52 Weeks to Simplify Your Life - Weeks Three & Four

I have fallen behind with my Simplify Your Life Challenge, I think I have been living a little too simply these past weeks! Summer invokes a LOT of beach time and as a result I become very relaxed. Okay lazy. So this weekend I decided to focus on my SYL12 challenge and have done a catch up of weeks three and four together. Fittingly, as much as I find this challenge takes a bit of thinking, I have decided 2012 is the year I follow my passion, really follow my passion. My focus is always on my family as I often mention, and in past years I have focused strongly on my career. But this year is more about tapping into my authentic self and following my heart's desires - writing being at the core of those desires. So I love where this challenge is going, I can see how it will tie in further along with me following my dreams.

Week three: Family maxim 

Anyone that knows me would know family to me is everything. Family comes second to none other; it is always, without a doubt, first. So writing up a mission statement felt weird at first, as Deb outlines it's something we often associate with big companies. And since we place such a strong focus on ‘us’ all the time it felt unnatural to question one another about our values and intentions. But as challenging as it first felt I still gave it a shot, and discovered it wasn’t difficult at all. I really enjoyed it.

I could have just written it out myself, I knew very well what my boys (husband and son) would say. And I wasn’t wrong. These are the questions I asked and our answers, we mostly answered the exact same things and wound up with the same responses to each question. The words ‘relax’ and ‘beach’ were my son’s favourite responses. He is his mother's son.

What is important to us as a family?

Relax time, love, speaking kindly to each other.

We are our happiest when?

We are together, we are relaxed, we are at the beach.

What would we enjoy doing more of?

Spending quality time together, being at the beach, relaxing.

And less of?

Work, technology.

How do we want our home to be?

Peaceful, full of laughter.

How do we see us as a family unit?

Happy, loving, fun.     

So our family maxim as drafted by me (and agreed to by the boys) is as follows:

Our family is all about love and kindness.

We enjoy us most when we are relaxing.

Our home is our place to relax, laugh and enjoy each other’s company.

We value one another.

We strive to enjoy quality time together.       

It reads quite simply when worded this way and I guess that reflects our family perfectly. We like to keep it simple, we like to keep it kind. And most of all we love our family.

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Week four: Balance and the wheel of life

I found this week really easy. Like week three I found a similar pattern to what my boys and I think are important and where they placed on our wheel of life. The wheel of life is essentially a tool to establish key areas and how they stand in your life and where you place your energy to maintain balance. I was happy (although not surprised) at the placement of family and how high it rated.

Areas we consistently place a strong focus on - family, fun, health, well being and self-development - placed high up at either four or five. Areas like home (this pertains to the state and order, or lack of, in our house), community and particularly work/life balance rated a little lower at two or three. These are areas I would like to focus on to achieve more balance. We work hard at maintaining balance on family, fun and health etc so I feel we have those areas balanced quite nicely at the moment. I think it's fair to assume which areas we'll be looking at when we start setting goals. I'm excited!