Rebalance Your Tires: Step Three – Revitalize Your Life

We’ve divided this book into three steps which follow the same process used to rebalance the tires on your car:

Step One – Spin Balance to Diagnose

In order to discover how “out of round” they are, your tires are put on a spin balance machine. This machine is able to determine the exact amount of weight needed and where it needs to be attached to the tire in order to bring it to a truly “round” condition, in other words, to balance it.

The symbol below represents the spin balance machine and will be used throughout this guidebook to reinforce the analogy and the same process we need to go through to rebalance our lives.

Like the spin balance machine, Step One “diagnoses” the areas of your life that need to be changed, that need to be “weighted” or “lightened.” As a consequence, some activi­ties are likely to increase or decrease.

Step Two – Attach Weights To Become Balanced

It’s worthless to only know your tire is out of balance, even how much weight is needed and where to place it on the tire.

The tire dealer must actually put the weights on and then check to see if the tire is running perfectly round.

Step Two will show how to align your life’s activities so that it’s possible to begin to live out your reprioritized acti­vities. But it won’t do much good to only know what to do. You need to do it before any beneficial change will ever take place.

Step Three – Enjoy A Smoother Ride

Almost all of us have experienced driving our car after the tires have just been rotated and rebalanced. It’s easy to feel the smoother ride. In fact, sometimes our car feels almost like new again!

Step Three is the “Go Do It” step and covers how to be­gin to enjoy your rebalanced life. It asks you to visualize the changes you need to make and how your life will “ride” if you make them.

This step paints a picture of the benefits you’ll receive when you realign the activities in your life with your freshly reprioritized values.

Rebalance Your Tires

“Rotate and balance your new tires, Bob.”

Bill was a smart tire guy. He ran a good service station and he always gave me sound advice.

“If you want to get more life out of those new tires, plus have a smoother ride, you’ll need to rotate and rebalance them every 7000 miles.”

Maybe the same principle could apply to me, I thought. My life has changed; maybe I, too, have to bring my priorities, my tires, back into balance. In fact, maybe we all need to take a look at what’s become important so we can once again bring ourselves into balance.

I know that much of the current research on stress and productivity says the number one concern and frustration felt by business professionals is that their personal and professional lives are out of balance.

If that’s true, if we are out of balance, why not spend at least as much attention rebalancing our lives as we do our tires? A set of tires costs from $700 to $1500, and I can always buy a new set if I need to. But I can’t “buy” a new me! So if I’m running out of balance and feeling the “thumps” in my life, it’s obvious I need to take time to rebalance my priorities.

And the process of adding, shifting or removing weights on our tires so they run perfectly round is exactly the same thing we need to do in our own rebalancing process so our life runs “round and true.”

When a tire is out of balance, one part of it is  actually heavier than the rest of the tire so that, as it rotates and hits the road, the heavier part hits harder and wears out faster. This creates a concave portion in the tire which people call “cupping.”

When a “cup” is created, we hear “thumping” as we drive down the road.

The same can be said of our lives. If one part is out of bal­ance, another part can easily be caused to be out of balance as well.

Another way to look at it is, if your tires are not in balance, one may appear to be soft, causing the car to veer to one side, to be out of alignment.

The same analogy can again be applied to our life. If all our tires, our priorities, are not running with equal pressure and in “true round,” we can veer off course as well. We’ve all read enough about how change has invaded our lives. Most of us are living with substantive change, yet few of us have ever taken the time to realign our priorities to meet those changes.

We need to discover what’s important to us. We need to define what we want to spend our time doing.

If we do rebalance our priorities, our spirits and our activi­ties, we, like the tires on our car, will run more smoothly, last longer, and eliminate the “thumps” in our lives.

Let’s Start…

The premise of this articles is simple: if we can spend the money to rebalance the tires on our car, we can spend the time to rebalance the tires of our lives!

The tires of our lives are our values and our priorities, those things which move us and occupy most of our time and energy. Our present priorities can be revealed by look­ing at just two things:

• Our schedule
• Our checkbook register

Where we spend our time and money is what we appar­ently value.

But many of us are out of balance. We work too hard, we feel too stressed, we try to get more done with fewer people, we smile too little, we live from crisis to crisis and we never, never have enough time for ourselves. In short, we’re out of control, out of balance with what we would like to be doing, and out of touch with what we know our lives should be.

And we don’t know how to fix it.

The purpose of this book is to help you “fix it.” It will help you think and ask you to do some writing. It will take you down “memory lane” as well as into the future. The out­ come, if you participate, will be a much cleaner view of what you believe to be important in all aspects of your life plus what to actually do to get back into balance.

For once you have prioritized what’s important to you,

• You’ll realign your activities.
• You’ll rediscover interests, friends, and places.
• You’ll rejuvenate your talents, your spirit, and your zest.
• You’ll revitalize your personality, your energy and your productivity.
• We’ve divided this guidebook into three steps with sugges­tions and ideas designed to stimulate your own journal entries.

The first step will be to reprioritize what’s important in your life. What do you need to change in order to balance your tires?

Second, you will want to realign your activities. This will be the test of your own personal integrity to see if you actu­ally do what you say is important to you. It’s “put up or shut up” time.

And third, you’ll need to revitalize your commitment to live a balanced life that will allow you to be in control. Start fresh by doing what you know is important in all aspects of your life. This, in turn, will create a life full of genuine accomplishments, more smiles, more hugs, and many more laughs.