THE BRAVELY BALANCED BLOG
For the overachiever and the overworked!
How exhausted are you? I know the feeling!
Does being exhausted serve you? What if I told you that you could have it all without subjecting yourself to hustle culture?
Sounds divine, doesn’t it? Follow along and feel the ease!
Category
- Anger and Depression
- Anxiety Stress & Fear
- Balance
- Burning the candle
- Burnout
- Change
- Dealing with Urgency
- Drive
- Emotional awareness
- Empowerment and Living
- Epigenetics
- Expectation
- Healing
- Hope
- Introversion
- Leadership
- Personal Boundaries
- Resilience
- Self-reliance
- Shame
- Trauma
- Victim Mentality
- Vulnerability
- Worry
- avoiding conflict
- balance
- conflict resolution
- connection
- decluttering
- emotional eating
- empathy
- feeling stuck
- imposter syndrome
- intentions
- justice
- mindfulness
- overeating
- perfection
- perfectionism
- procrastination
- regret
- resolotions
- self-awareness
- unfairness
- visibility
Decluttering Your Mind
I used to spend most of my time in my mind, dreaming, planning, worrying, and spiraling. It was not only off-putting to anyone around me, it could also be dangerous. …
When Hard Work Turns Harmful: A Story Of Change
I spent time with an old friend a few weekends ago, who was convalescing after a long illness that was caused largely from overwork. My friend was known for her relentlessly hard work, never stopping when she got tired, pushing through any physical barrier to finish what she’d committed to on time.
People admired her for her energy …
From Knowing to Experiencing: A Journey of Self-Discovery
I spent time, recently, re-connecting with friends who I haven’t seen for a while. I loved those re-connections: they brought back past times where we worked together for a common goal and experienced, together, both triumphs and trials. I believe we grew and matured from the experiences, and that an essential part of that growth was our connection.
I was thinking specifically about the trials we met together in an organization we belonged to. …
Ready for a New Beginning? Embracing the Next Chapter of Your Life
What do you do when your spouse decides to leave? Or when you find yourself needing to learn to live without the one you can’t live without? Or when your business partner suddenly turns on you and demands a change you can’t agree to?
These are a few instances of major life changes that are visited on us many times over, …
Navigating Unfairness: Finding Empowerment In Chaos
My mind and heart have been dwelling on how unsafe the world feels lately. How innocent people are being hurt and that harm is justified by the countries inflicting it. …
From Resolutions To Intentions: A Journey Of Self-Discovery
It’s March already so the typical resolution time has come and gone. But not for me – I do mine on my birthday, which was in February. I also decided a while back to switch from making resolutions to making intentions.
Resolutions, for me, were concrete goals I felt I wanted to attain. They often entailed …
You Already Have Everything You Need
What can I do? That’s a question I’m asking myself about my life situation and the (mostly political) chaos around me today. What can I do? So that I can feel like I’m part of the solution in my own life and in my community and not feel helpless.
The answer,…
From Fear To Freedom: Embracing Total Self-Acceptance
I’m a driven woman, and I work with driven women and men. Being driven is a wonderful way to live, if one’s drive is the kind that feeds one’s spirit. It is for many of us. And at least for some, it’s tinged with something that doesn‘t feed the spirit.
If you find yourself worried …
The Power Of A Story
I have a story. Two days ago my purse fell apart. The story of how I chose this purse has its own story, but that isn’t the one I want to tell today. Today I want to tell how I became a purse abuser.
Yes, you read right – I am a purse abuser. After carefully getting the purse that would fulfill all my requirements, it still ended up not being quite adequate.
Understanding Victim Mentality: How to Reclaim Your Agency
It was rush hour after work. I was on a fully packed bus trying to zone out so that I didn’t feel the push of bodies against me. When I got home, my wallet was missing. I called the police, who suggested I list all documents that were in there and get them replaced immediately. They also said it was very unlikely I’d find that wallet.
That bitter feeling of being victimized took a long time to leave my body. …
You have way more than you think
I decided to clean out my tea cupboard. In it, I found 5 unopened boxes of Bengali Spice tea. It isn’t as if these tea boxes are tiny and easy to miss, but miss them I did, over and over again. The reason I kept not seeing them was not only because my tea cupboard was a mess, but that I was afraid I’n eventually run out – and be without!
As a result, I ended up with this ridiculous overabundance of Bengali Spice tea. …
Setting Intentions
I led a workshop a few years ago on setting intentions. I offered this for a personally selfish reasons: my habit every January would be to look at what I didn’t like about myself and resolve to make changes in concrete ways. I would begin the year carrying those actions out, and they would work until some time in February. Sure, it felt good for a week. Then it became an increasingly burdensome chore until the burden was great enough for me to stop doing them. …
The Transformative Power of Perspective: A Step to the Side
I was with a friend a few weeks ago. We were talking randomly as friends do when suddenly she said seemingly out of the blue about another mutual friend “I hate that man!”.
Have you ever found yourself saying or thinking that about another person? I have. Hate is such a strong word: filled with emotion and anger, maybe also fear. But unless that person has done something seriously bad…
The Best Time is Now: Turning Regret into Resolve
Have you ever regretted doing something, even long after you did it, and can never undo it? Then, not only regret the action, but also the amount of time you spent not doing anything about it. Yes, the best time to have corrected your mistake might be just after it happened, but for any number of reasons, that didn’t happen.
I still remember …
Rethinking Trust in Politics: The Appeal of the Outsider
I hear a lot about why populist-type people are popular and are winning most of the political races just now. I hear a lot about how they relate to those who vote for them, even if the populist in question has never lived in the same circumstances as the person saying this. Some say it’s because the populist feels authentic.
I understand this reason. I
How Failing Can Help You Succeed
I spoke with someone recently who believed he’s failed whenever he finds himself falling into an old, familiar, unproductive pattern. Yes, you could say he failed to move away from the pattern. That’s true. But then we took a closer look.
What he discovered i
Growing Through Tension
I’m in a meeting full of people intent on their own unspoken agendas, vying with each other to get their wants through. If I’m chairing that meeting, I can feel the tension it creates. How successfully I work with it is the measure of my ability to chair.
Beyond Intelligence: The Value of Emotional Awareness
I listened to an interview with David Brooks recently. It was on what he terms elite meritocracy. He was contrasting our current educational system of requiring high mental intelligence with other kinds of living, and finding that our dependence on intelligence as defined by high IQ or SAT scores is not getting us to any sense of collective happiness or fulfillment, …
Choosing What Matters: Strategies for Prioritizing Life’s Tough Problems
Problems come in so many ways every day that I thought I’d write about them. Positive Psychology likes to term them “challenges” because that makes them sound less scary. However you want to call them, they are things all of us encounter repeatedly, and daily.
There are problems
Sugar and Spice
A dear friend had a dream a few weeks ago. It wasn’t much of a dream: it was an image actually, of a large soup bowl filled to the brim. Exactly half of the bowl was filled with a nourishing soup, while the other half was filled with Crème Brule. The soup and sweet weren’t intermixing or ruining one another. They simply occupied half of the brimming bowl each.
So different from my friend’s life.