think about it. All your yeses to other people, those are ours. And the more hours you hand out, the less balance you feel. So at some point, you have to stop handing out so many hours to people. Now, at this point, you might be thinking, but you don't understand. My life is out of balance because I just had recently had kids or I recently got sick or this recent thing blew up in my business and everything's crazy. And to those times, all you can do is to do your best and allow yourself to struggle for a little while, but have the intention to get back to balance. That's where people get jaded, is they struggled for so long but never had the intention or the goal or the ideas or the structure or the ability to say no or get rid of distraction. And so they gave away their balance and never tried to return to it. Sometimes life takes away our balance. You know, many of you know I had a brain injury in 2011, and when I had that brain injury, it took me out of balance for a year and a half. But every day I was working back towards gaining, Getting more balance in my life. And it just has to be a desire, and I don't make it light. It's hard. It's a struggle. But you deserve to give yourself that permission to start saying no, to start protecting your time so that you can move back into more hours. And with more hours, then you can be more judicious about where you spend your time to getting back a little bit more of that balance. You might not be able to get all of it, but you'll get more of it back. And then, last idea, be more explicit in communicating your boundaries. Be more explicit in communicating your time. So if you're going to go to a meeting, sit down and say, guys, I have 45 minutes today for this meeting. Can't go a second over. And they're like, oh, okay, and stop going over on your times. If you said you were going to work out for an hour, work out for an hour, stop, go. A lot of the, what I call bleed time ends up taking away from our balance. Bleed time is those things where you're. You go over on Things that you didn't need to go over on, you know, that, that one cocktail with your friend ended up being on 16, you know, and you lost the entire night now. Or that one, you know, lunch meeting you were going to have turned into four hours and now you lost the day of work or that one show you were going to watch before getting back to work turned into a whole season and you're like, oh no, the day, the night is gone. That's called bleed time. It's where so much time just dissipates because you didn't stick to your mark. So set your boundary, communicate it clear with people and don't go over on things anymore. A lot of people, if they just started with the intention, said we're only going to do this for this much time and then we got to go. If they stuck to that, they would get better balance. And then here's the last idea, very simple for you. If you want more balance in your life, you need to improve your health. You need to get back and get in balance in your well being. And that begins with sleep. That begins with meditation. If you add more sleep and you add more meditation, you are more focused throughout the day. You are more productive. We can prove by neuroscience you gain 30% more cognitive ability. And that just means you're much more efficient and effective throughout the day. So you get more done so you can be more balanced, so you can deal with stress better, so so that you're stronger to say no to people so that you recognize and see distractions versus getting sucked into them. All these things will help you get back in control of your life. You might not ever gain perfection, you might not ever gain perfect balance, but you can get better balance and you must believe in that. When you start developing better balance, you start to experience what we call the charged life. Hey everyone, it's Brendan. Did you like this episode? Be sure to subscribe to the next one and tell a friend about us. If you want free books and world class training on motivation and high performance, visit me@Brendon Burchard.com and enter your name and email for our newsletter list. Until next time, stay charged and go out there every day of your life and live fully, love openly and make your difference today.