Life can be full of challenges.  One thing to help you become a happier person is to balance your life.  Take charge of what’s most important to you.  Where is your life out of balance?  Often the hardest balance is between work and family time.  Especially if you are trying to establish yourself at work, or you are a new parent, or you are now a single parent.  One of the things to pay attention to if you are noticing that work is encompassing your life, what needs are being fulfilled there that aren’t being fulfilled at home?  Work may provide some kind of significance for you and maybe you are not feeling that at home so you overcompensate at work.  Have you made work more meaningful than parenting? Whose voice are you hearing making that true for you?

Tony Robbins talks about all humans have 6 basic needs – the need for certainty, for uncertainty, for significance, for love/connection and two spiritual needs – growth and contribution.  You will have those needs filled either in a positive or negative way.

When your life is out of whack, you will try the best you know how, to have your needs met.  Like, do you want to be a better parent but feel pressures of work? Take time to see how you are having your needs met.  Awareness of what you are doing in negative and positive ways in each of those categories is valuable to finding your happiness.  A reason for unhappiness or frustration with life is when you know things are happening in your life you don’t like.  Usually, you ignore it or justify it rather than addressing the problem. What you want to do is to find positive ways to have those needs met but you first have to see it to know it.

Write out how your life is fulfilling each need both positively and negatively.  It can be telling.  When I did this activity, significance and growth were my two strongest.  I saw how much of my significance was negative where I was trying to be valued, be important like obsessing over being the best at my work.  It’s important information because it’s a beginning place to being happier.

The first step is to become aware is to know how you are operating right now.  Don’t make it bad or good but information you need to feel empowered to make the changes you want in your life.  Next, seek to understand how your needs are being met negatively.  Then what are some small steps to begin shifting those so you can feel more contentment and lead a happier life by having your needs met in the ways you want.  In other words, how can your negatively fed needs turn to fulfilling needs?  For example, you drink too much.  What need is not being met that you are now having met by the drinking – significance, connection, uncertainty?  Own it.  Decide to change it.

Once needs are met in a positive way, you choose different behaviors more in alignment with what you want.  Then your life is happier and you are less effected by trivial things.  You are living in harmony with the life you desire.

Share with me on Facebook, what’s one revelation you have had about how you are trying to have one of your needs met in a negative way and how you are planning on changing it.