in: Wellness

Kick the Chaos By Balancing These 8 Areas of Life

Kristine Carey knows chaos. Thankfully, she also knows how to restore order. Reclaim your sense of self by balancing these eight areas of life.


Life Balance. This term gets tossed around a LOT. As in, “You should really look into getting some balance in your life.” Or, “I wish I had better work / life balance.”

Which prompts the question: what does that mean, exactly?

As a trained Life and Business Coach, this topic comes up often for my clients. I had an illusion—and maybe you have it, too—that balance is a thing that can be achieved if you focus on it and work hard enough. What I’ve discovered, however, is balance is more of an ethereal notion, an ideal that is not tangible and therefore can be tricky to realize.

Some believe balance might look something like: eight hours at the office, two hours with friends over drinks/dinner, and one hour of exercise per day. If you sleep eight hours, that leaves five hours for everything else—things like showering, commuting, watching CSI, and calling your mother. Then consider things like grocery shopping, cleaning the house, walking the dog, paying the bills, and the other various things that make up daily life and it’s no wonder we don’t feel “balanced.”

The concept of balance has entire books devoted to it, blog posts full of witty recommendations, and your friends and the experts have multiple opinions on what it is and how to get it. So in an attempt at simplification, here are my two favorite ways of looking at balance.

Total Leadership

I read this book by Stewart Friedman several years ago. In it he talks about balance and breaks life down into four domains:

Here is a sample Venn of the four domains from the book:

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Friedman asks you to notice what percentage of your time you devote to each domain vs how important that domain is to you, as well as how the domains overlap. If you’re like me, it’s easy to put your attention on areas that aren’t really that important, which will lead you to feeling unbalanced and unsatisfied. Or, no matter how much attention you put on each domain, it may not feel like enough. Or, perhaps you’re doing great in each domain, putting in the time and attention you’d like, yet still feel a bit empty at the end of the day. What’s to be done?

According to Friedman, life is like a jazz quartet. In jazz, there is a part of the music where everyone plays together, then the horn gets its solo, then the bass, and sometimes they play together and the other two instruments sit out, and on it goes. The music does not follow any strict rule of how much time or attention should go to one instrument—rather, it flows according to that day’s mood and the overall groove.

Such is life.

This idea of life being more like jazz—crooked and unpredictable, yet an overall cohesive picture—has been a life saver for me and made life much more fun.

The Wheel of Life

No self-respecting Life Coach is without the handiest of “balance” tools: the Wheel of Life. I love the Wheel because it can make life look like a pie, and who doesn’t like pie?

Screen Shot 2015-01-14 at 11.46.11 AM

The Wheel of Life is sliced into eight pieces so you can assess how you’re doing in each slice. Rather than measuring yourself against some external ideal, you are looking at how *you* would like that slice of life to be. And please watch getting too perfectionistic on yourself! Not all the slices have to be the same size, or carry equal meaning: it’s your pie and you can slice it however you like.

Write down what would be ideal in each slice (note that the “relationships” slice may be three smaller slices), then look at what would be good enough, and finally what you think you can manage in the short term. Breaking each slice down into these smaller bites gives you an idea of where you’re at vs. what you’d like, and what might be your next step to move closer to it.

Where to Go From Here

Hopefully you’re getting the idea that balance isn’t something to be measured against an external ideal. Balance is relative, fluid, and completely what you decide it is. What balance means today can be different from what it is next week or year, so be gentle with yourself when contemplating what it means at any given moment and how you pursue it.

Consider letting life be a bit of an adventure—punctuated by horn solos and unexpected fabulousness—and my hunch is you’ll achieve the perfect balance.

About the Author:

Kristine Carey

Coach Kristine Carey brings enthusiasm, expertise and humor to her work. She has more than 10 years of experience coaching micro businesses and the entrepreneurially minded, empowering them to align their talents and passions with their career and business goals. You can learn more about her at KristineCarey.com

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