Wondering why work/life balance is a cruel joke? There’s no basis in reality if you live your soul’s purpose. When you are living an ageless lifestyle after 50, your ageless mind is very active, always learning new things and developing new interests. Balance goes out the window and is replaced with a curiosity for life that continues to evolve.
Back in the early 80’s I believed, and taught, that you needed to find balance in your life. The motivational, success and self help books I read made me feel like it was required to have a well rounded life with equal emphasis on all possible areas of life.
Those Life Segments Are:
Family
Business
Spiritual
Social
Community Contribution
Financial Success
Personal Growth
Physical Fitness
The goal back then as I was taught was that you were supposed to have an interest in all these areas and always be working to not only improve each area of your life, but make them all equal.
And in my 20’s I worked really hard at doing this. The only problem was I didn’t have equal interests in all of them and that made it difficult to reach that level of perfect equality.
[Tweet “For many years now I’ve believed balance is a myth for the most part.”]
Trying to live your life be in balance doesn’t work in reality. You are a constantly changing and growing person, acquiring new interests and achieving new levels of excellence in one area or another all the time. What these life segments give you is a place to make clear and informed choices from. There is no blanket wrong or right. It’s whatever works for you.
And your life is in a constant state of ebb and flow when it comes to how much of each is currently important in your life.
For example, for almost 20 years I lived and worked with the man in my life. I had a hard rule of not talking about work after the work day was done. Once we got to a restaurant for dinner, time to discuss work was over and we had a personal life. In that situation, I felt it was necessary to make the division to not have work become all consuming.
Fast forward another 10 years and my life was all about my work, because my work was and still is my passion. It’s what excites me and makes my heart sing. In those years when I would go on vacation I’d take my laptop because my creativity was inspired by being in nature and I enjoyed working a little or a lot almost every day. I did it because I wanted to, not because I had to. There were also some times that I chose to not work at all and totally disconnect from the world. Back then it was either full on or completely off, and it was mostly on.
Then I got a divorce and things shifted as I started working less and focusing more on my spiritual life and what my soul needed as I dealt with the grief of this life change. That was a conscious choice.
After a couple years I decided to move back to Cabo San Lucas and I thought I would still work. But once I got here, I felt I needed to focus on my personal life for a while. All of a sudden, I went from being a prolific writer to feeling like there was nothing I needed to say at the moment. It felt more important for me to go quiet and go inside. So that’s what I did. I closed my business down completely for more than 2 years. Not much balance there!
Late last year I started thinking about a domain name I had sitting for about 4 years, AgelessLifestyleAfter50.com, and got the feeling it was time to do something with it. So I ran it around in my head for a few months and in the first quarter of this year I decided what I wanted to do with it. It was time for me to bring the other passion of my life into the mix with the personal growth, spirituality and being a lifestyle entrepreneur pieces that had been p[art of my business before.
Now that I introduced my almost 40 year passion for health and nutrition, I had a renewed interest in writing and contributing in a more public way. And now I’m very excited about what I have to share and business is moving to the front of the line again.
And so the ebb and flow continues. You may have even seen some of your own patterns as I detailed mine for you. Take a look at your current beliefs on this topic and how that’s influencing your ability to live an ageless lifestyle. [Tweet “If you are here to live your soul’s purpose, the idea of work/life balance really is a cruel joke.”]
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