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Jeremy: [00:00:00] When life feels out of control, it's often because one part of you is out of balance. Today, let's discover how the five forces of balance can transform your life into one of harmony and purpose.
Hello, and welcome to season two of the Jeremy Hayswood show. This podcast is all about exploring a wide range of topics that spark curiosity, build community, inspire action, and deepen our understanding of the world around us.
Each season we dive into a new theme, offering fresh perspectives [00:01:00] and insights that are practical, informational, entertaining, and thought provoking. subscribe to or follow this podcast now by tapping the button on whatever platform you're seeing or hearing this. My whole mission with this show is to create a space where we can explore the questions and ideas that matter, bringing together knowledge from different fields and experiences. Throughout my career, I've been passionate about connecting people with the resources and ideas that empower them to make a meaningful impact.
This podcast is an extension of that passion. Where we can learn together and grow together. I believe that the heart of every great endeavor is a great story waiting to be told. My background in marketing, music, and entrepreneurship has shown me how powerful these stories can be in transforming lives and communities. Whether I'm helping a non profit power their cause or working with individuals to discover their true potential, I'm always driven by the idea that we have the ability to create positive change.
All we need is hope. And as a messenger of hope, that's why I started this podcast to share those stories, insights, and [00:02:00] conversations that can inspire you to take action, no matter what field or passion that you're pursuing. We're about to kick off season two. That's your first time joining me. Let me explain how my seasons work.
Every single season, we're doing a different topic. Last season, I did 10 episodes on digital fundraising for nonprofits. So if you're listening to this and you work for a nonprofit, you may want to go back and listen to that season. Season two is all about personal development and life transformation.
This one is based on my bestselling book. Finding your edge, how to unlock your talent and purpose. So each of the 10 episodes in this season , will pull different concepts and expand on those a little bit from that book. Today's episode is all about finding balance in life. Sometimes we don't know when our life is out of balance, but oftentimes we do. There's this feeling that we get inside of us that just, Insights us and lets us know we're spending too much time on X or not enough time on Y. so my goal today is to provide some different insights and approaches to recognizing that balance in your life [00:03:00] and giving you some strategies to help conquer those diversions that are taking you away from achieving that balance.
Let me introduce you to the five forces of balance. And I define those as family, professional, health, spiritual, and personal. So let's dig a little bit into each one of these because these are five areas of your life that I feel If you are balancing these, then you are living a life of joy and fulfillment.
Now, disclaimer, these forces will be out of balance at times. There's certain seasons of your life, certain days, weeks, sometimes months that you'll go through where one or more of these forces will be out of balance. So my goal is not for you to have 100 percent balance between all of these forces. It's one to be aware that these forces exist because when we're aware of something, we can be more intent on how we're living our lives.
But two, also to give yourself some grace. If your forces are off balance a little bit and recognize that's where you are right now, but you need to get better and implement some strategies to try to create [00:04:00] more balance in your life. So digging into each of these a little bit more, your family force is basically what is your relationship like with your family?
And this could look different to different people. Some people have family that are not blood related family. These could be your relationships, but if it is your family, it could be the relationship with your spouse, with your partner, your children, your significant other, your parents, your siblings. So what does that family relationship look like?
And this is an important force because this is often the foundation. Of who we are. This is who we've spent a lot of our time with. This is the force of our life that has shaped so many different pieces of our life. Now whether you have a great family life or a poor family life, consider what your family relationships are.
If you're a person who doesn't speak to your immediate family, because that could be you, like that's okay. Sometimes your family are the people that you chose, not the people who chose you or are biological or blood related. So when we're speaking about family, how are you defining family and what is your [00:05:00] relationship like within that family structure?
The second force is professional. So what does your professional life look like? If you're a student, then this would be, what is your school life look like? And we know if you're a student right now, especially, college, like you're going to be way out of balance more than likely with some of the forces here today.
However, like if you have a job, have a family if you're out of school or not in school and you have a job, let's look at your professional life. How much time are you spending there? How is it impacting other areas of your life?
The third force is health. What does your health look like? And when we talk about health, we're talking about your physical and your mental health. This also includes what does your diet look like? Are you eating right? Are you exercising? Are you healthy mentally? What are the things that you're doing to take care of yourself?
So this is a big force in your life is your health. The next one is spiritual. And regardless of what your religions or beliefs are, I believe that there [00:06:00] is a higher power and whether you agree with me on the way that I worship or what my spiritual life looks like, I believe that spirituality is a foundational piece of our lives and it is one of those forces of balance.
So what does your relationship look like with spirituality and how are you exercising that? How are you prioritizing that? And what does that spiritual life look like for you? How healthy is that spiritual life for you? The fifth and final force of balance is personal. The personal force of balance. and this involves self. What are the things that you're doing to really spark curiosity? Your hobbies. What are the things that you're doing for you spending time? Some me time. And yes, that could relate to health and mental health. But when we look at personal, we also want to look at things like finances.
