60. The Problem with Balance

0:00 Hey, what’s up everyone, it’s Jennie Dildine, the LDS mission coach and you are listening to the LDS mission Podcast, episode number 60. The problem with balance. I’m Jennie, the LDS mission coach. And whether you’re preparing to serve a mission, currently serving a returned missionary or a missionary mama like me, I created this podcast just for you. Are you searching for epic confidence? Ready to love yourself and to learn the how of doing hard things? Then let’s go. I will help you step powerfully into your potential and never question your purpose. Again. It’s time to embrace yourself. Embrace your mission, embrace your life, and embrace what’s next. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. If you’re here, that means that you are invested in either showing up as a missionary that you are the kind of missionary that you want to be, or helping you’re currently serving missionary or your return missionary, be the best version of themselves. So that is amazing. Thank you so much for being here. The tools here have the ability to completely transform your mission experience. And so that is super fun. I wanted to remind you that Facebook is no longer hosting this podcast, which is totally fine. Facebook gets to decide what they want to do and when they want to do it. So what I’ve decided, though, is that I’m going to share this podcast with all of you if you have a missionary on Google Drive. So if you have a missionary, you can go ahead and just email me Jennie at Jennie dildine.com. Remember, Jenny’s always spelled with an I II. Sometimes people say it, Genie, not Genie. It’s just Jennie with an IE. Jennie at Jennie dildine.com. The other thing I want to remind you of is I have this amazing video is a training video, if you’re preparing to leave on your mission, go to Jennie dildine.com, forward slash one tool. This one quick training will completely empower you to show up as the kind of missionary that you want to be listen is tough business out there on the mission. And you want to show up the best way that you can. You don’t want to be having thoughts like I’m a horrible missionary. I mean, you’re gonna probably think that at some point, but what I want for you is to be able to think I’m a terrible missionary, and then know what to do after that, instead of letting it kind of take you down or make you feel down or whatever else, you know, happens out there. So go grab that video. Go watch it today. So what is the update with us and our family? Super fun. The wedding festivities are finally wrapped up. We had a beautiful open house at our house last weekend. Which was awesome. I had tons of help. Tons of people, the flowers were beautiful. And we had family come into town. And it was just perfect. You guys it was it was an amazing weekend. And when I say perfect, I don’t mean perfect like nothing went wrong, although I can’t think of many things that went wrong. But what I mean by perfect is, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. And now my son and my new daughter in law, I have two now, which is super fun. They left today they’re going to Bear Lake for a little bit with her family and then they’re going to be in Provo starting school like all the rest of you guys. Yep, schools right around the corner. My daughter. She’s fifth grade, she’s going to be starting

3:59 fifth grade. And so that is going to be fun. It’s our last year of elementary school. And we just want to really enjoy that while we can. Then I have one that’s going to be a seen your Hello that is exciting. And then one that’s going to be a sophomore. And then my two older boys are going to be in Provo, married working school. One of them teaches at the MTC. He’s a supervisor there. I actually super fun. I had one missionary mom reach out to me and be like, hey, my son had your son. As a teacher at the MTC. I always love to hear stuff like that. So today, what I want to talk about with you is balance. And what I’m going to talk about today is the problem with balance. So I think there’s this idea out there that we need to live in Within more balance, and let me give you a couple of examples of this. So I had one client who was getting ready to go out on her mission. And she was really worried about where she would spend her time. Like, should she spend her time preparing? You know, kind of studying Preach My Gospel? Should she spend her time with her family? Or Should she spend her time with friends, and all of those things were super important to her. And so she just asked me, How do I find the balance? So another example I have for you, is on the mission. And I know that this was a kind of a big concern during COVID. And I think there’s a lot of missionaries still trying to navigate this balance is being out finding people like street contacting and, and contacting people out and about, versus finding on Facebook and contacting on Facebook. So that can be a tricky balance. Sometimes, if you’re a return missionary, maybe it’s the balance between your schooling and your social. I remember thinking about this all the time, right? It’s like, do I study for this test, I know, it’s important for me to be social with my friends. So that can be one balance, that is one area that we might want to kind of think about balance. The one buzzword that I hear a lot is work life balance. Maybe you’re like one of my return missionary clients who just started like his real adulting. He’s done with school, graduated, and he has his job. He was a physics major. And so now he’s like working in that field. And he’s like, wanting to date and he’s wanting to be social. So he works all day, he actually has also a site coaching business. And he’s wanting to, you know, have this social life as well. Maybe it’s you’re trying to strike a balance between dating, right, maybe you’re home from your mission and dating, and hanging out with your friends. You know, we always get this idea of like, oh, so and so was my friend, I don’t get to see them