What Life Balance Really Means and How to Create It

Authored by Dr. Amy Wood, PsyD
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Life balance is a goal many women attorneys strive toward without a solid grasp of its meaning.   Popular misconceptions are that it’s about juggling multiple responsibilities with exacting finesse or having personal and professional lives equally weighted like a yin-yang symbol.
 
This black and white understanding of life balance used to be largely attainable when work and home lives really were distinct and clear.   But that once-indelible line between home and the office is blurry in a world where technology allows us to be accessible around the clock from anywhere.
 
The truth is that life balance is an ancient definition of success that is reached when a resonant outer life nurtures a vital inner life.  Way, way back in simpler times, the idea was to invest money in personal surroundings expressly designed to rouse pleasing thoughts and feelings integral to overall fulfillment and productivity. 
 
The original American ideal was to put earnings towards beautifying the home and garden, creating a sanctuary in which passions, relationships, and inspirations could flourish.    Balance was possible when you enveloped yourself with a customized balm of intellectual, emotional, and social stimulation necessary to rejuvenate from daily pressures and keep evolving at a satisfying – not exhausting -- clip. 
 
Most Americans – it’s not just women attorneys -- don’t experience true life balance anymore because our outer environments are distracting and noisy and pull us away from -- rather than enrich -- ourselves.    We are so swept away by external directives – Respond to this signal!  Read that text message!  Keep up with it all or you will be left behind! – that we are downright depleted internally.  
 
To bring life balance back in the way it was initially intended, we must give up the crazy notion that every outside call beckoning for our attention is worthy of our response.  We need to see that trying to be in command by flexing to an ever-multiplying flow of information is a sure way to feel off-kilter.  Regaining our equilibrium requires taking from “out there” only what we know deep down will serve and sustain us.
 
The more you cultivate your inner world in ways that feel fortifying and right, the more likely you are to feel balanced.  And when you have real life balance, you feel grounded, curious, connected, confident in your inner wisdom, and fully alive – and much more able to thrive in an external world that will never be balanced no matter what you do.
 
You can experience the exquisite centeredness of genuine life balance by practicing the spirit of these stabilizing suggestions:

• Take an honest look at the settings you spend most of your time in – bedroom, office, yard, living room, car – and get rid of everything in those contexts that does not in some way serve a real purpose or bring value to your life.  If it’s not totally essential or absolutely meaningful, it is distracting clutter that must go.
• Wake up your senses with fresh flowers on your desk, exotic foods cooking in your kitchen, compelling art on your walls, or stirring music in the background.
• Provoke refreshing thoughts by reading imaginative books, listening to irreverent podcasts, or enjoying movies that you wouldn’t ordinarily choose.
• Get better acquainted with your inner callings by walking alone in nature, or tossing your calendar for a day and letting your gut navigate.
• Make face-to-face dates – coffee, dinner, at your home or theirs – with people whose company brings you the most joy and comfort.
• Enliven your perspective by immersing yourself in contrasting backdrops – city grit if you’re usually in the country, the steamy tropics if you’re tired of snow.
• Replenish your brain by routinely shutting down all your gadgets and bathing your mind in restorative silence.

 
As you pursue true life balance, the most important question to consider is what kind of atmosphere will keep you lawyering and living at your best.  Navigating the constant cacophony of modern life takes a clear, calm head – and if you put your focus on fostering that kind of equilibrium with well-suited circumstances, you will always be up for the challenge. 

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