Recently one of my friends posted “Build a Life. Don’t live one.” as their Facebook status and it really struck me. Too often, I find myself caught up in the ongoing current of my life. Work is busy and I tend to focus on the week ahead, rather than looking further into the future.

I’ve recently been thinking that I need to get better control of my daily work/life balance. At work there are always pressing issues, people matters, meetings and action items that demand attention. It’s easy for me to get drawn into the urgency and importance of everyday work. And somehow meetings eat into hours outside “normal work hours”. Sometimes this is necessary. But often this becomes the ‘norm’.

As work days get longer, they squeeze into time I need for myself to build a life I want. When I reflected on this, I identified three very important foundational elements that I must control:

• sleep,
• socializing, and
• working out.

Sleep

In my world, sleep is the first priority and last thing I like to give up. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always needed a lot of sleep. Even when I was in Grade 7, I would go to bed at 7:30pm and get up at 7am. My friends thought this was crazy but I’ve always needed a lot of sleep.

Recently, Thrive by Arianna Huffington has been raising awareness of the importance of sleep and mindfulness on overall health. Arianna’s personal wake-up call came in the form of a broken cheekbone and nasty gash over her eye due to exhaustion. Mine was related to stress and its effects on my nervous system and wellbeing.

I went to see a naturopath that was recommended to me by a friend: Dr. Courtney Campbell at Aurora Integrative Medical. She is excellent. She diagnosed adrenal fatigue. (This diagnosis is not necessarily supported by western medicine practitioners but it did fit my symptoms). One aspect that was interesting to me is the comprehensive intake questionnaire she had me fill out. It goes through various functional systems in your body and it told her how many systems were involved, how far the impact of adrenal fatigue had cascaded through my body. Fortunately, my symptoms did not extend to having an impact on my ability to fall asleep or stay asleep. I did consult a number of different practitioners during this time and every practitioner asked me about my quality of sleep, my ability to fall asleep, my ability to stay asleep.

Sleep is an important indicator of wellness.

Sleep can also be an important indicator of how much you’ve depleted your systems. I find that if I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for a long time, then even if I get a good night of sleep, I may not feel better immediately. And as a working mom with two children, I’ve been sleep deprived for years.

With my adrenal fatigue, it was a very slow process to recover. I had to keep reminding myself that it took a long time for me to get down to this point, so it was just logical it would take a long time to recover. I tried to be patient with myself and kind to myself.

Sleep was one important part of my recovery process. Sleep helps me to build a life.

Socializing

As a consulting professional, I am frequently responsible for teams of people who are delivering a project for a client. Unless we have the opportunity to work on an in-town project, we are usually working out of town during the week from Monday through Thursday. Because the team will likely have a significant proportion of out-of-town travelers, there tends to be opportunities to get together for dinner and socialize with each other outside the office.

Social time is important because that is when you learn things about each other that are not related to work. The more connected you are with the people on your team, the easier it is for the team to pull together when the going gets tough. And for me, on big projects and programs, you always know there will be tough moments when you’ll need the team to stand strong together.

One of the trickiest parts for me, as an introvert, is figuring out how to balance my socializing time and my down time. If I don’t do a good job during the week, then on the weekend, I don’t want to go out anywhere with my husband or family. And that can be unfair for both my family and for my personal friends for whom I don’t have as much energy as I might like.

Balancing social time and downtime is an important factor to build a life that has the right balance for me.

Working Out

If you’ve seen my post about Four Tips to Keep Moving, you’ll know that I sometimes have to talk myself into working out and staying in a regular workout routine. Recently, I hadn’t been working out as regularly as I might like, so I signed up with a friend of mine, Shelly MacPhail, who is an inspiring workout coach. Shelly is amazing – she’s a fit mum of two who makes time to workout and eat right as a priority. Being fit enables Shelly to achieve big, hairy, audacious goals like completing a Spartan race. Having access to workouts that are already recorded, that I can do on my own schedule and the other techniques Shelly uses to help us stay accountable to our goals, really help.

Being in good physical shape gives me more energy and strength to do other things. To build a life, I need to make sure I have a good level of physical wellbeing.

Build a life. Don’t live one.

What this saying really reminds me is to be intentional with my choices about how I spend my time, what I eat, who I spend time with and how much rest I get. And it inspires me to put myself at the center of my choices – to make sure my priorities are at the heart of my decisions.

So I’m looking forward to seeing how I do with building my life, my way.

And I realize that these are foundational elements for building a life – I haven’t even start to talk about what my dreams are, or where I might want to go that is different from where I am today. So getting control over these parts is a first step in a longer journey.

What would it take for you to build a life? Do you get caught up in the day to day? What tips or tricks do you use to keep your focus on what’s most important to you? Please share your comments or thoughts below.

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