anymore. Because they’re always hanging out with this person, that they really, really liked this person that they’re dating. So what I want to offer to you today, is that balance this idea, this mental construct of balance can sometimes be a problem. And if it works for you, that’s great. But I want to point out a couple problems that we might be having with this idea of balance. The image that came to mind was the Cat in the Hat book. So do you guys know, Dr. Seuss, I don’t know if you remember this book, I used to read it when I was a kid. And also, I used to read it to my kids as well. And the Cat in the Hat book, it’s like first he starts with a bowl of fish. And then he tries to balance the fish on the umbrella. And then he tries to balance like a book on top of the fish on top of the umbrella. And then he tries to, you know, balance, I don’t know, some dishes, and then some people car. I mean, it’s like all of this crazy stuff that he starts to try to balance. Okay. And that’s the image that came to mind. In fact, did they make a movie about this book, at some point, I feel like maybe they did. I never saw the movie, I only had the image in my mind, of the Cat in the Hat, trying to balance all of these things like on his foot, and on his feet and, and all of those things. And then eventually, when the parents come home, right, they all of this stuff kind of crashes and burns, and then they have to clean it up and all of that. So there’s a couple problems with balance when we think about it this way. And I’m gonna give you three. Number one, it’s impossible to perfectly balance things. As humans, it’s just impossible. And what I mean by this is, we can never make things exactly equal. I mean, we can try. Like, let’s say we want to spend an equal amount of time with our before the mission. We want to spend an equal amount of time with our friends, as we do with our family. We’re like, okay, every day, I’m going to spend 40 minutes here and 40 minutes here.

9:38 But the problem is, is even if we’re in those places, what we find is that maybe our focus is not in those places. So even though we’re with our family, if we’re thinking about our friends, maybe that isn’t actually equal. Do you remember Do you see what I’m saying? We’re humans with emotions with thoughts that think about Future that think about the past. Very rarely are we actually in the present. And so it’s actually impossible to balance all of it. When we talk about work life balance, if your post mission and you’re, you’re working your dream job, and you’re trying to balance that with, you know, your social life or whatever. Also, again, like the number of minutes, we can’t make equal. I was also coaching one RM, that just came to my mind that he had moved into a new ward. And he was trying to balance his old friends from the old Ward, with his new friends from the new ward. And again, we can never perfectly balanced that. And one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is why? Why do we feel like and this is what I asked this RM, I said, Why do we feel like we have to make it perfectly balanced. And I think it’s because in this type of situation, especially with friends and other people, we’re actually trying to people please, basically, is we’re trying to show up for everybody, and not really taking into consideration what we might want or might not want. So all of that, to say, it’s impossible to find a perfect balance. Number two, the reason that trying to achieve perfect balance is a problem is because just the fact that we’re trying to create balance can be a problem, we start to think we’re doing it wrong. Like, I can’t count the number of times I’ve gotten on a call where it’s like, I really feel like I should be more balanced in this area. And notice how in this instance, we’re making the balance the problem, like there’s actually not a problem with the amount of time that we spend with friends, there’s not a problem with the amount of time that we spend with family, we just make it more of a problem. Because we’re like, I should be more in balance. And that doesn’t have to be a problem. If we just decide that we don’t need it to be imbalanced. And and I’m going to offer you a different way to think about it here in just a minute. But we just make a bigger problem. That’s number two. Number three, and this is a big one. When we try to achieve perfect balance in our lives, what we end up doing is we end up putting two things at war with one another. Because our brains really like all or nothing thinking. And so we decide, well, I can either spend time with my family, or I can spend time with my friends. Like there’s nothing in between. But think about you guys. There’s a whole bunch of different options in between what we start to be as like, my family is against my friends and my friends are against my family, right? And none of that has to be true. We can actually spend time with our friends and with our family. So I had this experience just last week, and I’m going to tell you more about that in just a second. But think about the idea of balance, I was just we were watching my daughter learn how to ride a bike. And when I think of balance this word, it can be a problem. Because think about what happens if you’re not balanced on a bike. You crash and burn. Like you have to be perfectly in the middle. Or you crash. And I don’t want you guys to think about your lives like that. Like there’s a more useful way to think about it. So again, the problems. Number one, it’s impossible to find perfect balance number two, we may get a bigger problem. So instead of just like how much time do I want to spend here, how much time do I want to spend here, we actually make it a problem, like what’s wrong with me, I can’t be balanced, right need to be balanced, when that doesn’t have to be a problem at all. And number three, we put those two things kind of at war with each other. They kind of fight with each other in our brains. It’s like a tug of war. So what can we do?

