Harmony is the New Balance
Balance suggests that in order to have more of one thing, you have to have less of something else, which is why Embodiment Coach Natalie MacNeil focuses on harmonizing her life and business in a way that optimizes for her joy and fulfillment rather than focusing on creating balance
Natalie’s approach was inspired by a concept called “strategic imbalance,” developed by Marcus Buckingham.
It’s this idea that whenever we try to create a perfect equilibrium, we end up creating more stress rather than reducing stress.
That stress can end up creating energetic blocks in your life.
Natalie shares that when you shift into strategic imbalance, you get to imbalance your life in a way that maximizes your joy and fulfillment, which looks different to each person.
For example, Natalie has a lot of work on her plate as she runs the Embodiment Coaching Institute, and she gets immense fulfillment from this purpose-driven work instead of it draining her like a job might do if it wasn’t in alignment with her higher purpose. Last year, there were several months when she did not work more than 3-4 hours a day, and that was a big part of her personal harmony and her strategic imbalance at that time. She was tilted way more towards travel, experience, falling in love, healing, and all kinds of things.
This year and this season of her life, she is working 15 hours a day and that is harmony to her right now.
You get to flow into your own rhythms and cycles and seasons.
Harmony Wasn’t Always So Pleasant
At first it took some time to surrender into that way of working. Natalie had a lot of conditioning around what work “should” be
She put more value on hard work. and the things that felt like they were challenging to be working on. Natalie now believes these rigid systems hold us back in a lot of ways.
She’s been in a deeper contemplation around capitalism and conscious capitalism and what she wants her relationship with work to look like..
When you live in a hyper capitalistic society, your value is in what you produce, but Natalie teaches that by breaking that mentality and looking at how we have internalized capitalistic structures, we can peel back a lot of layers and conditioning to discover how we want to work and contribute to society.
For a very long time, she felt that she was valued for creating the world or the accomplishments that she had. If she didn’t work hard for something and receive external validation for it, she didn’t feel worthy of having it. Natalie shares through her work now that it’s important to dismantle those kinds of systems and structures in us so that we can really live into the potential of who we are as multidimensional beings.
Ready to start living into your potential? There’s a practice from Natalie’s bestselling book The Rituals called the Futuring Ritual that you can download at nataliemacneil.com/futuringritual.
