The Pursuit of Balance

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:00]:

I am part of a family, and we have family values, but I personally have a set of values that are certainly overlapping with those two institutions that I'm part of with marriage and our family. But there are things that appended just to me as an individual. Just Tiffany, who am I? And that is what your values are. And when you are making choices that are aligned with who you are, it's difficult not to feel aligned.

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:26]:

I'm a small town kid born with a big city spirit.

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:29]:

I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life.

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:32]:

Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, and mentor. 17 years ago, I founded a marketing consultancy. And ever since, my husband, junior, and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline. Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered I could purposefully embrace all of these ands in my life, it unlocked my world. And I want that for you, too. I'm Tiffany Souder, and this is Scared Confident.

Tiffany Sauder [00:01:08]:

If I were to ask you right now, is your life in balance? How would you answer that question? This is a word that I have put an enormous amount of thought around, because as you get to a place where life is busy, your cup is full, you have lots of people in your life that you've said yes to. You've got lots of things in your life that you've said yes to. You've got dreams that you want to continue to pursue. This idea of feeling like you're out of balance, like you're behind, like you're reacting, can become the prevailing emotion of your life, I think if you're not careful. And so, as I was at a crossroads in my own journey of figuring out either what am I going to give back to life? What am I not going to do so that I can get peace and proactivity and just the sense of not feeling guilty and overwhelmed and out of balance, like, I was done with it. I was absolutely done with it. And so one answer to getting being done with a life that is feeling guilty and overwhelmed and out of balance is to just start saying no to everything and making life incredibly small, incredibly simple, and saying, I am willing to give up my dreams in exchange for feeling in balance, not guilty, not overwhelmed, I'm willing to give up growth for me. I just felt like if I don't stay in things that are hard and challenging me, what will happen? Who will I become? What will go on in my brain and what will I think about and what will I do? And, like, I just couldn't think about a world where I would be excited about turning off all those light switches just so that I could live a life imbalance.

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:47]:

And so I started to disconnect this concept of balance from time because I was like, I think what I'm accidentally imagining is that time, a perfect allocation of time, exists somewhere on the planet where 40% of my day is for work. I'm going to make up these percentages. 40% of my day is for sleep, 10% is for exercise, 40 50 at a whatever it is you get in some percentage for my family and for eating. And like, there's an ideal wheel of time that I've allocated these hours against. And so long as I live that day, every single day, then I will feel imbalanced. Is that actually what I'm working towards? What I'm wishing for? And I was like, that's a pipe dream. That is a fairy tale. That is a fantasy.

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:36]:

We don't get to live in a world that is that protected and that sheltered and that controlled. At least I don't. I don't want to live in a world like that. I love it when things are busy and crazy, but I do want things to be sustainable. I want them to be peaceful. I want there to be consistency in my behavior and what I'm putting time towards. And it not feel like this chaotic thing. So I want to share with you in this episode today a definition of balance that I've created that I think is helping people get their arms around.

Tiffany Sauder [00:04:07]:

I don't need to react to this word. I can take control of it and I can be proactive in my pursuit of balance, because we say we're out of balance. But I think most of us, if I asked you, well, what is your definition of balance? How do you know when you're at those days, balance days? How do you know if you're working towards it? How do you know if your decisions and your behavior and your choices is leading you to and towards a more balanced. How do you know this? How do you know if it's just this word that we mostly say in the negative, which is, I feel so out of balance. You hear people say much less often, I feel in balance. I feel in control. So here, let me stop the preamble and give you an overview or a summary of what my definition of balance is. My definition of balance is balance is a life that is lived 100% in alignment with your values and your priorities.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:05]:

So let's talk about these words real quickly. Values and priorities. Values is who you are becoming. They are those adjectives, those words that describe the person you want to become, the life that you want to create for yourself, the experiences you want to put yourself into, that is what your values are. In the course, we go into different exercises about how to unearth those. But here's what I want to say to you. I am part of a family, and we have family values, but I personally have a set of values that are certainly overlapping with those two institutions that I'm part of with marriage and our family. But there are things that appended just to me as an individual, just Tiffany, not me as a mom, not me as a wife, not me as a CEO, just me as a human being.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:50]:

Who am I? And that is what your values are. And when you are making choices that are aligned with who you you are, it's difficult not to feel aligned. But if you're only chasing who you are and not the impact you want to have, the what that you want to do in life, which is your priorities, it has to be balanced against that. What are the things that you want? What do you want to do? What are the roles you want to play? What are the things that you want to pursue? That's what your priorities are. I've purposely chosen the word priorities and not goals, because goals are like those way out there things. So you may have the goal of taking your family to Europe for a month. Cool goal. Super cool goal.

