#600: Creating Work-Life Balance

We always think it's other stuff that tilts us out of balance in our life. Right? In this kind of mythical quest for work life balance, we say, well, you know, I've been dealing with all this family stuff or work got really intense or whatever it is. Yet we find that as soon as we clear that thing off our plate that got us so out of balance, most of the time, we end up piling stuff right back into that cleared spot. In other words, it's not stuff that pulls you out of balance in your life, it's you. You're the one who tilts your own self back out of balance over and over and over again. So the key to getting into work Life Balance isn't actually arranging all the stuff. We always think it's arranging the stuff. It's actually arranging you arranging yourself. Welcome to episode number 600 of Flow Dreaming. It's called Creating Work Life Balance, and that is what we are to delve into today. Flow Dreaming. It's a show where we talk about the power of your mind to change your world around you, to literally affect the fabric of your reality. We talk about this feeling of hope and joy and relief, and that is what being aware of your flow does. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. Breathe. I'm Summer McStravik, and welcome to another episode of Flow Dreaming. Hey, everyone, it's Summer here. And before we even get started, right off the bat, I've got two cats in my office with me today. They tend to fight, so if you hear any snarling in the background, that is not me or my stomach growling, it may indeed be kitty cat, especially rubbing up against the microphone, etc. I've also got a lot of work and stuff going on in my house. Happens to be spring break, so the whole family is home. In other words, if you guys are hearing a bunch of noise, it's just. It is. It's noise, please ignore it. I decided I'd rather just jump in and get some great new content out there instead of waiting for everything to be perfect. Which, by the way, is a great idea for an upcoming episode. Right? Stop waiting for it to be perfect and just give something. Just get going. But that's not today. Today we are creating a balance in our life, in our work, and I think this idea kind of popped up in me, like, yeah, I want to look into that. I want to talk about that. I want to get us all into Flow around that, because I was remembering a time maybe a decade ago. I think what happened is I was actually on my phone, and if you have an iPhone, they have this nifty new thing where they will organize your pictures for you, and they'll say things like, this time last year or this time in 2012 or whatever it is, and then they'll show you this little slideshow montage of all the pictures you took that day. And I started looking at these, and I just got fully, like, captivated by them. And it made me remember. Oh, yeah. I remember when I used to take the kids out to the zoo and the wild animal park at least twice a month. I remember when we used to take a walk on the beach after work every day in the summertime, and we would just walk along the water with the kids, and they just run around and play. And Charles and I got to talk, and. And I was thinking, I haven't done a lot of those things in a very long time. What happened? And I thought, oh, I think my work life balance got a little out of hand. When did that happen? And I began tracing forward in my life from that one sort of happy memory time. And I realized, well, you know, I went through cancer, went through treatments. I went through really expanding flow, dreaming, starting mi, school, moving. And I thought, my God, what a lot of things I have done in just the last couple of years. You know, four surgeries. One, two, three. Yeah, four or five surgeries. I mean, just kind of a lot. No wonder. No wonder I'm at where I'm at, which is taking another look at my work life balance now, oddly enough, a lot of my life is situated better than it's ever been before. You know, I work for myself. I have, and I work from home. My husband's beautifully able to do the same thing. Our kids have grown to the point where I'm not having to constantly make sure they've swallowed a nickel or something. In fact, my daughter's driving now, so they're pretty much watching over themselves. I have a lot, a lot of beautiful time that's actually opened even more than ever in my life. And yet the way that I've filled it, I've realized, became part of a habit, a habit that I developed from years past, right from the last, say, five years, when I had a lot. A lot more to shoulder than I am now. And yet I've still been acting like I have to continue to shoulder that much. So all of this led me down this merry little path of looking at what is work life balance. How do I get back into it? The first thing for me, of course, has been the revelation. So I mentioned it's spring break and I've had a really nice time. I've been up to Anza Borrego. I went looking at flowers, they were so beautiful. The whole desert is erupting in gorgeous, you know, orange poppies and blue lupine and these tiny little yellow daisies, probably a billion, I am not joking, a billion of them. Carpeting the floor bright yellow, that's all you can see. There is no sand, it's just a sea of bright golden yellow. And that is what I want to do more of another trip up to la, to Beverly Hills, to some museums. My kid love. My kids love cruising around, looking at all the Hollywood stuff and the old cemeteries, they just love that. So I have been working hard, this break, to