When our boys were younger, we overloaded and overwhelmed our lives by trying to take advantage of every opportunity life presented – School activities, Sports, Etc. We naively thought balance and getting less busy in our lives would somehow occur on its own; thinking we had plenty of time and life would get less overwhelming in the near future.  Fortunately, we discovered that life’s balance doesn’t just happen on its own.  So, we came up with a simple formula that has helped us, over the years, to find balance in our life.

Life Balance = Prioritized Life + Disciplined Tactics

When you close your eyes and picture a life in balance, what do you see?  For us, we see harmony and fulfillment where everyone in our family is thriving and reaching their potential spiritually, physically, mentally, and emotionally.  The specifics of what all of that looks like for us and what you may have envisioned, begins with prioritizing your goals.

Prioritized Life

In our sixteen plus years of mentoring, we’ve seen a lot of life imbalances due to couples not having the same life priorities.  Mainly because they never really talk about it.  They end up reacting to life instead of living life.  Are your days characterized by running the kids everywhere, constantly working late and having limited time for things that truly matter to you?  Then perhaps you are reacting to life’s pressures and your default life priority may look like this: Kids, career, certain friends and, then maybe, marriage.

Your life is a reflection of your priorities

In our Best Version of You letter, we outlined how we go about setting our yearly goals with the emphasis on creating the best versions of ourselves.  All of those goals reflect the priorities in our life: Faith, Family, and Friends.  We make certain that we prioritize all of our yearly goals to match our life priorities.  With a few weeks into the new school year, this is a good time to set (or reset) some yearly goals and evaluate your priorities!

Are you and your spouse on the same page with the priorities in life?  Are you intentionally living a life that reflects those shared priorities?

Disciplined Tactics

Having common shared priorities is at the heart of having a balanced family life.  But then you need to add disciplined tactics to stay focused on those identified priorities.  This means you need to come up with specific ways (Tactics) that will help you remain resolved (Disciplined) in reflecting and living your life’s priorities.

Here are a couple of examples of Disciplined Tactics we’ve used that have helped us to remain resolved and reflect our Life’s Priorities:

Faith Life Priority – A consistent morning quiet time is a habit that reflects our Faith Priority.  The Disciplined Tactic is to make sure we have “lights out” by 9:30 so we can wake up rested by 5:00am to fix coffee and have devoted quiet time to start our day.

Family Life Priority – Weekly Date Night and Family Game Night are habits that reflect our Family Priority.  The Disciplined Tactic is to populate and sync our calendars (on the fridge and outlook calendar) at the beginning of each month with these dates so that our priorities don’t get overlooked.

Staying committed and following through with your Disciplined Tactics may lead you to some difficult decisions as you pursue the balanced life.  It sure did for us and still does today.

The decisions you make determine the schedule you keep. The schedule you keep determines the life you live. And how you live your life determines how you spend your soul. – Lysa TerKeurst

This may sound obvious, but less is more when it comes to finding balance in life.  Staying late at work may get you noticed by your boss but being home for dinner will get you noticed with your spouse and children.  Cutting back on the kids’ sports and activities may not be popular in your community, but being free to volunteer, have long family weekends, attend conferences or classes will fill your soul.

An over-committed schedule is the quickest way to abandon your Disciplined Tactics and overwhelm your life priorities. You need to preserve the space in your daily and weekly schedule in order to encourage the resolve of your tactics and keep on track with your priorities.

With school and fall activities in full swing, your life can quickly become out of balance!  We want to encourage you to evaluate your life priorities and see if you have the proper disciplined tactics in place. Then make sure you don’t sabotage your efforts by over-committing your schedule.  It’s ok to say “NO!” for the sake of finding balance.

Let your life’s balance be a reflection of what your soul craves!

Blessings to your family,

Shelly and Rich

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