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:31]:

And as a result of that goal, you may need to create the priority to save money to be able to make that happen, or the priority of saving your vacation days, or the priority of getting an andy to be able to travel with you. I don't know what it is, but usually those goals have priorities that have to come behind them. One of the goals I have is to help thousands of families in two career homes move from chaos to connection, from reaction to peace. As a goal that I have is to help two career families. So a priority needs to be, how do I make the time to do that against these other things that I have? I needed to put a president in place at element three. I needed to make sure that I still had the financial ability to create coverage for my kids so that I had time to work on this. Like, there's priorities that have to come forward in your life if there are goals you want to achieve. So my definition of balance is, I'll repeat it again when my actions, behaviors, decisions completely align with my values and my priorities, who I'm becoming and what I want to do in the world.

Tiffany Sauder [00:07:36]:

When that is the case, I am less interested or less concerned. Maybe that's the word. In exactly how many hours it takes me to do every single thing. When I am passionate about my goals, when I need to work against some of my priorities, when I'm like maybe a ten minute call, when I'm driving a kid to practice or I need to take care of a few emails before I go to bed. For me, I am bugged 0% by that. If it's things I know that I am uniquely qualified to do, it's moving the things I want in life forward and it's helping me become the who I want to be. Some of my who's is like, I want to live vulnerably. I want to pursue family.

Tiffany Sauder [00:08:14]:

I demand excellence. These are some of my values. Well, I want my to dos to align with who I'm becoming. And when that's the case, I don't get frustrated about how many hours it takes. I wake up at butt crack 30. My husband gets up most days in the fours. We do not complain about this because that is a really important part. We have found in this stage of our lives of maintaining our commitment to ourselves to stay healthy.

Tiffany Sauder [00:08:40]:

That is a priority. And if that is a priority, I am not going to be as lamenting and annoyed and frustrated that it's taking hours so early in the morning because we've just learned that's exactly when it has to get done. Now you have the opportunity to be able to say, I'm going to renegotiate this priority. I'm going to move this priority to what I call my not now list. Because there are seasons when you find, holy crap. The bucket that I have, the container that I have of things to do, it's overflowing. I have to do one of two things. I have to either take things out of the container or I have to make the container bigger.

Tiffany Sauder [00:09:14]:

We all get 24 hours in a day. You can only make your container big by so much margin, by just not sleeping. That doesn't work. You can make your container bigger by outsourcing. That is a different episode. I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of outsourcing hours of your time so that you can exchange it for things that you want to do against your priorities. Okay, so I'm going to talk real quickly. I'm going to say it one more time.

Tiffany Sauder [00:09:38]:

Living a life in balance is living a life where your decisions and choices are totally aligned with your values and your priorities. So if you can imagine an x and a y axis. On the x axis is priorities and on the y axis is values. On the priorities axis, the right hand side is their plus, you're in alignment with your priorities and all the way on the other end is like a little minus and you are not aligned with your priorities. And then same with values. At the top you're aligned and at the bottom you're not aligned. So to help you track, as I'm talking through this, there is a link in show notes to this graphic. If you want to pull it up on your phone quickly or also in the YouTube version of this if you want to go take a look at that, we will pull up this graphic as I'm talking through it so that you can follow along a little bit.

Tiffany Sauder [00:10:25]:

But it's not that complicated. I also think if you're just driving, we can definitely work through it together, just verbally. So if you think again, top right hand quadrant, your values and your priorities are aligned. And that is where our balanced life lives. Well, what happens if we're pursuing our priorities, things that are moving us towards our goals, but we're acting in a way that is not in accordance with our values? For me, this is where guilt lives. This is where it screams at me when I pursue my goals, pursue my priorities, but I'm compromising things that are important to me. This can show up with being like, you have time to do all of your work commitments, but you're not able to get back in time for a really important solo or a concert or something for your kids. That was a value that you wanted to protect.

Tiffany Sauder [00:11:14]:

You didn't. Something came up. Whoever, who knows what happened. But that's where certainly guilt can live. Or you're pursuing all of your professional priorities, but you're not able to figure out how to make time for your health or to be able to just live your best each day. I also have found that guilt can live in there because it's like one of my values is to be strong and healthy and as proactive about that as possible so I can live for a very long time. I had a kid at 40, y'all. Like, I have got to make sure I live to be 102.

Tiffany Sauder [00:11:45]:

This is just a mandate. And when I am acting in a way where my priorities are being served, the things I want out of life, but I'm doing it in such a way where I'm compromising my values, that is where guilt sits in. So that is that quadrant. And if that feels like you, you don't need to live a guilt filled life. You just need to say to yourself, I gotta be honest, I haven't defined my values. I'm making choices that are making me into somebody who's making choices that are not aligned with who I want to become. I want to be a present parent. I haven't actually been.

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:21]:

I want to be in a fulfilled marriage where my husband and I have just, like, excitement to be together. But when I'm not acting in a way that is honoring that, it just can't be. So that is where guilt lives, is where your priorities are being pursued at the expense of your values. The next quadrant, over the bottom left, is where both your values and your priorities are not being served or honored. And this is the ultimate reactive existence, where other people's priorities for your time is what happens. Other people's wishes, other people's ambitions, other people's ideas, other people's dreams, other people's cultures. A job you don't like, a boss you don't respect. This is like the ultimate reactive existence where who you are becoming and what you want out of life, neither one of those are being fed.

