The Illusion Of Balance

Join Clare for an exploration of the illusion of balance so you can experience calm, balance and clarity and create a life that you love.

During this session you will be taught a simple understanding of how your mind works which helps to develop self-awareness and connection to intuition.

Leave your busy intellectual mind behind and listen like you would listen to music, in the background.

Remember that you can listen to this again and again to deepen your access to calm, balance and clarity.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the CalmCast, A time to feel calm and think clearly. I'm Clare Downam, The Queen of Calm, A Transformational Life Coach. I was a burnt out head teacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying, And I want to prevent you from having to do the same. The CalmCast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state, Which is calm and clarity. Just listen like you would listen to music, With an open mind and curiosity. There's nothing else to do. Now let's relax into today's episode. So today I'm exploring the illusion of balance. Maybe it isn't an illusion, The whole work-life balance thing, Maybe it's actually insanity, Which I feel like might be a bit shocking to some of you, Because it's spoken about endlessly, Isn't it? Work-life balance, How to have work-life balance, What boundaries we need to put into place, What things we have to do in order to ensure this thing called work-life balance. But let's just unpick that from a place of truth, Really, Is that what we're actually doing when we talk about work and life in that way, Is that we are creating this illusion of separation between the two. Like they are opposing forces butting up against each other in our lives, And that we have to somehow fight between the two or create this illusion of a battle between the two, Be in the illusion, Because actually it probably doesn't feel like an illusion, It probably really feels like a battle between the two, To try and create balance between them. Like, You know, Eventually this bit of land will be works land and this bit of land will belong to the rest of our life, And then there will be this somehow, This balance between the two. But I would say the whole of that would be like if we carry on with that battle kind of metaphor, The whole thing is on quicksand, Because the whole thing is built on an illusion. I mean, The concept of work and the concept of life are being separate, Is an illusion. If we look back not that far into history, There was, You know, People lived on the land, They worked the land, They lived on it, There was no sense, When they needed to work a lot, Because there was a lot of crops to bring in, They worked hard, And when they didn't, They didn't, And they worked to the point where they had enough to eat and enough to feed their family and maybe sell a bit, And that was it. There was no sense of that. This illusion has been created in much more modern times, And I'd be interested, Actually, I probably should have looked this up before, To see what actually, When actually did this whole illusion begin, Of something called work-life balance. When did we start talking about that? Probably when we started working a little bit more than we, Than's probably healthy. So what that mental construct does is it kind of creates a lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety, Where we are trying, You know, To make the two, Battling the two against each other, That they are like they're separate entities, Then there's this internal struggle, An internal battle between the two, And I see what that leads to in the clients that I work with. It leads to guilt, It leads to frustration, Why can't I get this right, Why am I the only one who doesn't manage to have this work-life balance? It's something I need to work on all the time, And it's exhausting, It's exhausting, And I think how I saw that play out in my own journey was when I, Sort of, During my first headship, The first headship that I had, Which started in 2010, I worked very, Very, Very hard to start with, To the exclusion of an awful lot of other things in my life, I didn't really have much of a life, A social life or anything else, Because my school, The school I had taken over, Was graded as not quite good enough by Ofsted. So when I took on that position, I really did work very, Very hard, Alongside an amazing team, To get that school by the, So just over two years having taken it over, We got the good outcome that the school obviously really wanted. And then, It was a little while after that, That I kind of suddenly went, Oh, I have no life, I didn't do anything else, And I then began this journey into doing lots of other things, So I joined a salsa class, I started to go out a little bit more with friends, And kind of sought the other bit of it a lot more, And after I spoke from my husband, That then led into excessive amounts of social stuff, All with this illusion really, That I was trying to make myself feel better, And it really, What it really was, Very imbalanced really, Towards, Well, It was just out of kilter really, But, And it meant that I kind of switched off from work a little bit, I became a bit