Have your passions taken a back seat?
Starting and running a practice can be all-encompassing. There are times when your practice requires all of your time, energy, and focus. With this, you have to trade the time you spend with your family, on your hobbies, self care, and other passions. This is meant to be a temporary sacrifice, but for many of you that trade off starts to become more and more permanent. Now family time, hobbies, self care, and passions are limited to a few days or weeks of vacation time you allot yourself per year.
Of course you don’t intend for this to happen. It just kind of sneaks up on you, right? Well, no.
There are only so many hours in a day and it’s impossible to give equal time to everything in your life. When people run out of time in the day the first things that tend to get cut out are the things that enrich and fulfill all of us such as social connections, hobbies, cooking meals, etc. You cancel plans with friends, miss your child’s sporting events or plays, reschedule your massage, skip the gym, eat dinner at the office… The things that keep you healthy and connected to the people you love take a back seat to work.
It feels like this sneaks up on you, but there are no surprises happening. The only thing that’s happening are the results of the choices you have made. Choices that are so normalized in our culture that we convince ourselves that we have no choice. But the reality is that they are choices. Which is a GOOD thing! Because it means you have the power to choose something else.
Have you ever had a colleague or friend who has their life well-balanced? They have a busy practice, spend quality time with their family, they’re happy with their work, they sleep well, have hobbies and vacations and days off. These people have the same 24 hours in a day as you. So how do they manage? Because of the choices they make. They have chosen to prioritize certain areas of their life over others. Instead of trying to “find the time” they are making the time for what’s important.
This is something I have been personally working on for myself. Prioritizing what’s important and putting those first instead of prioritizing my career and money first then fitting everything else in after that. The result for me means I live a more simple lifestyle. A big departure from where I was only a few years ago making a $200K+ household income. And I honestly can say I have never been happier in my entire life.
Challenge yourself by scheduling out your week with everything you have to do, but blocking out all of your family, hobbies, and self-care activities FIRST then all the other stuff with the rest of the hours left and see how that turns out. And report back!