How to rebalance and get your life back

Rebalancing is the act of getting the asset allocation back to its ideal. You do it by selling the asset class that’s overweight and buying the one that’s underweight. This idea of rebalancing also applies to life.

There are steps you can take to change what is not working and get back some control and balance in your life. And once you start seeing results you will be better equipped to maintain that new found equilibrium. The key is not to try to change everything at once, but to make small adjustments over time to determine what works for you. Eventually you will have a whole new set of positive life habits and you will never look back. You need to make sure that your life is balanced and if it’s not, you need to rebalance it.

In life, there are five major aspects:

• Spiritual: your relationship with the greater power.
• Health: your physical health.
• Work: your career and finance.
• Social: your relationships with others.
• Learning: your personal development.

See steps on how to rebalance your life from time to time:

1. Find the aspects that are underweight.

Look at each of the five aspects. Which ones do you think are underweight? Which ones do you think need more attention? Think this through and figure it out.

2. Find the aspects that are overweight.

Now, do the opposite and find the ones that are overweight. Where do you spend so much time and energy that it takes away from the other aspects? Which aspect dominates everything else? A likely possibility is idleness. This is when you do things that are not included in the five aspects above. For example, you might be watching too much TV might cause overweight.

3. Find ways to reduce the overweight aspects.

Next, you need to find ways to reduce the resources taken by the overweight aspects. Say no to everything that is either not essential or doesn’t add something valuable to your life. Think about how you can spend less time there. Think about how you can become more efficient. Set boundaries for yourself. Such a boundary will push you to become more efficient at work because your time is now limited. Also eliminate. Decide not to do certain things. Say no to them and then delegate. If you can’t eliminate something, find ways to delegate it to someone else.

4. Spend more resources on the weak aspects.

The key here is to plan ahead what you are going to do. If not, your extra time might only be spent on idleness which is the default way of spending time for most people. For instance, If a weak aspect is learning, think about how you are going to learn. You might want to buy a book and put it beside your sofa to remind you to read. Bear in mind that new behavior would not happen automatically. You need to plan for it to happen.

5. Review your life regularly.

Just because you have rebalanced your life once doesn’t mean that it will stay balanced forever. Over time, things might go out of balance once again which is why you need to review your ‘life portfolio’ regularly. Doing a weekly or monthly review is a good way to do that.