Avoid the trap of trying to be too balanced

How do you get into the zone with ease and consistency – and maintain it? The short answer is balance. Think of when you have been in the zone. Likely, it was a time when you had the physical health and clarity of mind to address problems and resolve them.

The challenge is to avoid the unfortunate mental trap of always trying to be balanced. It is unrealistic and impossible to always be balanced. Inevitably, this utopian wish sets the individual off on a kind of quixotic crusade which ends up producing the exact opposite of what is intended. Instead of being in the flow, the individual finds they end up overwhelmed, frustrated and increasingly out of the zone. People end up getting stressed out about trying be balanced.

What I recommended in last month’s column is that you play what we call “The Game” to achieve more balance in your life in a realistic way.

Let me ask you a ridiculous question. If the game you were playing were baseball, would you really expect to bat 1,000? No. You would know that the point is to get up to bat and be as consistent as possible in striving for batting 1,000, but you would not leave the game just because you didn’t.

This may sound silly, but how many people end up leaving their field early or altogether because they could not achieve balance? In the last article, I challenged you to answer the question “on a scale of 1-10, how balanced is my life?”

This time, I want to take the process even deeper by having you examine and rate each day on a scale of 1 to 10. The trick here is to do this every day for 30 days and begin to examine when you seem to be most balanced in the day, the week and the month. Take a look at what are the people, places, things, activities and information that tend to provide you with more perspective and more balance.