Forget Balance, Practice Resilience

Balance has become an impossible expectation placed on mothers today. How often do you hear women say, “If I could just achieve better balance, I would be happier?”

 We head out to yoga, experience a moment of bliss, and return home to a messy house, piles of laundry, and a cranky husband. Then we bludgeon ourselves, “If I could only be balanced!”

I’m letting you off the hook. Balance is overrated and impossible when raising families and pursuing your own interests. Balance implies stasis. It can only be achieved in that moment when everything is perfectly aligned. That never happens in my house. How about you?

What I encourage you to do is ask yourself what specific feelings you’re looking for when you say you want balance:

• Why do you want balance?
• What will you have when you achieve it?
•  What do you experience at your best moments? How do you feel?

Stop for a minute. Take a few grounding breathes. Get into your body. Read the questions above and simply write down the first words that come to mind. Settle on three to five words as your touchstones. My quest for balance is a desire for inner peace, ease, and flow.

Once you have your words, ask yourself how you can create more of those feelings in your life. Do things that make you feel this way, make your to-do list around your words, and most importantly practice resilience.

Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from adversity and change. With adversity and change there is always a choice to be made. And practicing resilience will empower you to make those choices grounded in your values, from the inside out.

Resilience feels like surfing to me. If you go for balance, you have to exert a lot of CONTROL to keep it, so you’re working really hard. And even if you’re successful, yes, you might miss the lows, but you will also miss the highs.

Resilience, on the other hand, has fluidity. You’re on your board; some days there will be killer waves, some days the doldrums. And sometimes you will crash and burn. Resilience is a practice. Your work is not to look for why or beat yourself up, but to get back on the board because you LOVE the thrill and joy of that ride.

How do you develop resilience and practice it when the big waves hit? I’ve created an Emergency Resilience Cheat Sheet just for you. You can download it from my website http://www.annepillsburycoaching.com/.

 

To hear more on this topic, you can also listen to my radio interview with Sandy Fowler by clicking here.

 

QUESTION: What can you do to achieve greater resiliency?

CHALLENGE: Find ways to practice resilience in your everyday life by creating a to-do list around your touchstone words.

 

Image by Microsoft Office Images

About Anne Pillsbury

Anne Pillsbury is the change catalyst moms call when they know they're ready for their next chapter, even if they don't know what that looks like. A mother of four who has learned to navigate overwhelm and find joy and resilience amid the chaos, she helps others do the same through her coaching. Coming as she does from Minneapolis' prominent Pillsbury family, Anne has developed ways of helping women find their power when family money or their husband's success makes their own relationship with work, money, and power complicated or confusing.