get myself right back into balance. And I gotta say, I'm feeling a lot better, just a lot more. Well, I can't say I'm rested. Obviously if you've done all that stuff, you don't feel rested. But there's something else in me that's feeling more in alignment. So I'm going to share with you today what I've done, what I'm doing and maybe let you take a look and say, hey, yeah, I need to get this thing under control too because I tend to veer off. I tend to get myself down a direction, down a path and then I forget what balance ever, ever looked at. So first of all, I want you to look at your life and all the little pieces and parts in it as just stuff, right? Stuff that has to get done, be handled, taken care of. A lot of it's exciting stuff, stuff we've asked for, stuff we want, stuff we've been co creating. It's brilliant and beautiful. A lot of stuff is just mundane, you know, it's like paying the bills and buying groceries. It's nothing that really thrills us. But we do it because it's part of maintaining this broader life that we making, developing, creating for us. So remember this, it's not the stuff that tips you out of balance. It's almost never having all of this in your life. It's the way you're handling the stuff in your life. You're always the ones who tilt yourself out of balance. And I know this so well because I have cleaned my plate so many times of stuff my whole history, my whole, all of my decades. Look at yours too, is a bunch of stuff we've all cleared through, right? We're not doing that anymore. We did that two years ago, five years ago, two months ago, all that stuff has been cleared and cleaned out and frankly, handled going forward. The question is, how much stuff are you going to put in? But more importantly, are you going to let it get you out of balance as you're experiencing it? That is always you and that is always in your power. So if your first thought is, I am a subject, I am a pawn of the things in my life and other people and other expectations and work and all that, I'm just, I have to do what all the outside stuff is telling me. That is wrong. That is wrong. You are choosing to do all of this outside stuff. You are choosing the balance of it, you're choosing the maintenance of it. You're choosing what's inside your life, you're choosing all of this. So that's the very first idea to take in. You're the one who has all the power when it comes to the alignment and the balance of your life. And if you say that it's the outside that's causing you or forcing you to do for it, please reevaluate that pronto, pronto, pronto. Because it's wrong. And that will always keep you in a powerless, powerless position. So now you know that it's you. You're the one who tilts yourself out. And you know this. Cause every time you've pushed more stuff and completed it, you allowed and created and brought in more stuff, right? That's your doing, not life. It'll push, push its way in, but you're the one who has the door to open or close to it. Right now. Let's chunk down that stuff. Get real practical for a second. I want you to chunk it down into daily balance, weekly balance, monthly balance. Now you can look at the flow of stuff that comes in and out of your life from these three fields of vision, these three perspectives. Now, all the stuff in your life, remember, it's always flowing in, it's always flowing out. And you can add more in and you can take stuff away. You can tinker with the amount, but don't get stuck on the amount. Like that's the first thing that we tend to do. We get stuck on the amount. If only I had less, I'd be in more balance. Not true. Those of you who have less, you have probably filled yourself right back up again into a state of imbalance again, because it's not outside of you, it's you. You're the determining factor. But before we get into that, let's go back to daily, weekly and monthly balance. So your daily Balance. If you're really wanting to kind of get in there and put a schedule down and enforce a little bit of control. And you know me, I'm very touchy about that word control, especially because I teach flow dreaming, which is sort of a release of control. But if you wanna start with that because you feel like I'm so out of alignment, this is the only way, somewhere I can get back in, then I suggest daily balance. Now, daily balance means that you're creating a to do list. And the things on this list have a great degree of variety. So, for instance, I actually keep several to do lists. And the reason I keep them is not to force myself to do more, do more, do more. It's because I dislike the feeling of having a lot of stuff stuck up in my head that I might forget. So I find that my personality is. I work extra hard remembering that stuff. Oh, don't forget. Oh, don't forget. And then I have anxiety. Oh, I think you forgot something. And, oh, you right. If I write it down, it's a way of purging for me. And I go, oh, okay, I don't have to keep that in my mind because it's down on some paper somewhere where I can go and find it. And there we go. All good. So I have several of these lists. One of them are work related things. These are the work tasks that I'd like to chip away at today or this week. I also have another list. In fact, I'm looking at both of them right now. One's called home. And it has a list of things that need to also be done today, this week, right? I've got some drywall patching, gotta get some SAT planning for Lexi on the board. Gotta look at my summer travel plans, have a tree that needs to be trimmed