disenchanted with it, I suppose, And lacked motivation, And felt then that I needed to get a promotion to fill that gap again. So, Can you hear how it was a battle, It was, I'm all work, Now I'm all social, And now, Oh, I don't feel quite right about work, So I better get a promotion to fill that gap again, And it was like this back and forth, Really unhealthy, But in actual fact, They're not two separate things. You know, I work from home, And I do bits of work at all sorts of odd times, So I'm a very early riser, My fiance is not so much so, So even when we're at home, Definitely, But even when we're away in the motor home, I'll pick up my laptop in the early hours of the morning, And I'll maybe write some social media posts, Or, You know, Do something about work, Just because I'm inspired to do it, And it doesn't really matter, This whole concept, And I think boundaries is the word that comes in for a lot of people here, And that is, That is, Again, Not helpful, I don't think, To think there has to be straight lines between everything, Where's the fluidity and flow in that? When we're, You know, As business owners, And even if you absolutely love your job, And your, You know, Your profession, Your profession, You, When you approach that from a place of passion and purpose, And you see this, This idea that that's all part of life, Like, I really like the words interconnected, You know, Integrated, That they're into words, Where we're saying that this is all part of us, It's all part of, Of who we are, And then we can fall into a place of flow between the two, And create something that is meaningful for us, And works for us. So, You know, I spoke to a client recently, Who, You know, Was contemplating an aspect of, You know, A part of life coming up, And what to do about it, In terms of, Should I be working, Should I not be working? And I, I really said, Well, What makes sense to you? If we think it's supposed to be very, Very rigid, Then we will get lost in trying to force something to be something that it isn't. But when we tap into what's right for us, It will unfold. And so, What does that look like to me, Is, Is that I am becoming more and more connected to my body, More and more just noticing, Well, What does my body need right now? You know, If my eyes are getting a bit squinty, And I'm not squinty, And I'm getting a bit of a headache around here, I probably know that I've been on my screen too long. There's something really cool that happens in terms of, In terms of integrating work and life. And because I'm not advocating working all the hours that God sends, And ending up making ourselves ill at all. But what about if we, In the present moment, Did what makes sense? So that for me, Is that on a, On a Sunday, Saturday, Sunday morning, Whenever, I may well do a bit of work, Because I don't have any rules about it. And but it also means that on, I think it was Wednesday afternoon, I felt shocking. I had a massive brain fog moment, Not moment, Actually, It was all day, Still a bit there now, But it's much better than it was. And I cancelled two appointments, Because I felt dreadful. And that was okay. It was okay for me to listen to my body and say, Actually, You're not in a fit state to do this today. And that's cool, Too. I think if we're trying to make it all very rigid, Then we're not allowing for our present moment-ness. That's a new word I've just made up. Don't you love it when I make up a word? I love it. Our present moment-ness to come through, Because if we've said, Right, This is work hours, And this is, This is life hours, And it's all very rigid, And therefore I've created this balance. I mean, That just, I mean, Even I'm saying that it sounds like insanity. It sounds like insanity. We've made up work, We've made up these separate bits that are life, The two are not integrated, We've drawn all these lines in our life. And now we're going to like go through life like a little robot, Doing the things we said we would do at the times we said we'd do them. And, And not never the twain shall meet in the middle. Like, That is, That's insanity, Isn't it? It's insanity, Because where's the presence in that? Where's the real time responsive intelligence? Where is what's happening in this moment? What's my body saying in this moment? You know, You've planned to work this period, But like on Wednesday, I felt flipping awful. And I needed to rest. And I did, I laid on the sofa, And I listened to the lovely Amy Johnson's podcast, Highly recommend that. And I dozed a bit as well, Which was nice. And it's what I needed. And it meant that an evening import, A really important evening appointment I wanted to keep with a client, I could do that, Because I'd allowed myself to rest. And then, You know, Tomorrow morning, I might wake up early and decide to do some work. It doesn't, It's, It's the rigidity that's not helpful. It's an illusion that we need to weigh the two up against each other that will never ever work. And as I say, The result of trying to make that happen, Is stress, Is anxiety, Is, Is overwhelmed. 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Reviews

Excellent, I am so appreciative that someone has said this, finally ;) Thank you so much ♡♡♡