14:39 My favorite, favorite analogy that I love, instead of thinking about my life as having to be balanced, is I love to think of them all of the things that I want to do in my life as a smoothie. We have this most amazing smoothie place right now. In the town where I live, it’s very popular all of the high school kids work there. And even some of the college kids work there. Actually my oldest daughter in law, the one that got married last year, she worked there, all of her high school career is called Bull of Heaven. They have amazing smoothies, I love the smoothie bowl, it’s my favorite to be able to eat it because they put granola on top and Anna’s and strawberries. Anyway, I want you to think of your life like a smoothie. So instead of like I have to ensure achieve this perfect balance, like riding a motorcycle, or I’m gonna crash and burn and bust my head open. Okay, I want you to think of it like I’m going to add a little of this, I’m going to add a little bit of family time, I’m going to add a little bit of friend time. And when I mix those two together, it’s going to be it’s going to taste so good, it’s going to feel so good. Think about when you make a smoothie, maybe the first time you follow a recipe, like a quarter cup of this and a quarter cup of that. And even notice, if we’re measuring it, it’s not equal, it’s not balanced the number of the amount of orange juice, compared to the number of bananas compared to the number of strawberries, it’s not balanced at all. It’s just like, eat. And then after that, once it’s once we kind of get the hang of it, we don’t measure it at all. We just put it in there mix it up, then we taste and we’re like, huh, did I like the way that turned out? Okay, perfect. Or, like, oh, needs a little more sweetness, let’s add a little bit more honey. And we can just go on and on and on like that in our lives. So think about it like this way, if we’re a missionary, we have a lot to do. And we want to spend time with our friends, and we want to spend time with our family. If we’re getting ready to leave, we just like I want to do all of those things. And what kind of smoothie do I want to make today, a little bit of friends, a little bit of family a little bit of mission prep? Awesome. Let’s say that we’re on the mission, and we’re trying to do like finding, and some Facebook finding like street contacting and Facebook finding great, instead of being imperfect balance, let’s just decide, you know, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna make up awesome finding smoothie, it’s gonna have a little of this, a little of that, it’s gonna have a little of that, and it’s going to taste amazing. And then if I’m going to taste that smoothie, if I live that experience, and I’m like, huh, that didn’t, I didn’t like really the way that turned out, we’re going to add a little bit more of that. Let’s talk about schoolwork and social same thing. Instead of like, I’m on a tightrope. And I have to have perfect balance on both sides, the schoolwork and the social. But then if the social gets too heavy, then I fall to my death. No, like, think about it like a smoothie, I’m going to do a little schoolwork, I’m going to like you know, put a little emphasis here, I’m gonna throw in a little social, we’re gonna blend it in the Vitamix, we’re gonna taste it after it’s done and be like, ah, like, I like the way that turned out. Or maybe I need to add a little bit more here, or a little bit more here. Same with work life balance. And I’m going to share an example with you about this in a minute. And then also with dating, and hanging out with friends like, I don’t know, we just get to decide what we want it to look like what we want it to feel like. And it doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced. Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t make it a bigger problem than it is it’s not, it doesn’t have to be a problem at all trying to get your life into balance, or your mission into balance or your social life into balance. The other analogy that I think we like to say a lot is I’ve just got a lot of my plate. And that actually totally made me think again of this analogy of the Cat in the Hat like we’re balancing this and we’re balancing this plate, or we often say like, I’ve got a lot to juggle.

