Finding Balance

How To Get It and Keep It

In our super busy overstimulated world, it’s easy to lose our sense of balance. In fact, how can we even find balance when it seems like there’s an endless list of things to do, actions to take and people to help? Everywhere we go a flashing screen or a buzzing device demands our attention! Finding balance in daily life, it seems, have never been more difficult, or more important.

Although I personally love that technology allows us to be so connected, there are often moments in my day when I long for quiet solitude. I long for a space where I can close my door, turn off my computer, shut the world out, listen to my own breathing and find balance once more.

And, with my touring lifestyle as a professional musician, yogi and voice coach, finding balance has become an important skill for me to develop. I’m constantly in motion – on trains, in different cities, in front of different people – so even more than I used to, I seek to stay balanced. Over the last few years I’ve found a few simple things that help me with this that I want to share with you here,

4 Simple Tips for Finding Balance

1. Keep Your Phone on Silent

Having the world at our fingertips is awesome. It makes us so connected and lets us access all the information we’d ever need. But in my honest opinion, we’re animals who haven’t evolved to constantly respond to a ping or stare endlessly at a screen. Our mindless scrolling and reacting stimulates our stress response system and makes finding balance, as well as self-acceptance, difficult.

One of my solutions to this is to keep my phone on silent at all times and I set windows of time in my day when I look at it. That lets me respond to people who wish to connect to me when I want to. And it also gives me a structure for when I’m on Instagram or Facebook creating content and connecting with my followers, instead of doing this reactively throughout the day.

2. Drink Enough Water

I’m no doctor but our bodies are 70% water, and we need to keep them topped up in order to feel good! I used to drink very little water and kept wondering why I was tired, couldn’t concentrate and had frequent headaches. Then I started drinking more and it made all the difference. Lately I drink around 3 litres of water per day. I tried the 8 glasses / day tip but it wasn’t enough for me, so I upped my water consumption again and have been feeling physically better and mentally sharper since doing so.

My tip – when I’m on tour I carry at least a 1L bottle with me at all times and when I’m at home I have a 1L tea pot on my desk that I keep filled up with herbal teas and drink until my heart’s content 🙂

3. Do Something Each Day that’s Just For You

(And has nothing to do with technology!) This can be something small that takes just a little amount of time. It’s nothing you “should” do, instead it’s something you want to do for yourself. My tip – have an empowering morning routine that motivates you into your day!

I like dedicating a period of time in the morning after waking that’s just for me and no-one else. In it, I do yoga, meditate, do my vocal training and then go through the 9 questions of my Mindful Morning Practice. When I do this I feel so good, alive and empowered. In fact, I feel like I’ve already won the day before starting it. It’s awesome! And, when I don’t take this time in the morning for me, I notice the difference in my motivation, my energy and my mindset throughout the day. This never leads me to feeling good about myself or my voice.

Again, this doesn’t have to be something big – even just 10-minutes that you actively take for yourself can make all the difference. I speak about this idea more in my Mindful Morning Practice e-Book, and I created a short guided meditation series for it too that you can take a look at if you wish to.

4. End Your Day Well!

I recently noticed that how I end the day has a significant impact on how well I sleep and how I feel when I wake up the next morning. Doing anything that stimulates my brain before bed is never good for me, so I try to avoid watching anything at least more than one hour before going to bed. With a bit of experimentation, the following end-of-day sequence helps me to sleep well, wake up feeling good and fuels my relationship to my voice as well as my level of self-acceptance:

• evening face-care to wind down and feed my feelings of self-love
• having a shower before bed to de-stress and relax
• doing a little yin yoga in bed is great to calm down the nerves. Here’s my fav bedtime yin sequence.
• recapping the day & giving gratitude for 5 special moments that happened & loving myself for 5 things I did
• listening to soft music whilst reading to wind down the mind and make it sleepy

For me, doing these 4 things each day helps me feel more connected to myself. It opens me to experience more joy in my days, and it lets me work with more ease. I’m looking forward to hearing how they help you too!

Love,

Kirbanu xox