harmony and balance

Someone once said to me that balance is never truly acquirable. If you focus a second longer on one thing, the scales are tipped. Harmony, on the other hand, is possible. This gave me hope. I started to wonder what harmony in my life could look like as someone with a multitude of spinning plates and a mind that keeps wanting to add more plates to the hands already full.

Lets start with the word harmony. There are three definitions that pertain to action:
1: the combination of simultaneous musical notes in a chord
2. pleasing arrangement of parts
3. an interweaving of different accounts into a single narrative

First off, I just love the word “interweaving”. Because I have so many things on the go, being a woman, mom, a wife, friend, and double business owner, there is no possibility of balancing these things. I can however, visualize an interweaving off all of these “parts, accounts, notes, into a single narrative in a more pleasing way.

All of this, of course, comes down to mindset. And choice. Ultimately, the choices you make though, comes down to mindset. Your beliefs about your personal worth, the value of your time and energy are ingrained in us from birth. As women, we have it bad; this idea that we are only worthy when we are giving of ourselves freely.

I started this season of work tired. I chose, finally, to believe I was worthy of having a summer not completely eaten up by work, a brain not stressed by the to do list a million miles long, a body jacked up on cortisol. I decided to play as much as I could with my children, to give them an unscheduled summer, to bring them along when I had out of town sessions, and to make an adventure of work and life. I had the best summer I’ve had in a long time. It felt like harmony.

I’m passionate about what I do. I LOVE it. Its not easy for me to say no to clients, to work, to creating, because it doesn’t feel like work. Until it does. Until I’m so busy with it that it throws me out of harmony with my family, my friends, my partner and myself.

I talk about mindset at my retreats, in my mentoring sessions and in my daily life a lot. When I see people struggling, living a life of “hustle” and overworking themselves to the point of illness, exhaustion and relationship break downs, it breaks my heart. It doesn’t have to be that way. When you start to value yourself, your time and your mental health, you start creating ways of working harmoniously with the rest of your life, and you start getting down to the nitty gritty of pricing yourself in a way that means you can work to live rather than live to work.

I am a championer. I want you to succeed. I don’t want you to burn out. I get excited when people are creating work that speaks to them, that sets them on fire and propels them forward. We can’t do that if we are burning the candle at both ends and wearing ourselves down. We are entrepreneurs, we get to create the life we want! Let’s make it glorious!