Is life balance important to you?

Is there an impact if you don’t have this balance in your life?

First of all let’s look at what the work–life balance concept is all about. It is the appropriate prioritizing between your career aspirations and your health, leisure, family and spiritual development.

Now more than ever we all play many different roles in our lives. These roles range from working to parenting to being a spouse, a friend, to volunteering. Even with all that, we should make an honest effort to make room to improve our own physical and mental well-being. It is not surprising that achieving balance with all of these competing priorities can be a challenge.

This concept of achieving balance can be a flawed concept. I say that because life management has never been about balance. It is doing what is important. Let me give you an example. You are at work and get a phone call that a very close family member has been in a serious car accident. What is your priority then? It should be to attend to the needs of that person and connect with all the other family that are close to the person injured in the accident. It is not to balance your work responsibilities with your family concerns, is it?

If you don’t prioritize properly, the stress in your life will be out of control. In fact, according to Statistics Canada, employees who considered most of their days to be quite stressful were over 3 times more likely to suffer a major depressive incident, compared with those who reported low levels of general stress.

So what do you do?

Why not consider the following;

• Ask yourself every morning; who are the most important people in my life today?
• What can I do to show this?
• How can I improve the life I’ve been given?