Balance isn’t something you achieve forever. It’s something you continually work at.
“Holding it all together: balancing work, being present at home, and looking after yourself.”
I had been working on a title for a talk I’ve been booked in for, and this is what I wrote.
However, when I read it back to myself I noticed the irony that it was scribbled on a post-it-note on my desk, surrounded by similar notes to myself, in amongst a chaotic jumble of all sorts of other things, including loom bands made by my kids and a tiny Easter bunny that I’m pretty sure has been there since last year.
And I scribbled it down on as the last little bit of work to do before I hurried out to the garage to make sure my daughters bike tyres are pumped and ready for a bike safety thing at school tomorrow.
So, I felt a little daft about it because I’ve found the balance hard recently. I’ve been a bit distracted when trying to be with the kids, and at work I’ve found it hard to stay on track with all the family stuff to attend to as well, often feeling guilty about not being available all the time. It’s a familiar feeling and one that comes up a lot.
Sometimes that can be frustrating, because I think about and talk about this stuff all the time. So should I not have already figured this out by now? Shouldn’t I be have a balance already?
But maybe that’s not how balance works.
If you try and balance on a log, it’s not like you get to a point where it’s done forever, you will be constantly adjusting yourself as needed. There might be times where you feel solid and steady but the wobbles will still come every now and again.
Balance is something that requires maintaining. If you have to think about it and amend what you are doing quite a lot, that’s not failure: it’s just natural.
Balance isn’t something that you reach and keep forever.
It’s ok if you wobble. It’s ok if you have to think quite hard about it sometimes.
That’s not failure.
It’s just how balancing works.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Ted
Ted Bradshaw
Cognitive Behavioural Therapist and Coach
My name is Ted Bradshaw (@cbtted on Instagram and TikTok) and my main aim is to make mental health and anxiety in particular much easier to understand. I am a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist accredited by the BABCP and have been working in this area for over 15 years. I am an honorary Assistant Professor of Psychological Therapies at the University of Nottingham and I also work as a coach, accredited by the International Coaching Federation to PCC level. On my first day of training as a therapist, I was immediately annoyed. The things I was learning seemed so useful, and I was confused as to why I had never been taught any of this before, because it would have been so useful. For me, it seemed ridiculous that we would wait until people feel really bad before we offer them any information or insight into how anxiety or how a mind works. That is what led me to look into coaching and it is also why I spend a good deal of my time writing about and making short videos on lots of different aspects of mental health and anxiety in particular. As a parent, I have also found that what I know about anxiety has been so useful to me when dealing with my own children, so a lot of my focus is upon parents understanding anxiety for their children, too. These days in my 1:1 work with enduring mental health issues such as depression. OCD or PTSD, and I also work with people who might not be sure whether it is therapy they need but who are looking to improve something, like confidence or self-esteem. Finally, I also run workshops for schools and businesses on all of these subjects, including how to help an anxious child, good mental health in the workplace and more. You can find me across most social media platforms @cbtted, on Instagram and TikTok in particular.