What is our personal life look like? And how is that balance compared to everything else? An example of how that could be off track is if You love playing video games and you're spending a [00:07:00] whole lot of time playing video games and it's taking away from your family life or your health. That would be an imbalance in your personal life.
So just to go through some of these as an example, I talked about what these forces are. But to give you an idea of how we can look at whether we're doing good or bad in these in my opinion, or how we'd rate ourselves let's look at family. If we have great relationships with our family our significant other, our spouses, our kids, our parents, then we're probably doing well in that force.
Areas where you may be falling short in family may involve how tight your relationship is with your significant other or your kids. Have you been spending more time at work and haven't been able to really show up and be present for people in your family who need you? From a professional perspective, looking at the professional force, you may be excelling at work.
You may have a healthy relationship with your boss. You may have satisfaction with the work that you're doing. On the other side of that, maybe you're working really, really long hours that are taking away from your health, [00:08:00] taking away from your relationships. Or you may not be content with your job. This, you may be stuck in a job and you don't like your job.
It doesn't fulfill you. It doesn't give you satisfaction. So I would say that would be an area that you may not be in balance with the professional piece. When we look at health, things that are very great for your health, looking at eating right, exercising right, taking care of your mental state, doing the things that bring you completeness and wholeness that are good for you.
On the flip side, if you're not ever working out, if you're eating a bunch of junk food that's bad for you continuing to expose yourself to things or relationships that are really harmful to you, that can negatively impact your health and throw off that balance. From a spiritual perspective, if you're attending a religious service weekly or praying or meditating, or just taking time with the creator and having that belief and being open and surrendering yourself to a higher power, then you're probably in a good state of balance from your spirituality.
On the flip [00:09:00] side, if you're so caught up with family, professional health and everything else that you haven't really taken time to check in and get your spiritual life and have time to reset and restore and have that stillness, then your spiritual life is probably off. Then we look at personal. Are your finances taken care of?
Are you doing things that make you happy? Like I mentioned video games, you can play video games, just don't play so much that it's taking away from these other forces of your life. Are you traveling if you love to travel because that's what you love to do? Those areas that are for you, that me time, are you taking that time?
Now on the flip side, if you're not doing those things, these things that stir your soul whenever you have the time to do it. Because your time and effort is so caught up in all these other pieces, then that would be something that is taking away from that personal force of life. So when we look at these five forces of balance, this is such an important balance and a foundation for life transformation.
This whole season is about personal development and life transformation. One of the things that [00:10:00] I key on early in my book are these five forces of balance and the importance of getting this right so that as you start to do this work on yourself, you're coming from a place where there's more of a stronger foundation to start doing things like eliminating distractions and discovering yourself.
So we want to make sure that we're aware of these different forces and what I want you to do with each of these and you can write this down this whole season we're going to have different questions that I'll ask you and homework in a sense that you can participate in as we're on this podcast. But as you think about each of these forces, this is what I want you to do right now and get out a pen and paper or pull your phone out.
And we're going to go through each of these five forces, and I want you to rate yourself in these five different areas. So when we look at family, this is going to be a scale of one to five. One is you're way out of balance, this is an area that you need a lot of help in. Five means you're excelling, you're on the top of your game in this area.
So as we look at family, how balanced is that family forest? Do you have those good [00:11:00] relationships in place? Are you present? Are you showing up for those people around you that count on you? And again, family may not be your parents or kids. It may be like your really close friends that you consider family, people that are your brother or your sister that are not blood related, like your best friends.
Like, how are you showing up in the world? How, what does that balance look like? So on a scale of one to five, one being. I'm not doing good five being at the top of my game with that. Rate yourself on that for a professional rate yourself one through five. Do you have balance in your professional life?
Are you happy with your work? Do you have a good relationship with your coworkers, with your supervisors? Are you working the hours where you still have time to pour into these other forces of your of balance in your life or on the flip side, Do you work in a very toxic environment that is draining that you dread going to every day?
Are you becoming, even though you may not want to say it, are you becoming a workaholic where you're working so many hours that [00:12:00] you're missing out on things like your health, like your family, like your spiritual life? So rate yourself accordingly, one being low, five being very high. The next force of balance, health.
Let's rate ourself on health. You. Are you taking care of yourself? Are you eating right? Are you exercising regularly? Are you doing things for your mental health? Doing things that make you happy and help to keep negativity out of your sphere? On the flip side, are you living a life such that you aren't really paying attention to what you eat?
You're eating a lot of things that are not good for you. You're not working out and you're in toxic relationships and you can see some of this relates. I talk about a toxic work life and that's professional, but also just toxic people that are in your life that can help to impact you from a negative standpoint when it comes to health also.
