Za7 Blog

The Balance of Play

Now that we have a sense of what balance is and how work plays a part in it, let’s discuss how to balance the rewards, or play. We all need a balance between the work we do and the rewards we gain from it. We sometimes hate to do work, but can’t seem to enjoy playing without it. So we are struggling to keep a balance where we work just hard enough to enjoy playing. But sometimes this leads to an imbalance as well. Sometimes we play too much, but sometimes we don’t play enough.

Playing too much

We all love to indulge in things that make us happy, who wouldn’t? We loved to play all day when we were kids and we love to do things similarly as adults. Is it possible that we can play too much? This doesn’t make any sense, how could something that feels good but keeping us out of balance? Well, the first obvious thing is money. If you spend too much, and essentially play too much, you have to go back and work for it again. This leads to stress and imbalance if you spend more than you can make. I think a lot of people have been in this situation. But there are more situations that are less obvious.

Have you ever felt guilty for not getting something finished? Did you go out with friends, eat a big dinner at the restaurant and see a movie instead of finishing a term paper for school? In this case, playing is out of balance with the work and we end up suffering. Why did we do that? We knew the term paper needed to be completed! Very simply, we didn’t think that thew work was worth the reward. We wanted the reward now and played too much. We were out of balance with our rewards. Why not go out and enjoy yourself a little before writing the paper, or just go out after it was complete? These seem like obvious questions but why then do we keep doing things like this? We are lacking balance in our lives.

Playing too little

This is quite a confusing one since people believe that everyone enjoys themselves enough, otherwise why would they keep working all the time? I mean, who in their right-mind would work all the time and never take time to enjoy their hard work? This is a little less common scenario, but it still happens. I am in the middle of it now. Let me explain what I mean. Recently, I started working extremely long hours and trying to balance everything. My workload is high, and my rewards are low. My balance is a little out of whack, but not in an obvious way. I really enjoy doing the work, I am starting a new directory, running a popular website business, teaching English to a VIP client, and being an active parent to my two kids. I really have my hands full learning new things and staying busy trying to juggle all my responsibilities. The funny thing is I really enjoy it, the work is great. But I am still out of balance because I don’t do enough to enjoy it. I rarely do anything for myself or even reward myself for accomplishing things. I need to balance my work amount with an equal amount of reward. This reward can be new hardware for my computer or catching a sumo tournament when it comes back to Tokyo. These things might not take much time, but they would be big rewards for me right now. I need something like this to bring my balance back.

How to find out if your rewards are out of balance:

1- Do you feel guilty enjoying your rewards? This is usually a result of playing too much.

2- Do you feel frustrated at not being able to enjoy rewards? This is usually a quick way to learn if you are not enjoying enough reward

3- Could you be successful and happy with this amount of reward?

So maybe you are a bit out of balance with rewards, but how to bring balance back in your life?

1- What would make the work feel worthwhile?

2- What work would you have to do to feel satified with your rewards?

3- What type of reward would make all your work seem totally worth it?

Rewards can be simple things like a pat on the back, or a public announcement of your hard work to your peers, a thank you, or just a smile. Rewards mean different things to us all. What do you feel satisfied with?

I hope this explanation of balance can help you in your daily life and bring a sense of achievement to you. I hope you are in balance now, or can find what you need to correct it before it becomes a problem. Leave a comment with your own situation, are you in balance?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 2:51 am and is filed under Relevant Matters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.