Solution #8: Lack of Balance

What it feels like:

You’ve got nothing left.

You’ve lost the joy you used to feel in the creative act.

You feel so burned out you can barely stand to drag yourself to your gig and your relationships are falling apart.

You pour all your time and energy into the day job that supports you day-to-day, and have little left over to pursue a serious career doing what you love, let alone the energy to be creative.
You pour all your time and energy into running your creative career and have little left over for creating, let alone relaxation, relationship, friends, or anything else you enjoy.
You are working so hard that you’ve lost the joy you used to feel in the creative act.
You are getting physically ill, often.
You get really inspired and busy, and then push yourself and push yourself, and don’t take care of yourself, until you completely collapse. So that you can’t take advantage of the opportunities that your flurry of activity created.

No matter how hard you try to do it all, something has to give. Unfortunately, for people who are struggling with this challenge, it’s often their health that gives. Don’t let that be you.

STOP!

Just stop and think and look at your life!

What do you truly want? Ignore the voice in your head that is pushing you to go, go, go, go. You can stop for 5 minutes. You can. And if you don’t, your body will force you to.

Success Solution:

The solution to this challenge is paradoxically both basic and complicated, simple yet very, very hard. You must learn the basic skills of time management, project management and prioritization. You must learn to say NO – when that’s really what you want/need to say.

And even more importantly, you must learn to listen to and say yes to yourself. Prioritize your needs for a change. And you must learn to ask for help, because NOBODY makes it by themselves.

What this will look like really depends on you: your life, your goals and your situation. It may look like:

Finding a day job that is closer to what you love and/or doesn’t suck the life out of you.
Getting clear on your priorities and letting go of projects and possibly people that don’t support those priorities.
Postponing some of your projects so that you can focus on one thing at a time!
Setting boundaries with the people you love, your coworkers and co-creators.
Hiring an assistant or asking family, friends and fans to support you in more concrete ways.

Balance can be both a time management issue and an emotional intelligence issue. Because it involves both the skills of setting up your time management and project management systems to create balance AND understanding what is driving your behavior.

What are the beliefs that got you into this mess in the first place?

Because before you can do any of those things (or even figure out what you need to change and how to change it), you must stop long enough to assess the truth about yourself.

Through this examination, you may discover:

Things that you thought were vitally important, you really can let go of,
Ways to streamline routine tasks to free up time (Challenge # 5 – Organization),
That you don’t need to do everything yourself (Challenge # 3 – Lack of Support),
And how to schedule your time to truly make room for all of it (Challenge # 1 – Time Management).

As a Skill-Based Time Management, Organization and Project Management Issue

When this Lack of Balance is primarily a lack of skills in the area of Time Management and Project Management, you may notice some or all of these things:

That you tend to find it difficult to switch gears
You tend to think it will take 15 minutes to do something and it ends up taking you 2 hours – and this happens a LOT.
You will find yourself spending a lot of time looking for lost items
You start work and have no idea what you should do first – and this can lead you to procrastination or spending time doing unimportant things
You always feel like you’re putting out fires and never get to the things that are truly important to you
Once you start on something – you can’t stop until it’s finished because you don’t trust yourself to ever get back to it.
You over book and double book yourself.
You promise things to people while having absolutely no idea how long it will take or if you’re going to be able to deliver what you promise, when you promise.

The solution will definitely include creating systems and structures that streamline your routine tasks. And it will definitely look like learning some new skills in the areas of time management, project management, prioritization and organization.

As an Emotional Intelligence Issue

Very often, the overwhelm itself is a way of avoiding the hard truth about the choices you have made that got you here and what choices you will have to make to create a real lasting change.And even thinking about those choices make you run for chocolate.

If you are not adept at self-evaluation and trained in personal growth, this can be extremely difficult to do without support. This is an area in which working with a coach can be invaluable, because when you feel like running or hiding, the support of a coach can keep you in the game and make it safe to confront those bugaboos.

Because you cannot see what you cannot see.

For some people, all it takes is getting conscious of what is driving you to start to clear these issues up. And sometimes, when they are connected to very old, deep seated issues it can require more. Especially when the issues are connected to childhood abuse or neglect. Using NLP and Hypnosis, I can often help you move through these deeper and older issues faster than you can on your own. I have often used Personal Breakthrough Sessions for just this purpose.

Sometimes Therapy can be helpful, and I’ve seen clients who are in both therapy and coaching be able to clear these issues much faster. Sometimes, Therapy by itself, while brilliant for uncovering the issues, doesn’t fully resolve or heal the issues. And sometimes Coaching by itself doesn’t go deep enough in the discovery process – though the Personal Breakthrough Session does in my experience.

Recommended Actions

Purchase Time Management from the Inside Out book and run the process she outlines.
Spend 15 minutes every morning, just sitting still with your eyes closed, working with your vision.
Spend 15 minutes every evening, journaling about what worked and didn’t work that day – what can you discover about your life?
Join the Artist’s Marketing & Business Academy and review the classes on Time Management, Project Management and Emotional Intelligence Skills.
Hire a coach to help you figure out what’s really going on and how to make lasting internal and external changes so that you can joyfully live your life with balance and consistency.