Sometimes I use this blog to highlight a section from my ebook, “What Can Go Right?’, and I’m doing it this week. I’ve found that people can be happy and productive if they don’t forget to include balance in their lives. Below is a summary of my thoughts. What do you think?
Activity levels are important in achieving one’s goal, but it is equally important to leave time for recreation, socialization, and experiencing meaning in one’s life through spirituality or other means. All of us know people who have thrown their entire selves into their work at a sacrifice to their marriage and family lives and general enjoyment of life. If there is only one area of focus in your life, it leads to a striving for perfection in that area. That makes it impossible to be totally happy because perfection can never be reached. You can’t make all the money in the world, you can’t ever be totally satisfied with your body image, and you can’t always get everyone to agree with you. Happy people take a degree of satisfaction from participating in the processes that lead to some level of accomplishment in various areas, but they don’t demand perfection. If one operates from the assumption of happiness is one of the things that you want to have go right in your life, a necessary corollary is the importance of maintaining a degree of balance.
Ron Kaiser, Ph.D.
What Can Go Right? 