How To Find Balance – Tonia Adleta, Ep. 54

Podcast interview with Tonia Adleta on how to find balance

To whom or to what are you saying yes? Are you saying yes to yourself and the things that matter most to you in this life? Or are you saying yes to everything else and putting yourself second, or 3rd, or 4th, or worse?

And how exactly are you supposed to know the difference?

This conversation with Tonia Adleta is really going to help you with that. And it’ll help you think about how to find balance.

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Tonia is a powerful example of someone who lives her their life trying to do everything they really thought they were supposed to do, all while unknowingly shrinking away from who she really is. The symptoms are not uncommon.

It often looks like this: driving yourself into the ground trying to keep everyone else happy often results in no one being happy and you facing a total life and career makeover. That’s what happened to me. It’s what has happened to so many of the other guests on this podcast. And it’s what happened to Tonia.

The great news is that she is a shining example of taking those lessons and learning how to find balance. If she can do it, so can you. And so can I. So let’s learn from Tanya’s journey, and we will all continue to grow together.

Multi-Talented

Tonia is an international speaker, the founder and host of The Single Parent Summit and the owner of multiple businesses, including an award-winning wedding and event planning and floral design company. She describes herself as a recovering perfectionist and single mom to the two most amazing kids ever.

Tonia and I are kindred spirits in many ways. One of the suggestions or principles that I often hear that I simply have never been able to accept is the idea of just choosing one thing, picking one lane and staying there for the rest of your life. From a marketing and simplicity perspective, I admit I sometimes wish I were more like that. If I were to choose just one thing and be able to dedicate my whole life to it, I bet I could be world-class in that field. But I’m not wired that way. I’m too curious and too creative. I have things that I am more interested in developing than others, but I can never see myself doing just one thing.

Seeing that Tonia feels and lives the same way was a breath of fresh air. And I don’t think either one of us is trying to suggest that’s what you have to do as well, but especially in this digital age, it seems that we must be multifaceted in our emotional maturity skill set in order to navigate the tricky waters of relationships, friendships, work, health, parenting, recreation and so many other things.

Some highlights

1. There’s no such thing as work-life balance – There’s just life. This was one of my favourite beginnings to any episode of this podcast so far. I thought I’d tossed Tonia a bit of a curveball and was interested to see what she do with it. I was fascinated when she didn’t even swing at it. And I absolutely loved the way she answered the question. So rather than saying anything more about it here, I will let you listen to the episode to hear her response.
2. Mindfulness versus looking backward or forward – Tonia gives a terrific account of how you can tell if you are in one of two very common camps of people. The first is to evaluate if you are treating yourself like a victim, as if life always happens to you. This will sound familiar if you find that you are always looking backwards, rehashing things from the past, carrying ill feelings with you, recycling bad memories, and basically being unwilling to let go.The other camp has you looking forward. This one delays the thought of happiness until a certain result can be achieved. Of course, the tragedy is, with this operating system, you can never get the result that you want. You’re focused on pleasing everyone but yourself and having to be perfect all the time. It’s a road to nowhere. You become a dog chasing your own tail with this operating system.The solution? Get to know who you are, get to be really good with who that is, and practice mindfulness so that you’re neither looking backward or forward but enjoying the only thing that’s real at this moment …. this moment.
3. Awareness – This has come up before, it is going to come up again, it is a key part of one of the keynote speeches I deliver, it is central as one of the six key pieces in a speech that Tonia delivers and I am going to continue to highlight this point whenever it comes up for as long as I’m doing this podcast. And the reason why is that most people, in my experience, are unaware that they are unaware. I include myself in this up until fairly recently. Another way of saying this is, “people that don’t get it don’t get that they don’t get it.” Tonia gives a great account of why this is important so I encourage you to listen for that along with the other of the six points that she delivers part way through our discussion.

The Bathroom Floor Story

Also listen for her story about being on the floor of the bathroom when she was living in a mobile home. I point that out because what you are about to hear is a dynamic, creative, successful woman of great character. I think it’s really easy to look at somebody for where they are now and then assume they’ve never had those moments when life has brought them to their knees. If that’s something you’re going through now, know that it is not just you. It happened to me and it’s happened to Tonia. You can get through it if you choose to and Tonia is going to give you some terrific examples of how to do that.