in my yard, stuff like that, right? But when I'm looking at my daily plan, my weekly plan, I can say to myself, well, I'm gonna make these two phone calls on my home list and I'm going to do these four things off of my work list. Now, your daily balance then kind of grows into, well, your weekly balance, right? Seven days of all work list. That's not balance. But I can also say, well, I didn't really get anything done on my home list. But I know Friday, Saturday, Sunday, it's all home stuff, right? Because Tuesday and Wednesday I'm going to be working long and late. Big days for me, right? So now I'm kind of playfully shifting the balance around. In fact, I'm doing that Friday Coming up for me is going to be home repair day. Charles and I have already talked about it. We have again, another list of projects that we think we can knock out together in about a day. So what I'm trying to do here is create this kind of variety throughout my week, right? Some time with the kids. We just invested a lot in that, taking them on these trips and doing stuff. Now we're investing some time in the house, some time into work. And I'm trying to keep it playful. I'm trying to keep a lot of variety there. Because for me, this becomes balance. And I want to actually refer you back to another one of my show. It's episode 597, Healthy High Impact Morning practices. Because don't forget that, right? That's a big part of our balance. The time that you have for you, right? That's incredibly important. All the stuff you do during the day, you might say, well, inadvertently, it's for me, because if I work, I get to pay for my mortgage, and that mortgage is paying for me to have a roof over my head. But that's not really for you. That whole show, that whole episode is devoted to just that. So I'm gonna presume you've got that piece down as part of your daily weekly balance. What about monthly balance? How about that third chunk? Daily, weekly, monthly? So the way that I'm looking at my months and I'm kind of creating balance in my months is that I'm recognizing, all right, I've got some big stuff going on at work. I'm starting to write a new book. No joke. I've been hinting and teasing around about it for a while. I feel like sometimes if I tell you guys, then it's kind of making me, you know, finally fulfill on it because I've already put it out there, right? So it's a little accountability. Thank you, guys. But when I'm writing a book, it means that my monthly balance is going to shift because now I have to factor in writing mornings, which means that the rest of my work might get a little extended and longer. So to keep myself in balance there, I have to really, really add in more of the activities that I like elsewhere in my life, like taking my daughter out shopping, taking my son and some of his friends, you know, out to K1, do some go kart racing, getting up there in my garden, getting everything plante finally. I mean, it's about time. Spring is almost sprung and over, but I'm paying attention to that. So if I'm gonna put in Four really, like long, you know, hard done days, writing and just taking care of stuff. You bet. My weekends or the other days I take off are gonna be even more important now. Not everyone structures their months the same. If you're in a 9 to 5 job, yeah, you're probably doing Monday through Friday, but maybe not. Maybe you have a work at home day, maybe you have a short Friday day. Look at all of the ways that your time is presently structured and be very conscious of what you're filling, what you're putting into it. You might say, well, I'm starting to go to the gym more somehow. I said, for a long time I don't have any time to go to exercise classes. And yet in January I said, I'm going to start going. And now I go to three a week and I'm still getting everything else done. I made it happen by carefully rearranging because that's part of the balance of my health, which I realized needed to have a lot more focus again. So you chunk down your life daily, weekly, monthly notice. Where is it in balance? Where is it out of balance? Is it in balance pretty much for the whole month, but your weeks are not really in balance or your days are way out of balance. Just this shift in perspective will really help you see where you tend to overfill or overfill, excuse me, where you tend to shift or lean or tilt into one area more than others. Right. Maybe it's more family, family, family and taking care of people and other people and your new job that you're trying to. Your side gig, you're trying to get off, keeps getting pushed to the side, pushed to the side, pushed to the side. It's out of balance. You keep tilting yourself into another direction. Really just being aware of that is often enough to start making the change. Now let me talk about another aspect of this sort of the third point I wanted to get into. For many of us, the key is how do we transition between these chunks? This is where oftentimes we fail. What ends up happening is we get so used to one environment that we adapt to it. And when we adapt back into a balance, it feels weird. So this is where I'm going to circle back to the beginning of the episode when I said I was looking back and I see some areas where I was a lot more in balance with my family life. And why? Well, when you have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 year old kids, you guys know this, they demand from you. You can't just shut the office door and say, not now. Honey, go entertain yourself for the next three hours. So I