LIFE Balance begins with Self-Care
“We must eradicate the shame of rest and replace it with the pride of self-care.”
Juliet Funt
I sat in the Global Leadership Summit this year and heard these words and thought ‘I learned that the hard way’. This has been one of my biggest learnings these last few years while healing and recovering from burn-out. I have had to learn that it is okay to sit quietly reading or writing while the house waited to be cleaned. It is okay to take a gentle walk in nature instead of frantically marketing my new business. What would I have been able to give to my clients anyway, while in this state of burn-out?
“We can only give to others what we have.”
The Work/Life Balance Myth
The world speaks about work/life balance. In fact they advocate for this so loudly that where ever we look and most articles we read shout these words at us! I myself believed the lie of work/life balance. I would like to challenge this because I believe now that it teaches us that work is most important in our lives and somehow we have to balance the rest of our lives with WORK – it has become our source of satisfaction and achievement, our status, our identity, our qualifications, our credibility – and then we burn out and what good are we to anyone? Work is only one element of what makes up LIFE.
LIFE Balance
Life is the greatest gift we have been given and we can choose life or we can choose something else! Time on this earth is part of this great gift, may we use it wisely. We all owe it to ourselves to choose how we spend our lives and our time. What value do you give your time? Can you imagine if we had to consider time = money, how would we spend our time? Would we let others steal our time? One thing we cannot do is store up time, not like money! So when today is spent it is gone. What we can store up are the wonderful memories and moments in time that give LIFE!
We all owe it to one another to choose not to waste other people’s time. Have respect for family, friends, clients and colleague’s time. My hope is that we would not steal their money – likewise do not steal their time. We cannot blame others for wasting our time because we have a choice but we allow what we do! If we disrespect other people’s time we will allow others to disrespect our time. May we make an intentional effort to respect other people’s time and therefore give life and not drain life from them.
TIME for everything
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens. What do workers gain from their toil? There is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of Life. What do you give yourself permission to do with your time so that it gives balance to your LIFE?
#simplicity #purpose #unity