Chart Your Life and Get to the Root of What’s Important through Journaling 

By Kim Ades
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As women, we seem to be constantly wishing for balance in our lives. A better mix of work and family and a little time for us as well.

Our balancing act is precarious at best. We teeter mostly on the brink of not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything we need to do at work and not enough hours left in the evenings to accommodate all the other things we just have to get done. Sometimes we want to scream. Sometimes the only place to get a minute to ourselves is the bathroom!

But, I say, be careful what you wish for. Personally I’m not striving for balance in my life— at least not the kind that we associate with that word. Balance insinuates equal time for everything. I am striving for a different kind of balance, one that sees “me” firmly centered in the balancing act and has me spending more time on the things I love to do and maintaining my calm in the chaos.

Ask any successful woman how she does it: how she fits it all into her day and has great kids, a great marriage, a successful career. All of those successful women whose lives we would like to emulate have one thing in common. They place themselves as a priority in their lives. They are engaged in careers that make them tick. They prioritize, carve out time each week to exercise, dedicate time to their spouses and children, have date nights and keep on top of current events, books, movies and restaurants. They enjoy life and take amazing vacations.

Many of us are so caught up in the hum drum of our day-to-day lives, reacting and responding in drone-like fashion rather than designing the lives that really fulfill us, each part of us.  Many of us have lost the desire to reach out for what is important to us. 

The first critical step in creating balance is to define what’s essential to our happiness, our personal well being and our joy. How do we do this? One of the most powerful ways to make discoveries and revisions in our lives is through journaling.

Journaling transforms lives. Our company has just created a new self-guided online journal program called FOM52, where clients write daily in our journal and respond to specific assignments that are directed toward self discovery. Writing daily in a journal is an immediate and profound way to make significant changes in your life and is an essential element to achieve and sustain life balance.

Journaling does a few important things. When we write down what we are feeling, examine our thoughts and reflect on the details of our lives, we are cleansing our emotional palette. Magically, once we have “vented” in our journal, we can let go of the stuff that was weighing us down and move on. What we have done is to actually make some space for us to think about other things.

Journaling allows us to tune in to how we feel and provides an increased awareness of how our thoughts and beliefs lead to the results that we are getting. It’s like holding a mirror up that reveals our inner equations and provides us with a critical view.

Through journaling we are afforded a unique opportunity to create, chart and plan our life and get to the root of what is truly important to us. It gives us the chance to design our ideal world and to imagine the possibilities that are available to us. This is an integral step toward creating life balance; we have to know what it is that we want before we can set about creating it.

There is a lot going on in our lives. We are continually re-routing, re-thinking and making changes on the fly to comply with the multitude of details and demands that comprise our days and nights. I find that I achieve balance through journaling. It gives me the space that I need to reflect and make decisions that are right for me. It helps me to solve problems.

When I’m down, it gives me a forum to talk it out, find thoughts that make me feel better and lead me closer to fulfilling my desires. I call this trading up (the idea being that by trading up our thoughts we continually reach for better ones).

My writing reminds me daily of all the wonderful things that are in my life and keeps me in a state of gratitude. Journaling keeps my head straight and provides the glue that holds all the pieces of my life in place. It gives me the occasion to dream and keeps me beautifully balanced.

Kim Ades, MBA, president of Opening Doors and Frame of Mind Coaching, is one of the industry’s foremost experts on performance and success in real estate sales. Visit www.assessyourframeofmind.com for more information. Ades can be reached at kim@openingdoors.tv. Click here to read “The Pink Slip,” another article by Kim.