allowed myself joyfully, of course, to spend more time with the kids doing things, but I had to, and I loved it. But as they became more independent, I realized, oh, well, they can just be on their own a little longer and somehow. And then I had my health issues, and then I had more to hold at work because I had my health work. And over time, I shifted further and further away from my family balance. Now, I became accustomed to that. It became a normal feeling. But here I am recognizing I don't really want this normal feeling. So I'm trying to shift back now into more time with my family. More days driving down to the beach after, you know, the kids are home from school and just taking a walk on the sand and letting them run around and do whatever, picking up, you know, seashells. But doing it for me. I've realized it takes more effort, not because I don't want to do it, but because I have something I've realized over the years that causes me to not shift very easily from one thing to the next. I become, for instance, if I have a project at work, I will say, well, I'm going to stay until I finish it. I'm, you know, even recording my podcast. I'll say, you know what? I'm gonna record two. I'm not gonna stop until two are done, even if it puts me behind an hour. Because it's harder for me to transition out once I'm in the groove. Now, some people can transition in and out, put a hard stop to it, move on, floof, floof, floof. But I tend to get very, very focused. So I have to remind myself, pull back, stop. My husband's always knocking at the door, and he's like, summer, get up. Take a walk. You know, your Fitbit's going off. I don't think you've moved in an hour and a half. And I'm like, yeah, actually, I haven't, because I get locked in to a state of focus. So I've realized that for me, transitioning between chunks is a thing. It's a thing I have to constantly be aware of. Now, the bigger part of this is it leads to a situation where I become so, you know, habituated to one particular way of doing things, one sort of environment of balance. That shifting into a new environment of balance just feels weird. And maybe you have that, too, which is why I bring it up. Because if that's the case, you're also going to have to remind yourself, oh, you're Doing that thing where it's feeling really strange to stop at exactly, you know, five o', clock, get up and start making dinner. Right? If you're a kind of person where you're really focused and someone interrupts you and you get kind of irritable about it, you're probably more like me. Other people, they get interrupted and they just look up with a friendly face and say, oh, yeah, what do you need? Because they know they'll go right back to what they were doing. There's no irritation, there's no sense of being pulled out of something. So keep that in mind as you're noticing how you are shifting back into your balance. So I have an exercise for you I want you to do. I want you to recall a time right now when you felt more balanced. When you looked at your life and you said, yeah, work, life, health, personal time, family, all of it. Pretty, pretty balanced. Yeah, it was pretty balanced then. Got it. Should have just popped up in your head right now. How far are you from that state right now? Please differentiate this from an actual period in your life. You may never be 22 years old again, just, you know, with no responsibilities on your plate. But it's a feeling state. It's a state inside you where you felt like, yeah, I was kind of handling everything and I was holding it. Well, what was that? How far are you from that now? The next question is, do you think you could achieve that state of being again? Come on, you're smart, you're wise, you're older, of course you can. Of course you can. Just this time you might have to think about it a bit more. It may have been that at that time you didn't really think it through. And so you might look back and say, well, it was just lucky, or it was the time of my life, or all of these other external factors that led to it. Perhaps. But please don't live the rest of your life thinking you have to wait for external factors to give you the balance that you're looking for. Right? That is a core tenet of flow dreaming, A core tenet of flow philosophy, and of me, school, myself, my students, we work a lot on the recognition that, you know, we are masters of our destiny. We are co creators. If we choose work, life, balance, we flow it in with ease, with grace, with skill, with ability. And that's what I want for you too. So the next question is, what drove you out of balance? What drove you to where you are now? So in my personal story, I said, well, yeah, I got cancer. I Had to do a lot for it, a lot of therapy, surgeries. And then I was building, growing, expanding my company. Took a lot. The kids started to become more personally independent, which made me kind of release some of my hands on. And I look at these three factors and I realize, yup, makes sense. Had to do all that. But now I don't. I can reach right back in, right? I'm not doing all those therapies. I'm at a more stable position in my company. I can absolutely reach back in and find my balance again. What about you? What drove you? Last question. What do you need to do to enact to get yourself more into balance? What would that look and feel like? What parts of your life would that happen in? Now, if you're able to write these down, awesome. If you're just driving and you're thinking, awesome too, just write it down in your