Balancing work & life Understanding yourself
Understanding yourself and what you want to achieve enables you to live a fulfilling life. Look at your beliefs, be sensitive to your emotions, assess your priorities, and plan action.
Chapter 1 – Analyzing yourself (I)
Achieving a work-life balance involves challenging the way you think and behave. Use your beliefs, perceptions, choices, and actions in strategic ways to reach the balance you need. Think positively and take responsibility for your choices and decisions.
Understanding beliefs
You have beliefs about everything, including work, life, success, and happiness. These beliefs influence your choices and actions. It is often the case that people who have a poor work-life balance have limiting beliefs such as “success must have price”, “long hours are unavoidable”, and “a social life comes later”. Write down any limiting beliefs you hold and be as honest as possible.
Perceiving clearly
Perception is subjective and describes the way that you see things and the way you interpret experiences. Be aware that perception is a choice: there is always another way of seeing things. Change your perceptions and turn problems into opportunities, challenges into stepping-stones, and setbacks into “set-ups” for greater success and happiness. Be prepared to look for solutions so that you will stand a good chance of finding them. Stay open and be flexible.
Thinking positively
Psychologists estimate that people think approximately 40,000 thoughts per day and are responsible for choosing their thoughts. Try to put your past experiences and conditioning to one side so that you create fresh ideas and lateral solutions – this is known as “possibility thinking”. Be willing to let your old ideas make way for the new, because changing your thinking can change your life. Make sure that you help your team think positively rather than negatively too, because it will change the results they achieve.