Living a balanced life is one of those highly coveted goals to which we all aspire, along with happiness, inner peace, and love. Yet, in this day and age, balance is also more difficult than ever to achieve.

Between career, family, self-care, technology, and everything else in our busy lives, it can feel as if one more new ball to the juggling act will cause us to fall off that tightrope called life and plummet to our deaths (mixed metaphors intended).

You may wonder whether it’s even worth expending effort to strive toward a goal that seems largely unattainable. No doubt something as sought after as life balance can’t possibly be achieved quickly or with little effort. At the same time, I would suggest that life balance is within the reach of most of us if we are determined, intentional, and patient.

Certainly, the rewards of life balance are enticing. They include:

Now, those are qualities worth aspiring to! I see life balance as an interconnected collection of five different types of balance in our lives.

There is nothing more important to a balanced life than your physical and mental health. Quite simply because the health of our body and mind are so central to everything that we think, feel, and experience, they form the foundation upon which all other forms of balance are built.

Physical health involves:

Mental health entails:

Because of its central role in your life, your physical and mental health must be the starting point for creating balance of all sorts.

You cannot have balance in your life if you don’t have balance in yourself (or, more accurately, in your self). If you think of your self-identity as a pie, a balanced self-identity is comprised of many pieces of the pie with no single slice too large, all contributing meaningfully to your sense of self. The danger of having an outsized piece of your self-identity is that you may fall victim to the “I am one self” mentality, where one piece of the self-identity pie dominates how you........

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