mind, speak it into your phone, tell it to record, record it for you, and send you a email to yourself of the idea. Sometimes that's what I do. But now you have a roadmap. Daily, weekly, monthly balance, transitioning between the chunks, recognizing you're the one who always tilts out, you're the one who can always tilt in. And finally, what do you need to enact to get back into that balance? Which pieces in which places? Now, one last little tip here, and this one is purely practical. It's just a little practical. What do they call it? Life hack. Here's a flow life hack. Maybe I had a. Maybe I had to make more of those flow life hacks. Though it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I have learned to automate as much as I can. So things like getting the toilet paper delivered to the house monthly, there's a lot of places you can do that with. Not just Amazon, there's Jet, there's all kinds of them. Google, you can just say, you know, I go through about this much toilet paper in a month and I don't have, I don't like running out all the time and, you know, stockpiling it. Get things automated, get your bills on an auto pay plan so all you have to do is look back and see what was paid, when, and check and make sure they were right. But you're not having to keep up and keep up and keep up and miss them and spend a whole Saturday morning, etc. There's a lot of things you can do. Buy in bulk, make that trip over to the bulk store and get those bulk cereals and get those bulk, you know, shampoos get those five bottles of toothpaste. It saves a lot. Whenever I buy something now that I know I'm gonna go through, I don't buy just one, I buy like four. Because I think to myself, that's four months before I have to do this again. What this does for me is it helps me clear out a lot of more space, more time to do the things that I really want to be doing, right? To go out with my kids for, you know, happy hour sushi, to spend some time in the evening with my husband, watching the sunset. To spend a little more time working on a good podcast topic with you. You. So that's a little hack I hope you can implement. Last thing you guys. Yes, you can flow for Life balance. And I really hope you will flow for life balance. I'm going to recommend a playlist for you right now. Go to flowdreaming.com, go to the shop and look for Program My Amazing Day Meditation and Flow Dream Playlist. It contains three tracks. One is a short one to get you you right back into alignment five minutes. The one other is a meditation. I want you to play it at night when you fall asleep. It's about getting you in balance. It's about setting up your day. It's sort of like putting it on autopilot, right? The personal growth work. In fact, all of your desire to get back in balance. If you flow dream for it, that is your autopilot, that is your buying in bulk because it's something now that's just going to kind of take care of it for you. Then there's a morning flow dream in that playlist too that gets you going and starts your day right and puts it in balance from the get go from the moment you wake up or you're driving to work in your car, listening whatever it may be. So I highly, highly, highly recommend Program My Amazing Day Meditation and Flow Dream Playlist. Of course, if you really want to do this with me, you've got to come in me school. I'm always going to throw that out there. My students are happy and thriving, getting themselves in balance, going bigger, doubling their businesses, falling in love. Oh my God. So many good things have been happening this spring. It's remarkable. So shout out to all of you guys. I'm very proud of you. So as we've been doing lately, we're not doing a flow dream here at the end, but if you're wanting to experience an actual flow dream, I encourage you scroll backwards in these archives and you will find dozens, hundreds of Flow Dreams at some point in each episode. Just this last year, we've been kind of playing around with this new form, so I'm gonna let you guys go with that. Please, please, please. Think about integrating some gorgeous balance in your life. Even if it's not a total overhaul. Maybe it's just one or two things. You're gonna pick up knitting again. You're gonna start your nightly scrabble game. You're gonna get to that. You know, what do they call it? Not tennis. Hobbit? Rabbit? What's it called? The squash? No, there's another one. It's kind of like tennis. I can't remember the name of it. How funny. I'm sure as soon as I stop recording, I will. Anyway, love you guys, and I'll see you next week. Another episode of Flow Dreaming until next time. Bye, everybody. Take care. Hey, friends, let's just take a second to point out a few really awesome resources for you every week. You hear me do this program as I wax on about some particular aspect of energy or life or growth. But I also have an amazing website that's filled with a decade of information, all on the same things, including the Flow Dreaming shop, where you can find all sorts of flow dreams, over 150 of them, that will help you fix up and shape up all different areas of your life. By the way, all the flow Dreams can be listened to on your phone or mobile device. You just have to have the app for that. So if you don't have that yet, just open up your app store in whatever kind of device you're on and download Flow Dreaming. You'll find a couple of apps. Actually, they're both free, and that will help you get even more deep into the world of flow. And with that, we're back to the program.