As I think about strength­en­ing the har­mony in my life (and in help­ing oth­ers) one of the first things that comes to mind is the mul­ti­ple “hats” we all wear.

In my life, I wear the hat of spouse, mother, grand­mother (of eight and it is the absolute blast), daugh­ter, sis­ter, busi­ness owner, friend, gar­dener, Great Dane and cat care­giver, bird feeder, vol­un­teer and per­pet­ual learner.  Try­ing to fill the role of each of these can be a daunt­ing task.  Main­tain­ing bal­ance across all of them is dif­fi­cult if not impossible.

The Jug­gling Act

If I try to bal­ance all of them, I find myself becom­ing mediocre at some.  Medi­oc­rity across all the roles does not work for me.   It only causes more stress.  What I’ve learned is there is an ebb and flow to the level of my involve­ment in all these roles.  When I have to focus on cer­tain roles, I  remind myself it is OK to put oth­ers “hats” on the shelf for a bit.  (Obvi­ously, you can­not do this with your chil­dren, although you may like to.)  I’ve also learned that there are ways that I can incor­po­rate just a bit of time in my day for cer­tain roles like life-long learner.  I’ve learned to make use of drive time to lis­ten to audio tapes of things that inter­est me.  My car has a trav­el­ing library of audio tapes that I have to move when I put on my “grandma hat” and trade car seats for audio tapes.  I fill my iPod with edu­ca­tional pro­grams, sub­lim­i­nal tapes and med­i­ta­tion pro­grams and lis­ten at night while falling asleep or while I’m trav­el­ing on a air­plane, or walk­ing the dog.

What “hats” do you wear?.  How do you man­age your “hats?’  What tips or tricks have you learned that could help oth­ers?  Please share your thoughts so we all can learn.

Well, the cat is out of the bag.  I know I should be pro­ject­ing this air of pure con­fi­dence, but I think it is impor­tant for the integrity of this blog to reflect what I am actu­ally feel­ing.  Trep­i­da­tion.  Excite­ment.  Amaze­ment that I’ve got­ten this far.

Cross­ing my fingers

Ques­tion­ing why I am not fur­ther. And much, much more. And cross­ing my fingers.

You see, I’m no dif­fer­ent than every­one else who is work­ing on achiev­ing their goals, build­ing the life they desire, and fam­ily har­mony. We all want to reach our goals.  We all want to have the life we dream about.  But I know from my own life that some­times it just feels like “I’m the only one strug­gling with this.” or “Why is this so hard?  Every­one else seems to get it so eas­ily.” or ” How come I am not get­ting what I want as fast as oth­ers get what they want? or “Why do fam­ily or work needs keep tak­ing pri­or­ity over what I want to accomplish?”

Being Authen­tic is Important

I want this blog to be authen­tic and a place where read­ers can find resources that help them on their jour­ney to strength­en­ing the har­mony in their life, fam­ily and work.

You see, I believe that the peo­ple we believe are suc­cess­ful — busi­ness owner, celebri­ties, hap­pily mar­ried folks, etc.  — have all expe­ri­enced their own per­sonal demons and dif­fi­cult times.  They just stuck with it and fig­ured out how to get through and get bet­ter.  That is what this blog is all about.  Help­ing you to get through what­ever is hold­ing you back and get bet­ter at strength­en­ing the har­mony in your life, fam­ily and work.

I don’t know where this jour­ney is tak­ing me.  I only know that I was given the idea — some­how it floated into my head and at least I was wise enough to “hear it.”  Up until now, I have been reluc­tant to truly embrace it and take action to take the idea to the world.

But now I am tak­ing action.  I hope “the world” will wel­come the idea and use the resources to take action in their own lives.

The topic of my sec­ond post (Yea!!  Feel­ing really expe­ri­enced now…) is to explain the pur­pose of this blog.

The  pur­pose  of this blog (StrengthenTheHarmonyBlog.com) is to

Strengthen the Har­mony Workbook

pro­vide arti­cles, resources and of course com­ments from the read­ers about top­ics and ideas that strengthen the har­mony in your life, fam­ily and work.

We all have many things that can cause stress in our lives.  It could be our kids, aging par­ents, work­loads that are increas­ing, finances, rela­tion­ships with our spouse, per­sonal goals that seem to always be out of reach or put on the back burner.  It could be try­ing to revamp our lifestyle to be health­ier or try­ing to learn a new skill (like blog­ging) or set­tling into or out of a job.

Any one of these things can add stress to our life.  Any one of these things can cause us to lose focus. Any one of these things can be the last straw that sends us over the edge. That’s why I finally took the leap.  I finally decided it was time that I put this idea out there.

So what you will find on this blog are arti­cles, ideas, tips and even humor to help you strengthen the har­mony in your life, fam­ily and work. I don’t have the answers.  But I do believe that as we share our thoughts, ideas and sup­port one another, we will dis­cover and uncover answers that will help us strengthen the har­mony in our lives.

I know I sure need more har­mony — espe­cially in the finan­cial area.  Devel­op­ing StrengthenTheHarmony.com, ShopliftingIsStealing.com, Whalen.com and ItStartsWithUs.com has def­i­nitely drained my resources.

I  am cer­tain that by pro­vid­ing qual­ity infor­ma­tion and serv­ing oth­ers, it will be replen­ished.  I’m still look­ing for­ward to the adventure.

This is my very first post on my very first blog.   Wel­come to  StrengthenTheHarmonyBlog.com

Judy Whalen

I finally took the leap, mas­tered the tech­nol­ogy (well, almost mas­tered) and launched this blog.  Let me tell you, it was a leap.   I hear so many peo­ple talk­ing about how they write, read and com­ment on blogs.  I’ve had inter­net mar­ket­ing coaches tell me to just put up a blog and start inter­act­ing with peo­ple.  Well, it seemed to take me more time than most peo­ple.  You see, I needed to develop the strat­egy of how the Strengthen the Har­mony webi­nar and this blog and fit into my over­all busi­ness.  In my offline world (whalen.com), I am a con­sul­tant work­ing with busi­nesses and non­prof­its to help them develop strate­gies to be suc­cess­ful.  So I needed time to get the strat­egy piece to come together.  But I also needed time to con­vince myself that I could mas­ter the tech­nol­ogy and learn the inter­ac­tion piece. You see I am “old school.”   My pro­fes­sional life started long before com­put­ers were on every desk or before you could research your mar­ket­place or get feed­back from your cus­tomer by “tweet­ing.”   Back in those days we devel­oped elab­o­rate plans about get­ting feed­back.  Today you get feed­back instan­ta­neously.  So that is the leap!   I am jump­ing off the “old school bus” and hop­ping on the “new school bus.”   I’m open­ing myself and my ideas up for com­ments and instan­ta­neous response.   I have to be hon­est, I have a bit of trep­i­da­tion.  But noth­ing ven­tured, noth­ing gained.  So here I go.…. Wel­come to the Strengthen the Har­mony blog.  I look for­ward to this adventure.