A life of balance is a concept that is commonly misconstrued by the general public.
For instance, it is a common practice for someone to feel as if they deserve a break for accomplishing the same daily tasks day in and day out without working towards a specific goal.
It is natural for the average person to go to their job, work an entire week, and then relax on the weekends - this is a concept that has been programmed into the human psyche to look forward to having the weekend off.
The weekend is idea that has been accepted by society as being able to have time off from peoples everyday lives.
Think about it, you go to work all week at a job you may or may not like just to look forward to having two days off at the end of your work week so that you can relax, maybe go to a bar with your friends, do your weekly grocery shopping, etc.
The two days off every week has given a false perception of finding balance in the sense that it gives people time to relax and recharge before they have to go back to work the following week.
While there is truth in that as humans, we need to have time to ourselves to relax and clear our minds, the rules are different when you have genuine goals in life.
When it comes to having a goals or achieving specific outcomes, the rules of balance change drastically.
Goals require more consistent work and effort than just working a regular weekly job.
Think about the owner of a company - most CEOs do not have the luxury of taking time off on a weekend to relax and do nothing, especially in the beginning stages of building the company.
In the building stages, the average CEO spends their entire week every week working towards one specific goal: building their company.
Over a long enough time frame, once the company has been built to a point where other people can run the company without the CEO always having to be there, can the CEO begin to take more time off.
Even then, as the owner of a company or a large organization, there are rarely any days where they aren't working to some extent.
In this example, the CEO is able to find balance by sacrificing their time and their consistent efforts in the beginning stages to eventually reap the long term reward of having more freedom in the future.
This is balance when it comes to having goals.
Understand that in order to achieve something, it requires sacrifice of your time and your short term gratification to reap the long term reward to find balance.
For myself personally, I reward myself one day per week to be able to cheat on my diet and enjoy food for one day.
After a week long of being strict on my diet and my training routine in the gym, I allow myself one day to splurge and enjoy food.
I choose to have my cheat day on the hardest training day of the week (leg day), and the following day I am right back on my diet for the next week.
I have been rewarding myself with a single cheat day per week for the last 11 years and continue to do so because it gives me something to look forward to.
I appreciate the tastey food more because I do not allow myself to eat it on a regular basis.
I make myself earn the tastey food after putting in the work all week and it becomes that much more of a reward when I can finally splurge a little bit.
For me, this is balance because my goal is to stay in peak physical shape and I work everyday to stay in good shape to find the reward for my efforts at the end of each week of training.
This is the fundamental law of finding true balance - being disciplined and consistent over a long enough time horizon to reap the rewards of your labor.
Understanding that there really are no days off when it comes to working on yourself or working towards your goals in life.
Sacrifice now so that you can enjoy things later because the more you sacrifice and stay disciplined, the more rewarded you will feel when things begin to pay off.