30 Dec Five Things I Learned About This Year (Balance 2021)

For the past few years, I’ve felt compelled to choose what I’ve been calling my “Word of the Year”. This word usually starts to stand out to me towards the end of a year and becomes the word of focus for the following year. Honing in on one word gives me the opportunity to really dive into a deeper understanding of it. I get a chance to learn what this word has to offer me as I integrate its virtues into my life.

In 2021, my word was Balance. If you follow my blog at all, I did several posts this year about what I’ve been learning about balance. Since, for many, the transition from one year into a new one is traditionally a time of reflection, I wanted to use this time to combine my year-long insights on balance into one blog post. Although my focus word will change going into the new year, I plan to continue practicing the ideas I learned from balance this year and even figure out ways that it supports my pursuit of 2022’s word (the word for 2022 is Fun… I’m excited about that!) I hope these five insights are helpful to you as you launch into a new year full of new possibilities. 

Insight #1: Accountability does wonders to support healthy balance.

Being involved in several groups this year taught me great insights about how accountability helps me to maintain equilibrium. I have an ongoing small group geared towards fighting the temptation of pornography. I’ve always wanted to do a book club and I got to do one this year. The book club kept me accountable to reading and analyzing new ideas, specifically surrounding how I interact with the attention economy. I also headed up a group of ambitious individuals committing to practice something each day for 100 days. This group helped to bring accountability around the discipline of showing up. The areas in which I’ve consistently engaged accountability – fighting temptation, integrating new ideas, and showing up to add value to something – are all areas in which I grew this year. 

Beyond the group setting, I also found great accountability support in the context of one-on-one relationships. This year, I grew in my weekly practice of making a list of 10 people to reach out to each week with the purpose of connecting with as many of them as time and circumstances allowed. As I made these connections, I found myself fostering the time and space for transparency relative to things that really matter to me. Creating this space also allowed me to help others maintain balance by serving as accountability partners for them.

Insight #2: Silence is a powerful force for creating or regaining balance.

The more I engaged with the practice of meditation this year, the easier I found it to access my balance when things started to get out of sorts. I also found equanimity in doing silent walks and car rides. It is amazing to me how much more measured your subsequent words become when you just shut up for a few minutes. My periods of silent strolls or drives would often lead to poignantly honest and intimate prayer sessions. If there was a stressful social scenario on the horizon, taking space away to get quiet, find my breath, and then pray, proved to be an effective strategy that helped me to better navigate the situation.

Insight #3: What you believe will either lead to balance or imbalance. 

This year more than ever, I embraced the practice of self-love through personal affirmations. This simple practice helped to revolutionize my sense of balance by increasing the frequency with which I interacted with the truth about myself. As false beliefs did their best to take root, the truth helped to rip them out and replace them with something beautiful. 

My internal world was another area impacted by the presence of strong accountability. My friends do a great job of reminding me of the truth about myself when I get in my ruts. They help me not to entertain foolish lies by offering me an outside perspective of reality. 

The practice of self-affirmation coupled with having friends that affirm the truth about me combined to help balance both my confidence and humility. It is important to practice self-affirmation so that, over time, you can come to know it for yourself. But it’s also important to have people who can get you back on track when your humanity distracts you from the truth.

Gratitude also played an important role in helping to shift my perspective, which directly influences my beliefs. When I’m tempted to believe that things in my life are horrible, gratitude counterbalances this notion by giving me a greater awareness of my blessings. 

Insight #4: If you’re going to be a balanced human, work ethic can’t just mean that you work as hard as you possibly can all the time.

The concept of balance challenged my understanding of my true ethics surrounding work this year. Ethics are guiding principles. If I want to be balanced, my principles need to be more nuanced than, “work as hard as you can.”

I create things for a living. As I’ve learned to understand and clarify the steps of my creative process this year, I’ve found that these tenants act as ethics for how I engage with making things. They help me to be more efficient and effective, which creates more margin for balance. 

Because balance means that I can’t work all the time, I also needed to understand what my limits for work should be. Through outside research, along with trial and error, I found that my limit for quality creative work is about four hours per day. For me, quality creative work is undistracted concentration. I can do more hours of a more distracted form of work. However, once I start to lock in my focus my limits become real. 

When it comes to work ethics, I’ve become increasingly fond of the way collaboration and delegation contributes to balance. Allowing others to help me by handing off aspects of my work to capable hands does wonders for helping me to foster the margin for balance in my work while maintaining high standards. 

Insight #5 – “The only way to create balance is to have boundaries.”  – Dr. Ramani Durvasula

I started to hint at the point as I talked about my work limits. Balance implies that limits exist. Actually striking balance demands that we develop a good understanding and respect for those boundaries in our lived values. One of the ways I practiced living out my value of respecting my limits was by practicing saying “no” more often. I really got better at this seemingly simple, but surprisingly difficult skill. My improvement here has done wonders for my sense of balance.

A huge realization that supported my ability to grow in saying ‘no’ is the idea that I am my responsibility. I am responsible for managing myself and that includes my balance. No one else is going to do that for me. In fact, when people try to manage my life I don’t like it because it is a breach of my boundaries. Managing me means understanding that I cannot do everything requested of me and maintain the margin needed for balance. When someone asks me to do something, I need to take it as an opportunity to assess everything I have happening in my life and figure out if I can handle their request while maintaining a healthy sense of balance. If the answer is ‘no’, then my answer to the request should be ‘no’.  I’m really proud of how I’ve been able to integrate this concept this year.

How was your balance this year? How did you grow in this and/or other areas? What do you hope to improve moving forward? What advice do you have about balance?