So on a scale of one to five, one being low, Five being top, how do you rate yourself in health? let's talk about spiritual on a scale of one to five. [00:13:00] What does that balance look like? Are you praying, meditating, having stillness on a regular basis? Do you feel connected and close to your creator?
Are you spending time going to services and connecting with other people? Or on the flip side, are you isolated? Are you so busy that you're not being still? You're not praying. You're not connecting with a higher power. You're not having that time you need for you. What does that look like for you in your life?
And the last one, personal. On a scale of one to five. One being low, five being high. you doing the things that make you happy? Are you spending time with your hobbies? Do you have some downtime where you can just enjoy the things that you enjoy? How are your finances looking? Are your finances in order? On the flip side, Are you so busy and so stressed that you don't do anything for yourself? Also are your finances a wreck? These are things that we want to look at when we look at our personal life.
So how do you rate yourself on a scale of one [00:14:00] to five? The next area that we want to do, now that we have our ratings for each of these, now let's set a goal. what I would say to you when it comes to goal setting, if you're at a two right now, a one or two and any of these, I think it may be a stretch to go from a one to a five or a two to a five setting a goal.
So when I want you to think about goal setting with the five forces of balance, think about what can get you one point higher. So if you're a three right now in family, what will you need to do to get to a four? If you're at a two in health. What could get you to a three in health? If you're a five at any of these, like your goal can be to maintain, if you're at a one, then I think it's pretty easy to set a goal to become a two and possibly if you're at a one, maybe you can go to a three.
The main reason that I do this exercise is that one, you're aware of where you are in these forces of balance and two, the goal setting pieces, let's put some action behind it. Let's strive to do better in these different forces of balance that we [00:15:00] have. a goal framework that I talk about in my book, and this is not one that I invented.
You may have heard of this. It's a very popular model, which is smart goals and it's S M A R T. And I actually use a revised version, which is S M R T. And that's specific, measurable, realistic, and time bound. So you want to write a smart goal for each of these five forces of balance that will move you at least to the next step.
Level up. So if you're at a 2, moving you to a 3. An example, if we're looking at a physical score, your physical force of balance. You may have a two and you want to get to a three. So maybe your goal is to walk 15 minutes three times a week for the next month. So that fits into the SMART format. It's specific. You can measure it. You can measure whether or not you're walking 15 minutes. You can measure if you're doing this three times a week and it's realistic. I say it's realistic. I don't know what your life looks like, but this seems like a [00:16:00] pretty realistic goal.
And then finally, it's time bound. You want to do this in the next month. So you have a deadline on there. If you're creating a goal and you leave off any of these pieces, then you're leaving some wiggle room for your goal. When you're creating goals, and you're trying to better yourself, and you're doing life transformation work, you want to have a framework that is specific, measurable, realistic, and time bound.
So I highly recommend that you use this SMART goal. I've given you an example of what you can do for. You're the health piece of it. So think about each of the other forces of balance, for family, what is a specific measurable, realistic, and time bound goal take some time. And you can even pause the podcast right now and go through each of them.
So for family that one, you can pause it right here. I can even guide you through this. For your professional force, what is your SMART goal? For health, write down your goal. [00:17:00] For spiritual, write that goal down. And for personal, write down your SMART goal.
So the challenge that I leave you with is whether you wrote this down right now or not. Is really just to do this work this week go back and relisten to this rank yourself on each of these different forces of balance and then write one goal for each of these forces of balance then this week Start putting that plan into action. Time on your calendar to do it, put time in your phone, whatever you need to do, but take that away for this week.
Rate yourself on the five forces, create one goal for the five forces, and this week, put it on your calendar, start working this plan. We're just starting out that way. Okay. So that's what I want you to do. There's a lot of power in small, consistent changes. And that's the kind of work that we're starting on episode one of this season.
Okay.
One thing that I'll be doing different this season because it goes along with my book, finding your edge at the [00:18:00] end of each chapter, I ask reflective questions and that you can journal about. So for this season towards the end of each podcast, I'm going to ask a few reflective questions as well. And you can write down these also.
Now, if you have my book, And if you're keeping a journal, you can pair that book with this podcast and you can just write the answers within whatever journal that you're already keeping. So your reflective questions for this week are, which of the five forces is most out of balance in your life right now?
The second question, what's one small step you can take this week to improve it? And that should be answered by the challenge I gave you today. The third question is, how will balancing this force increase your overall happiness? I'll The fourth question is how will balancing this force impact your overall happiness and purpose?
And that's it. That is episode one of season two of the Jeremy Haselwood show. I want to thank you for tuning in to my show. If you enjoyed this episode, don't [00:19:00] forget to follow or subscribe so you're always up to date when the latest episode drops. We've got a lot to dig into this season. I'm looking forward to the personal growth And as you listen to the season, I'd love to hear from you.
Shoot me a message on Instagram or hit my website. Shoot me a note there because that gives me energy. So until next time, keep following your dreams to find your purpose.
