This is the Ef Zin insight on Balance that you practice and experience in the program “How to Energize Your Personal Balance“.

We often catch ourselves falling into a cycle of routines that drains our energy and disenchants our perspective on reality. With work responsibilities, familial demands and personal necessities, it’s very easy to fall into an uninspiring daily pattern. So we try to inspire change. We adopt motivating lifestyles and develop new habits that will revitalize us and offer a sense of personal balance. Whilst going to the gym, eating healthy and putting our phone away are all well-intended, they can only take us so far. Unfortunately, their ability to inspire change is short-lived. They fill our days with seemingly positive acts without necessarily inspiring positive actions. Influencing what we do, without addressing who we are. Reshaping our daily lives, without inherently bettering the quality of our living. Which habits, then, hold the possibility of true and enduring change? How do we create a life of balance that energies us to keep moving forward?

Within the Ef Zin perspective, habits hold a more profound meaning than our eating, nail picking or smoking “habits”. Habits refer to our repeated behaviors as both the expression and development of our character. They are the actions we repeatedly do; carving out the qualities of our personality, reinforcing the way we think, and forming patterns in the way we react to situations and choose to behave. In the way we choose to interact with different people, choose to communicate our feelings, choose to develop our careers and most integrally, how we choose to practice our values in daily life. These choices – and how we approach them – make up the experience of our reality.

As we practice making choices we develop our behavioral patterns (habits) and energize the qualities that come to define us. It is through our habitual choices that we develop courage, patience or trust and their counterparts passivity, rashness or jealousy. In our on-going choices we activate and cultivate our personal qualities; exercising our strengths and negotiating our insecurities. It is in these qualitative patterns of behavior, true habits, then, that we have the potentiality of change. That is if we remain energized and animated in the way we make choices.