A Balanced Life–Part 2

What is Your Mission?

Remember that to be successful, you must become a monomaniac with a mission.
This is true today, and it has always been true in our competitive society.
To be successful at your job, you must work fast and efficiently and nonstop all
the time you are on the payroll. You must become an expert at time management.
You must become so efficient and effective that you get twice as much done as
anyone else. In this way, you will advance your career at the fastest rate
possible, and you will also be on top of your job most of the time, and it will
be unnecessary for you to take work home for the evenings and weekends.

Then, when you have finished your work, you can devote your full attention to
your family and to the other important people in your life. The Bible says, “A
double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” One of the meanings of this is
that if you are thinking about your work while you are with your family, or if
you are thinking about your family when you are at work, you end up
accomplishing far less in each area. However, if you are on top of your work,
when you come home you can devote yourself single-mindedly again, like a
monomaniac–to your relationships and to enhancing the quality of your
interactions with the most important people in your life.

On Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 11:00 PST, join my teleseminar "Create Your
Flight Plan to Achieve All of Your Goals in 2010." This powerful 90 minute teleseminar will give you all the information you need in order to find clarity,
balance, and create and achieve all of your goals this year. To Register:
Click
Here

Family

The key to a happy family life is communication. And it is not quality of time
but quantity of time that counts. Quality moments–those little moments that are
precious and important–come unbidden and, usually, unexpectedly. They arise
during the process of spending a large quantity of uninterrupted time with one
or more people. You cannot dictate those moments in advance. You cannot decide
to have quality time. You do not go to it. It comes to you.

There are a variety of ways to extract the greatest amount of quality and
happiness from your relationships with the members of your family. Perhaps the
most important is to spend unbroken time with your spouse on a daily basis. Of
course, you should spend time together talking after the children have gone to
bed, but you should also seek out and utilize small segments of time during the
morning and early evening during which you can communicate and interact. One of
the most important things that couples can do is spend the first 30 to 60
minutes after work debriefing each other and discussing the day’s activities.

Your children also have a tremendous need to communicate with you. In fact, in
my research on how to raise super kids, I found that the one factor that was
more important than any other was the amount of one-on-one time that the parents
spent with the children. When parents don’t spend a lot of time with their
children individually, they send a message to their children that they are not
very valuable or important. Children then react by experiencing feelings of
inferiority, lowered self-esteem, and negative self-images, and this is
expressed in poor grades and behavioral problems. But when the parents take the
time to sit down with their children and ask questions and listen to what is
going on in their minds, the children tend to feel a deep sense of value and
importance that is manifested in self-confidence, happiness, and good
relationships with others.

The key is learning to use your time better. You cannot get more hours out of
each day, but you can put more of yourself into each of those hours. Turn off
the television and spend time talking with the members of your family. Never
read newspaper of books when a member of your family wants to communicate with
you. Put the reading material aside. Concentrate single-mindedly on the most
important people in your world. Everything else can wait.

In regard to your work and family, continually ask yourself, “What is the most
valuable use of my time right now?” Consider if what you are doing today will
matter a week or a year from today. Sometimes, we become preoccupied with small
things that are not really important in the long run. But what is important in
the long run is the quality of our home life.

You don’t have to be a superman or superwoman to properly balance the demands of
your work and the needs of your family. You must, however, be more thoughtful,
be a better planner, use your time more effectively, and continually think of
ways to enhance the quality of your life in both areas. If you set this as a
goal and resolve to work toward it every day, you will gradually become far more
efficient, far more effective, and a far happier human being. And that’s the
most important thing of all.

On Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 11:00 AM PST, join my Teleseminar "Create
Your Flight Plan to Achieve All of Your Goals in 2010." This powerful 90 minute teleseminar will give you all the information you need in order to find clarity,
find balance, and create and achieve all of your goals this year. To register:
Click Here