How do you feel about your work-life balance?
And more importantly, how do you feel about your ability to CREATE the balance you want in your life?
Do you feel confident?
Do you feel doubt?
Confidence is the state of feeling CERTAIN about something.
Doubt, on the other hand, is the state of feeling UNCERTAIN.
Remember—your FEELINGS drive your ACTIONS.
And feelings are created by the thoughts in your brain. Often the sneaky ones you may not even be aware of.
The ones that say:
- ‘I have no control over my work schedule’
- ‘I have no control over having to take my work home to finish”
- ‘It’s never going to get better so why even try’
Those thoughts create DOUBT that you can make changes at work to create better work-life balance.
And if you act from the feeling of doubt or uncertainty, the actions you will take won’t serve you or your goal of better work-life balance.
Your doubt-driven actions might look like this:
You ruminate on your thoughts about having no control. We all know how unhelpful that is.
You choose inaction (take no action to try to change things), and clearly nothing is going to change if you don’t take action.
And you look for further evidence that you don’t have control over your (work) life.
And we know that what the brain looks for, it finds more evidence of. This is neuroscience. The confirmation bias.
Understand that you are 100% in control of your results, so if you want to change any of these things, it’s within your power to do so.
You can change anything, ANYTHING about your life that you want to.
There may be consequences for your choices, yes.
But if you don’t even consider your options, weigh the pros and cons of choosing something different, you’re stuck in the river of misery.
You might wallow in your current circumstances with no consideration of what you can actually do to change them. What you have the power to do.
Because you do have the power. To make a change. To make a different choice.
And even to choose NOT to make a change, once you’ve considered your options.
But then you are CHOOSING. Based on YOUR wants and needs. It’s not being imposed on you.
Assuming you choose to make some changes, understand that doubt is normal.
Doubt will rear its head even when you decide you are confident you can make some changes.
Nothing has gone wrong.
Doubt is simply an opportunity to re-commit. To redecide.
That you DO have the choice. You DO have the power.
To change your results.
To take the steps to get ever-closer to the version of work-life balance that you desire.
So let doubt come along for the ride if you must. Just be sure you don’t let it steer the car.
Here’s to creating the balance you want in your life,
Denee