Take a balanced view – and get a clearer picture of your world

THE OTHER night I had been asked to speak to a lovely group of female entrepreneurs. Of course now it’s all done by video link. which is a little different to how we are all used to delivering sessions, but I am amazed at how we can still get that feeling of connection, even though we are not in the room together.

Interestingly, we were talking about an ultimate mindset for resilience and growth, not just for business, but for life in general, and one comment really stuck out for me. Whenever I start a session I always find out how the group sees the subject that we are going to talk about, so that I can tailor my message for them. One participant had described how she experienced highs and lows, like all of us, but that what she would love is more of a balanced mindset, somewhere in the middle.

I loved that, how in that short sentence, she really summed it up for everyone in the room.

When we talk about wanting to experience balance, it’s like we know innately, that we want to feel balanced, and that in my mind, points to our state of mind, rather than our state of life.

So how can we achieve that? The answer lies not really in the how, but in understanding more about what is going on in our own minds and realising that there is nothing to do to achieve the balance that we seek.

When we experience that balanced state it is a natural state within us. It’s like our home base, our default state – or in other words the state we experience when there is nothing on our minds and it is clear. The best way is to try it out the next time you find yourself gazing out of the window with nothing on your mind – notice how balanced you feel in that moment, notice how good that feels.

Now the first myth is that we want to feel like that all of the time. We’re simply not designed that way, we are meant to have a whole range of experiences and feelings, life would be very dull if we only had one. It would be like all the colour in the world just drained out and we were left with black and white. However with more understanding of our own minds, we can become less concerned when our thoughts create feelings that we don’t like as much, or leave us feeling out of balance and interestingly when we do, we return to our balanced state more easily.

So often when we are feeling intensely about something, whether it be stress, or upset, we become worried about our circumstances, maybe becoming more stressed or beat ourselves us for feeling this way, we innocently, create more of the same thinking, and therefore more of the same feeling.

When we start to notice that it is our thinking that is taking us away from our naturally balanced state and that this thinking will pass naturally if we leave it alone; and really notice that we always feel better when it passes and that we always see whatever situation it is clearer when it does. We then start to realise, that our intense feelings are simply telling us what thinking we are doing in that moment and not about our circumstances, and as a result our thinking naturally reduces, and we return to our balanced state.