Feeling Burned Out or Just Plain Indifferent? Here’s How to Find Your Flow and Keep it.
The key to establishing a healthy cadence to the inescapable peaks and valleys of work-life, and well, just life, is achieving a sustainable state of both balance and renewal. Here are four building blocks that all work together to help get you there. First, we tackle balance as it is foundational to all the rest.
- Attend to Mind, Body, Spirit and Heart – The Medicine Wheel is a metaphor, used in ancient and indigenous cultures, that represents health and balance. Medicine refers to the art or science of preserving health and well-being. The Wheel is a symbol representing the four quadrants that comprise a balanced life – Mind, Body, Spirit and Heart. Mind is intellectual stimulation. Body is exercise, nutrition, and rest. Heart is quality time in relationships and community. Spirit is connection to anything bigger than your day-to-day (e.g., religion, faith, meditation, etc.). Getting to your ideal state of balance, as defined by you, requires you to consider where you are today and where you would like to be. Here are some questions to help spur your thinking.
- What are some key words to indicate the various activities in which you currently engage in each of the four categories? How beneficial are these activities to you?
- Now consider the activities in which you would ideally be engaged in to achieve your vision of a balanced life. What would you change today … if you could?
- What do you want more of in your life? Less of? Do you need to simplify or intensify?
- What skills, knowledge, learning or change in limiting beliefs will help you progress toward the achievement of greater balance?
- What must you give up, sacrifice, eliminate or let go of to achieve the balance you want?
As you reflect on your responses to all the above, what do you learn? How do you think you get from where you are today to your vision of a balanced life? A place to start is to identify the specific action steps you will commit to taking to close the gaps and overcome the obstacles standing in your way. Progress will be iterative, requiring the development of new practices and behaviors. The goal is to get to a sustainable state of balance and that’s where the next three steps of renewal come into play.
- Be Mindful and Present – This is all about tuning in to whatever you’re doing at any given time, whatever those around you are doing or saying and whatever is happening in your environment. Mindfulness is living in the present, taking time to reflect on what has been and staying open to what may come. Think of it as a respite from your go, go, go state. Try it for an entire day and pay attention to how you do. Make notes and then try it again. You will get better at it over time with practice.
- Cultivate Hope and Faith – Hope is when we look forward to a future that seems feasible and promising. Faith is believing and trusting in something or someone bigger than you. What are you looking forward to? What makes you hopeful? What do you believe in that gives you a greater sense of purpose? Renewal is fueled when you are deliberate about making hope and faith a routine part of your life.
- Foster Compassion and Empathy – Compassion is empathy in action. It’s caring for others, and a willingness to act on those feelings. Taking action is key. Think about it, when you step out of your own shoes and into those of someone in need what happens? Try accomplishing a single act of kindness, large or small, every day for a week and see how it makes you feel. Then keep it going.
Getting to a sustainable state of balance and renewal requires you to be intentional with all four building blocks. It’s an absolute imperative to sustain a lifetime of professional achievement and personal fulfilment.