Tiffany Sauder [00:13:10]:

And I think if we're honest, there are seasons where we have all sat in that space where we had lost ourselves, where we pursued some things that we thought were going to be good for us and were not, and didn't know when to say no fast enough. And if you find yourself in this reactive quadrant, that is okay. The first step is to acknowledge it and say it outside to yourself and say, you know what? I am responding to an existence that other people want from me. This is not what I want for myself. And so how do you get out of that? You start by defining your values and your priorities. You have to know in writing, what are these things? And then you can start testing your choices. What's getting your time, who you're around, what's getting your energy, what's getting your financial ability. All those things.

Tiffany Sauder [00:13:59]:

You begin to test those against your values and priorities. Okay, the last quadrant, this is the upper left hand side, is where your values are being respected. But your priorities are being violated. Not even violated, they just aren't being pushed forward. And I find this conversation comes up most often in my life and circle when I'm talking to a stay at home mom. They worked right out of college. They stayed home to have some kids because they wanted to, because family circumstances needed them to, whatever it was. And they're like, feeling like, look, I feel really connected to my family.

Tiffany Sauder [00:14:37]:

I feel really connected to who we are as a family unit. I have some good friends that I hang out with. Like, all those values are being really served and fed, but they're like, I don't know what I want anymore. I don't know what my goals are. I don't know if I should go back to work. I don't know if I should just volunteer. I don't know if I should just shut up and be happy. I don't know if I should just blah, blah, blah.

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:04]:

And again, I just think this means that they have not taken the time to say, what are my priorities? I want to be in pursuit of something. And when you're not in pursuit of something and you're only tending to your values, to who you are becoming, but not the impact that you're having in the world, then that's when you get bored. And defining your family as your primary priority. And if that is what it's filled with, that is a noble, noble cause. It does not need to be professional in nature. But without those priorities clearly defined, without a mission being part of who we are and that being very clearly identified and defined, I think we end up very bored because we protect our values, but we don't know what those are in service of, and so we end up bored. So there's four quadrants, balanced, guilty, reactive, and bored. And life will sometimes pull us into a quadrant that we don't intend to be in.

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:57]:

And I find sometimes I just, like, wake up and it's like, how'd I get here? You know, I don't want to be reactive to this idea of just being out of balance. I wanted to be able to take command and say, no. This is another area of my life that I want to be in proactive pursuit of living in balance. And if that is the case, then what does it mean? How do I know if I'm there? And for me? And I found this definition has worked well for others. When I am doing things that are wholly aligned with my values and in pursuit of my priorities, that's where I live and balance. And if you're like me and you have 10,000 things that you want to be able to do in life, I also have, and this is a little tool called my not now list. It's all the stuff that I want to do. And left to my own devices, I will, like, sneakily pull those into my priorities because they look fun.

Tiffany Sauder [00:16:52]:

My classic one right now is playing pickleball. I just think it is so fun. It's so social, it's active, it's outside at least two thirds of the year here in the midwest, it's, like, awesome. I just don't have time to play it right now. If I want to pursue the professional things that I have in front of me and some of the financial goals that I have for myself and the things that I want that to bring into my family, I have a certain window of time to do that, or at least that I want to do it on, and so I need to stay focused on that, and I want to be really flexible and present for my middle school kids. I've got three years left until Aubrey's out of the house like bananas, and then two years behind that, you know, we'll have another one leave the house. So I know I'm just in this special season of life where all of our kids are still under one roof, which is not going to be forever. And so I want to stay really focused on that priority and to be able to stay in balance.

Tiffany Sauder [00:17:50]:

There are some fun extracurricular things that scratch my, like, social extrovert itch very hard, and I think it would be so fun. And I say to myself, that's on your not now list, Tiffany. You will totally do that someday. I've got other business ideas in my head that I would love to do. And I say, you know what? That's on your knot right now list, Tiffany. Yes, you can do that, just not right now. And that's a great way for me to continue just saying yes to myself without burying myself into a reactive, chaotic life where I lose myself, I lose my kids, we lose a sense of family, we lose our sense of balance, we lose our sense of connection, and then everything starts to degrade from there. So this is a very simple concept, that living a life imbalance is wholly aligned with your values and your priorities.

Tiffany Sauder [00:18:41]:

But that's the point. The idea is simple, but an active daily, minute by minute, seconds by second management of those two things in your life will make it so that this idea of balance is not this elusive thing that only people who are retired, financially independent, and have no kids at home can have. Like, no, we don't want to wait until then to be able to feel imbalance. We want it now. And I have found when I think about it like this, I can have crazy busy days. It can look like, holy crap, you have hardly, like, sat down for, like, a second, and I'm like, I know, but it feels so imbalanced because it's who I am and what I want to do in the world. And when I'm doing that, I can do a lot of it and not run out of energy. Thanks for listening.

Tiffany Sauder [00:19:35]:

Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling fear you will not decide what happens in my life.

Tiffany Sauder [00:19:44]:

I will.

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