19:25 And maybe we can get away from thinking about it like that. We can just think I love this smoothie that I’m creating this this life smoothie. sounds so cheesy. But I just love thinking about this way. Remember, you’re a creator. And every day you get to wake up and you’re gonna say what do I want to create today with my life? Not how can I do it right or wrong or more balanced or less balanced? How can I get it perfectly aligned and balanced? What I want to create today. That just sounds like so much more fun smoothies are delicious. Am I right? So, here are some of the benefits of thinking about it like a smoothie. Number one, we can make smoothie experiences all day long. So, balance impossible. But smoothie experiences, we can just keep doing over and over. We’re like, okay, so I was with my family, and I was kind of thinking about this other thing. Okay, that’s fine. Let’s just add in something else. Let’s add in this, and just keep going. Number two, we can stop thinking that something is off, or we’re doing it wrong. There’s not a problem anymore. When we think about it like this movie. Number three, we drop that tug of war rope. No longer is family, fighting with friends, or schoolwork fighting with social life, or Facebook finding is it fighting with contacting and street contacting in our minds, we just got to stop that battle altogether. I want to share an experience with you that I had last weekend. So I guess it would have been two weekends ago now is I was helping at a big event with Jody Moore. And then the next day was the wedding. And then the next day was a big speaking event, I ended up speaking to over 1300 people in four different sessions about parenting. And that had been weighing on my mind really a lot. And I was sort of in this, like, I gotta find balance, I gotta find balance between showing up for the wedding, and showing up for this speaking engagement that I had. And really, I felt myself leading up to it and so much turmoil. It was like stressed about it. And I was like, if I’m at the wedding am I going to be thinking about my speaking gig. And if I’m at the speaking gig, am I going to be stressing about the wedding and, and I was just really, really worried about it. And it was going back and forth and back and forth. And now that I’ve thought about it more with these three things that it’s impossible to find perfect balance. And I was making it a bigger problem. And number three, I put, I put my coaching business and like my passion with the missionaries, I put that out war with my family. And with this amazing wedding experience that I was having with my son and his, his now wife. So I was feeling this turmoil back and forth. And it’s been going on for a long time. months even probably since I probably since I found out that I was going to be speaking and that ended up being the day after the wedding. So it was sitting there at this impact 2.0 which was sort of a business conference. And they had all of these entrepreneurs there women, female entrepreneurs that were speaking and giving inspirational messages. And at the very end of the day, I’m stewing and stewing about the wedding and still like at war with myself in my head and cake by Courtney was the last speaker that day. And Courtney Rich is her name. And she was speaking about like her personal journey, and along with her business journey. And for some reason, I don’t even remember what she said. But I just had this really poignant moment where I just had this shift. And the thought that came to my mind was this is exactly where you would want to be. And what that meant to me. And the feeling that I got was, I could quit being at war with the business. And this coaching and this helping the missionaries that I love and the wedding and my family.

24:23 And it just felt so freeing to want both. And to know that it was okay to want both. And also so freeing to realize that I could have both. It was just this moment where I was like wait a second. I don’t have to choose. I get to decide that I want all of this that I’m here for all of it. It was just such an awesome experience. It’s one of those I was talking to my coach today about the movie Inside Out, and how they talk about it in that movie, like a core memory. And I know this is going to be a core memory for me because it was in that moment that everything shifted, I dropped that war between the business side of me the coaching side of me and my family. What’s true, you guys, is there was nowhere I would rather be on the planet than having a back to back wedding and speaking gig. That’s actually amazing. It’s what I’ve always wanted, and what I’ve always dreamed up. And so we can get in the weeds about like, Facebook finding, versus like street contacting, or family time versus friend time. But instead, we can just take a step back, and we can just be like, what I had to do all of this. I want the most amazing coaching, family speaking missionary smoothie that I can create. I want it all. So the biggest thoughts I want you guys to come away with with this podcast is you can want all of it. Not only can you want all of it, you can have all of it. You can want both things. They don’t have to be in balance at all. You can have it all I promise you. You just have to surrender to it a little bit. That was just such an impactful moment for me. I love it. And I was able in that moment to let go of the war. So I invite you to also drop the back and forth tug of war. Just drop the balance. It’s so much better. It’s so much easier. It’s so much more abundant. You really can have it all you can have both, and an embrace both. All right, you guys. All right. I hope you have the most amazing week. We will see you next time. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Listen, if you’re learning a lot from this podcast, and you like what you’re hearing, you will absolutely love hopping on a free strategy call with me. That’s where you and I meet up one on one and talk specifically about what is going on for you. I love teaching young adults the mental and emotional tools that they need to overcome orient anxiety, serve the successful missions they’ve always dreamed of and navigate their post mission experience with confidence. So go to Jennie dildine.com, and click on the work with me link. I would love to meet you. And I would love to get you some helpful tools and strategies to help you fully embrace whatever is next for you. And in the meantime, no matter which part of the mission experience you are involved in. Just know that Jennie, the LDS mission coach is thinking about you every single day.