What if You Don’t Need to Find Balance…You Need to REMEMBER It?

By Dr. John Cane
Acting Out of Character™ — Turning Acting Skills into People Skills

We hear a lot about finding balance. Balance between work and family. Balance between responsibility and enjoyment. Balance between taking care of others and taking care of ourselves.

But what if balance isn’t something we have to go out and find? What if we have already experienced it?

And before we even ask how to create more balance, perhaps we should ask another question:

Why is balance important in the first place?

Balance Doesn’t Mean Everything Is Equal

When we hear the word balance, we sometimes imagine a perfectly divided life.

Enough time for work. Enough time for family. Enough time for friends. Enough time for ourselves.

But real life rarely works that way.

There will be periods when work demands more of us. A family member may need us. A major project may temporarily consume our attention. We may experience loss, opportunity, excitement, responsibility or uncertainty.

Balance doesn’t necessarily mean giving every part of our lives equal time.

Perhaps balance means that the important parts of who we are still have enough room to exist.

And that matters.

Because when we remain out of balance for too long, something interesting can happen.

We can begin to lose perspective. One role—professional, caregiver, parent, spouse, problem-solver—can gradually become our entire identity.

We can become so busy responding to what life requires that we stop noticing what we’re feeling, what we’re needing and even what we’re choosing.

Creativity disappears. Play disappears. Curiosity gets pushed aside. Relationships become something we’ll get around to later.

And sometimes we begin thinking: “I’m just not that person anymore.”

But what if that isn’t entirely true?

What if you haven’t lost that part of yourself?

What if you simply haven’t exercised it lately?

Think About a Time When Life Felt Right

Think for a moment about a time in your life when you felt genuinely content. Not necessarily successful.

Not necessarily when everything was perfect.

Just a time when, somehow, life….. felt right.

It might have been last year. It might have been twenty years ago. It might even have been during childhood.

Where were you? Who was around you? What were you doing? And perhaps the more important question:

Who were you being?

Balance May Not Be About Circumstances

When we remember happier or more balanced periods of our lives, we often focus on the circumstances.

“I didn’t have as much responsibility then.” “My children were young.” “I loved that job.” “I had more time.”

“I was surrounded by friends.” Certainly, circumstances matter. But I think there is another question worth asking.

What qualities were present in you during that time?

Maybe you felt:

Curious. Playful. Connected. Creative. Confident. Peaceful. Adventurous. Hopeful.
Spontaneous. Secure. Useful. Loved. Free.

Those words begin to tell us something different. They don’t simply describe what was happening around us.

They describe how we were experiencing ourselves within our lives.

And that distinction matters.

Because we may not be able to recreate the circumstances of the past. But we may be able to rediscover some of the qualities we expressed while living through them.

Your Past Can Become a Resource Instead of a Destination

Nostalgia sometimes tempts us to believe that the best parts of our lives are behind us. “I wish I could go back.”

But going back isn’t really the goal. The more useful question might be:

What can I bring forward?

Research on narrative identity suggests that human beings create meaning by organizing the experiences of their lives into an evolving personal story. Our memories, therefore, aren’t simply a collection of things that happened. They become part of how we understand who we are.

That means remembering a time when we felt strong, connected, creative or content can potentially do more than make us nostalgic. It can remind us:

That person was also me.

The adventurous child. The creative college student. The confident young professional.

The parent who somehow handled chaos with humor. The person who once took a chance without knowing exactly how everything would turn out.

Those people haven’t necessarily disappeared.

Some of those qualities simply haven’t been rehearsed lately.

The Difference Between Remembering and Rehearsing

This is where acting offers us an interesting perspective. An actor doesn’t merely think about a character.

The actor explores the character physically, emotionally and behaviorally.

How does this person stand? How do they speak? How do they respond? What choices do they make?

Actors rehearse possibilities.

And perhaps we can do something similar in our own lives.

Suppose one of the words you chose from an earlier balanced period of your life was playful.

Instead of saying: “I wish I were more playful again,”

ask: What would being 10% more playful look like this week?

Maybe you call an old friend. Maybe you sing in the car. Maybe you do something without needing it to accomplish anything. Maybe you allow yourself to be a little ridiculous.

Now the idea has moved from memory into behavior.

You are no longer simply remembering playfulness.

You are rehearsing it.

Balance Can Help Us Respond Instead of React

There is another reason balance matters.

When our lives become dominated by demands, deadlines and responsibilities, we can spend much of our time reacting. Something happens. We respond.

Something else happens. We respond again.

Eventually, our lives can begin to feel like a series of reactions rather than choices.

Balance can create enough psychological and emotional space for us to pause and ask:

What do I want to do here?

That pause matters.

Because awareness gives us choices. And choices give us the opportunity to respond differently.

This connects directly with the five areas of Acting Out of Character™:

Awareness. Communication. Connection. Adaptability. Confidence.

Awareness helps us recognize when something is missing.

Communication helps us express what we need.

Connection reminds us that our lives are lived in relationship with other people.

Adaptability allows us to adjust as circumstances change.

And confidence helps us act on the choices we discover.

Balance, then, isn’t simply about feeling less busy.

It may help us become more intentional participants in our own lives.

Behavior Can Remind Us Who We Are

One of the principles behind the Acting Out of Character approach is that personal growth doesn’t always have to begin with changing what we believe.

Sometimes we begin by experimenting with what we do.

Behavior can come before belief. Confidence, for example, doesn’t always arrive before we take action.

Sometimes we take the action—and confidence develops because we discover that we can.

Experiential learning offers a similar idea: we learn through experience, reflection and experimentation.

Research on positive emotions also suggests that positive experiences can broaden the ways we think and act and help us develop personal resources over time.

Creativity adds another important dimension. Creativity requires us to imagine alternatives.

Acting and improvisation allow us to try them.

Instead of asking only:

“Who am I?”

we can begin asking:

“What other ways of being are still available to me?”

That is a very different question.

Try This

Think about one period of your life when you experienced a genuine sense of contentment or balance.

Write down five words describing who you were during that period.

Then narrow those five words to three. Now ask yourself:

Which of these qualities do I need most in my life today?

Don’t ask how you can recreate your old life.

Ask something much smaller:

What would it look like to bring 10% more of that quality into my life this week?

Then choose one behavior. Not an intention. Not a resolution. A behavior.

If your word is connection, call someone.

If your word is creative, make something.

If your word is adventurous, try something unfamiliar.

If your word is playful, play.

If your word is confident, take one action you’ve been postponing.

Then notice what happens.

Maybe Balance Isn’t Stillness

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about balance is that once we achieve it, we’re supposed to stay there.

Life doesn’t work that way. Balance moves. Sometimes our careers need more attention.

Sometimes our relationships do. Sometimes another person genuinely needs us.

And sometimes we need us.

So perhaps the problem isn’t becoming temporarily unbalanced.

The problem may be staying there so long that we forget what balance feels like.

Maybe balance isn’t a permanent destination.

Maybe it’s an ongoing ability to recognize what helps us feel most fully ourselves—and intentionally bring more of those qualities into the reality we are living now.

Your past can help you identify them. Your awareness can help you recognize them.

But your behavior allows you to experience them again.

You don’t have to become the person you were twenty or forty years ago.

You can take something valuable from that person and bring it into who you are becoming now.

And perhaps that is one of the most powerful things our memories can give us.

Not a place to return to. A strength to carry forward.

So instead of asking: “How do I get my old life back?”

try asking: “What part of myself from that life is worth rehearsing again?”

You may discover that balance isn’t as far away as you thought.

It may already be part of your story. It just needs another scene.