Let's re-define balance. A counter balance may be a better goal. No matter how much you plan, there will be times that motherhood will take over and times when work or life will. Times of imbalance may be seasonal or change by the day. Realize that you can counterbalance by giving the neglected thing more time. If you have had a long work week, balance it out by spending extra quality time with your family on the weekend for instance. Stress comes in when you continue to burn the candle at both ends and neglect balancing the other side.

Think of any optical illusion. You know when you shift your focus and you see the other picture? Maybe that's what we need to do when we look at our life. Shift your focus and see things differently. You are not a victim. In most cases, the life you are living is one you have chosen. When your toddler is screaming because you won't buy her a toy, shift your focus and smile at the life long lesson you are sharing. When you are overwhelmed because you have 100 emails, think about how lucky you are that so many people want to connect with you. maybe we need to shift our focus and see things differently

Margin is probably so rare to you that you don't even know what it is. It is simply a little bit of downtime or unplanned time. It's the time to catch your breath. Heck, it might be the time to go to the bathroom. If you book your day so tight that you are always running late or behind, you have no margin. "Margin is the gap between rest and exhaustion, the space between breathing freely and suffocating" according to Richard Swenson, M.D. Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives. Margin is not something that just happens. You have to fight for it. Michael Hyatt suggests that you schedule margin in to your daily calendar.

Every time you say yes, you are saying no to something else. Your hours were already filled to the max so what are you not doing when you say yes? Say no to things that are not in line with your heart or your priorities. Say yes to what is truly important to you. Remember, just because you can doesn't mean you should. See what you can delegate, put off or say no to altogether. When you do, you might be saying yes to more balance!

We all have the same 168 hours in the week. We have a choice on how we use them. Most of us try to multitask and get more done at once because there is never enough time. Wrong tactic. All studies that look at multi tasking show that we are less efficient and less effective. In fact, these studies have shown us to lose significant brain capacity when we try to multitask. Choose one thing to work on at a time. When writing this post for example; I shut down my email, Facebook and Skype. I freed myself from distractions. Remember, a pilot or surgeon does not get to multitask when doing his job and neither should you!

This is also inspired my my virtual mentor, Michael Hyatt. He taught me that you need to have a budget for your time, much like we need a budget for our finance. I don't care if you are a stay at home mom. Consider creating an ideal week where you create the plan for how you want to spend your days. It wont always go as planned, but you will feel so much better when it does! See Michael's article here. He shares a spread sheet that you can fill out. I use my google calendar and have shared mine with you.

Our time is finite. Don't just fill your hours. Fill them with what you love, including recharge time and I can assure you that you will get to enjoy a little bit of that balance we all so crave.