Beginnings, Endings, and Evaluating Your Life Balance

Beginnings, Endings, and Evaluating Your Life Balance 

Written by Kelsie Goller, MA, LPC-S, RPT, EMDR Certified

Clinical Director, KPS

This is the final blog post that I will write as the Clinical Director at Kranz Psychological Services.  After two and a half years in this role, I have been preparing to step aside and allow others to take on my responsibilities.  I have genuinely loved supporting our staff here in our office, who specialize in so many different areas.  I have also loved learning from our staff here; I believe that every person has much to teach, and I learn so much from both my clients and my colleagues! 

However, I also recognize that I have to “practice what I preach” myself, and my work-life balance has become unbalanced.  I have stretched myself too thin by taking on too many commitments both at work and in my personal life.  I love to supervise, so I added more hours of supervising graduate interns and LPC Associates while not removing anything from my calendar.  I love to meet with clients, so I did not decrease any client hours.  I agreed to serve on several committees outside of work.  I also have small children who are my primary priority.  I want to walk you through the same steps that I went through in identifying and moving forward with a change:

1.  Recognize that there is a need for a change.  What are your signs that you need a change in the way that you use your time?  We all have our “tells.”  Reflect on what yours might be.  For me, a warning sign that all is not well is when I become more easily frustrated with the small people in my life who are doing normal “small people” things (i.e. being inefficient about getting ready to leave the house, wanting my full and undivided attention when I am at home, and so on.)  

2. Evaluate how you are currently spending your time.  One way that I have done this myself is using a technique called the Balance Wheel or the Wheel of Life- there are multiple versions of the same activity, but I first learned of this technique as an Adlerian intervention.  First, you draw a circle and divide it into as many pie pieces as you need to represent the areas of your life.  For example, pie pieces could include Relationship with Significant Other, Children, Friends, Family of Origin, Work/Employment, Spirituality/Relationship with God,   Recreation/Leisure Time, House/Home Environment, Health/Exercise, Education/School, or any other areas that take a significant amount of your time.  Creating the wheel is individualized to your own stage of life and specific life areas.  Second, use a color to identify how satisfied you are with each area of your life by drawing a line in that color within each piece of the pie.  A line closer to the center of the circle would indicate less satisfaction, while a line near the edge indicates greater satisfaction.  Finally, on the same pie, use a second color to indicate how much value, significance, or importance you place on each of the areas.  Again, a line closer to the center of the circle indicates less importance/significance, while a line closer to the outside of the circle indicates more importance/significance.  If you need help visualizing what these wheels would look like, here is an example that you can read about in full on this website:

3. Examine your wheel to observe areas of discrepancy.  Notice which areas are the most important or significant to you; are you also experiencing the most satisfaction in these areas?  You can also use variations of the same wheel to notice where you are spending most of your time and energy currently so that you can evaluate if there are areas where you want to be spending more time and energy and others where you want to be spending less time and energy.  

4. Remember that every “yes” that you say is a “no” to other things.  Every person has 24 hours in a day of life, and eight of those hours should be spent sleeping.  No one can freeze time to get more of it.  We do live within the bounds of time, and we are limited in what we can do.  Every time that you say “yes” to something, even something good, you are necessarily saying “no” to other things.  We live best in accordance with our values when we say “yes” to the things that are most important to us instead of saying “yes” to everything.  

5. Choose the change.  What is one single change that you can work towards to pull your life back into balance, where the areas that are most important to you receive the most attention and also have the greatest amount of personal satisfaction?  We may have to acknowledge in this process the Serenity Prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”  Even as we go through this evaluation, we acknowledge that there are things that we cannot change.  Perhaps one of your greatest values is good physical health, but you are struggling with a new medical diagnosis.  You may be spending a great deal of time at doctor’s appointments so that both your time output and your values match, but you are still feeling low satisfaction in this area.  Perhaps Romance/Significant Other is a high value for you, but you just broke up with someone and know that the time is not right to jump into a new relationship.  There are some things that we cannot change, but we can recognize them and grieve them as needed.  Still, also give yourself permission to be creative about the areas that need change, or invite trusted loved ones to give you creative ideas for change in these areas.  

6. Implement the change, give it time, and then evaluate.  Change is challenging.  It always takes time to adjust.  When you have given yourself a little time to adjust, reevaluate the Balance Wheel.  

For me as I walked through this process, I realized that I had become unbalanced with too much time spent at work and not enough time at home.  Unwilling to give up time with clients or time spent supervising, I chose to hand over my Clinical Director responsibilities to others to work towards achieving more balance.  Later, I will re-evaluate this change to see if it had the desired impact on increasing wellbeing.  I often say that balance is the point that we swing through on our way from one extreme to another; we often overcorrect!  But perhaps balance is an ever-shifting target, as our needs change based on our season of life, the needs of those around us, and a thousand variables.  May you savor the journey of finding more balance in your own life, one small step at a time.