Cher Holton, Ph.D. You can manage your life when you manage yourself … and you can manage yourself when you manage your choices! It doesn’t matter what great things you accomplish in life, until you have inner peace and harmony. Once you have inner peace and harmony, it doesn’t matter what great things you accomplish in life.

Start Your Year With Harmony:
How to Jumpstart a Year of Joy,
Inner Peace, and Hope

Most women think they need more balance in their lives, entering the New Year with pleas like “I just feel so frazzled!” or “I’m going BONKERS!” Perhaps it is not balance, but Harmony that’s needed now.

Webster defines BALANCE as “… a state of equilibrium; equality in weight, value, importance, etc.” To search for balance is to ask for frustration, since it is literally impossible to give every area of your life equal attention, value, and importance. The secret is HARMONY among the areas of your life—knowing where and when to put the focus and emphasis.

Consider a choir performing a beautiful piece of music. There are times when the soprano takes the lead, other times when it is the bass, and moments when everyone joins in together. Or visualize a drama unfolding on a stage before you. Sometimes one character takes dominance; other times the focus is on someone else; and at times, the support cast draws the attention. When anyone attracts too much attention at the wrong time, it’s called “upstaging,” and it can sabotage a performance. A good director seeks a sense of harmony among the characters, and takes great pains to draw focus to the right individuals at the right time.

As the New Year enters, a focus on this unique approach to bring a sense of harmony may be more productive than those pesky resolutions that never seem to materialize.

Apply the AC/DC Continuum to frustrating situations: Imagine a Continuum with AC at one end and DC at the other end (See Diagram). The continuum represents the level of control we have in a given situation. Everything we experience in life falls somewhere on this continuum. The key is to ask ourselves: “What is our level of control in this situation?” If the answer is “High,” we can focus on the DC side. The “DC” represents those things over which we have control: our habits; our thoughts; our skill development; our responses to situations; our attitudes. If we don’t like the situation we are in, we need to “DC”— Dare to Change ... take the necessary steps to create a change toward what we want.

On the other hand, if we determine that we cannot change this situation, then we must use the AC side: Accept and Cope. For example, we might be stuck in traffic, or the computer is down, or we must care for elderly parents, or we receive negative information related to a health condition. Perhaps we don’t like the work style of our new manager or we aren’t selected for a proposal we submitted. The possibilities are limitless. By applying the AC side of the continuum, we can release the frustration by Accepting, then search for ways to manage ourselves within the situation, to maintain our sanity and keep our perspective.

The secret to finding harmony is to understand where an issue falls on the continuum, so we don’t waste a lot of time and energy fighting something over which we have no control.

The power comes from the CHOICES we make—
and there are always choices!

I have found that when I am most frazzled and frustrated, if I check it against this continuum, sure enough, one of two things is happening: Either I am wasting time griping and complaining about something that I CAN change, or I’m trying to change something that belongs on the AC side.

For true inner peace, begin the new year by getting in the habit of applying the AC/DC Continuum to your life: Dare to Change or Accept and Cope! The power is in your choice!