Work-life balance: it’s the elusive goal of almost every professional. Try an experiment. Ask anyone in your personal or professional network how he’s doing. Chances are, he will immediately start talking about how stressed out he is.
The answer, of course, is to bring in an expert — like, for instance, feng shui authority Ariel Joseph Towne, who provided the readers of The Levo League with a few tips for achieving balance in any area of your life. (Or, if you’re like most of us, in all of them.)
Here are few of her suggestions for getting back into balance:
1. Create a picture.
Visualization is a popular tool of health advisers ranging from your friendly neighborhood GP to the hypnotist that helped your aunt quit smoking. The idea is that if you picture success, you’re more likely to achieve it. (Certainly more likely than if you were visualizing failure, anyway.) Towne recommends creating a picture of your perfect life, making sure, of course, that you’re not focusing solely on one aspect of it, like career.
2. Eliminate anything that doesn’t fit in the picture.
“This might include old thought patterns of not having enough time to do everything, it might mean letting go of certain relationships,” Towne writes. “It might just mean starting with acceptance about the way life exists now, today, in this moment.”
3. Reframe your problems.
It’s a cliche, but try to think of your problems as opportunities instead of insurmountable obstacles. At the very least, it’ll help you break old thought patterns that are holding you back, and let you see your dreams more clearly.
For further tips on using visualization to gain balance, read Towne’s column on The Levo League.
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