Life has a way of filling itself. The pace picks up, the invitations stack up, and before long you're saying yes to everything and wondering why you feel so stretched. I speak with people every week who are busy in every direction and balanced in none of them. So here's the question I'd love you to sit with: if nobody else had a say, what would you actually love your life to look like?
That question came up again and again in a conversation I had with Wayne Forrest, a life mastery consultant based in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. Wayne uses a wheelchair, and he's the first to joke that he has no physical balance whatsoever — which is exactly why his take on the other kind of balance is worth hearing.
A life by design, or a life by default
Wayne's starting point is simple and slightly confronting: you are always creating something. Spend the day in bed with a pillow over your head, hiding from the world, and you've still created something — you've created a day in bed. We don't get the option of not creating. We only get the option of whether we do it on purpose.
Most of us, he says, run our lives by default. We'll happily spend two hours planning a holiday or a night out with mates, and then leave the other ninety-nine per cent of our life entirely unplanned. Work, food, movement, family, rest — all of it just happens to us in whatever order the week decides.
I think of it like a building. No one pours concrete and hopes for the best. There's a blueprint, and every trade on site is working to the same one. That's why the thing that gets built actually resembles the thing that was imagined. Your health, your relationships, your work — they deserve the same courtesy. Everything gets created twice: first in your head, then in the world.
Your calendar is the most underrated wellbeing tool you own
Here's where it gets practical. Wayne runs his balance through his calendar — a big wall one and a digital one — and the order he fills it in is the whole lesson.
First in are the things that genuinely matter to him: his kids' sport, family holidays, his own learning and fitness. His son's rugby tournament goes on the calendar before his work does. Then work gets arranged around it. If you're in a nine-to-five and can't move the job, the principle still holds — the family dinner, the walk, the class, the time with the people you love goes in the moment the work hours are locked, not whenever there's a gap left over.
Most of us do this backwards. We book the work, then the obligations, then we try to find ourselves in the leftovers. There are never any leftovers. As Wayne puts it, if you don't look after number one, you can't best serve anyone else — your family, your team, or your community.
Balance isn't giving things up
Wayne's running joke through our chat was pies. He loves a pie. He's not giving up pies. But he also knows what a decade of daily pies does to a body, and he's got a clear picture of the ninety-year-old he intends to be — the one who's still moving, still capable, still in the thick of life.
That's the whole trick. Balance isn't a list of bans. It's holding a vivid enough picture of where you're headed that the everyday choices stop feeling like deprivation and start feeling like direction. Have the pie. Then have the salad for dinner, or take the extra walk, because you want the ninety-year-old version of you to have options.
Drop the guilt, get back on track
If there's one thing humans are world-class at, it's beating ourselves up. We have the pie, then we spend three days narrating what the pie says about our character. The rumination does far more damage than the pastry.
Wayne's advice is almost comically plain: okay, you had the pie. Move on. Get back on the plan. A strong plan isn't there to make you perfect — it's there so that when you do drift, you've got something obvious to return to. Without the plan, a slip just becomes the new direction.
Why "what would I love?" beats comparing yourself to others
We also talked about masks. About why some people need a few drinks before they feel free enough to be themselves, and why social media leaves so many of us wanting someone else's life.
Wayne was open about his own history with heavy drinking in the years after his injury, and about how that need faded as he got more comfortable with who he is. His invitation isn't a rule about alcohol — it's a question. If you find yourself needing to overdo it most weekends, don't judge it. Get curious about it. Why does it have to be that way? What are you reaching for?
And on comparison, he's blunt: the people whose lives you're envying are mostly worrying about what you think of them, and eyeing someone else's life in turn. The way out isn't to climb the ladder faster. It's to stop asking "what does everyone else have?" and start asking "what would I love?" Not what your parents wanted, not what a teacher once said about you, not what Joe next door has. Yours. Nobody expresses themselves quite the way you do.
That restless feeling is growth, not failure
One image from Wayne has stayed with me. Think of grass pushing up through a crack in concrete. Something in that blade of grass is saying grow, grow, grow — and it finds a way through solid rock to do it.
He reckons we've all got that same pull in us: a quiet discontent, a sense that there's more. Most people read that feeling as evidence something's wrong with them. Wayne reads it as completely normal — life leaning on you to expand. The clearer your picture of what you'd love, the more force that blade of grass has behind it. Vague longing stalls at the concrete. A crystal-clear vision finds the crack.
Key takeaways
- You're creating your life either way — so create it by design rather than by default.
- Score and plan the four areas that shape a life: health and wellbeing, relationships, vocation or personal expression, and time and money freedom.
- Put the non-negotiables in your calendar first — family, movement, rest, learning — then build work around them.
- Aim for moderation, not elimination. Keep a vivid picture of the eighty- or ninety-year-old you want to be.
- When you slip, skip the guilt spiral and simply return to the plan. One choice is not a direction.
- If you're regularly overdoing something, get curious instead of critical: why does it need to be this way?
What I love about Wayne's approach is how well it sits alongside the work I do with clients every day. You can have the best nutrition plan in the world, but if it isn't anchored to a life you actually want, it won't survive a busy fortnight. That's why my approach at me&my wellness is holistic — we look at food, movement, sleep and stress together, inside the context of the life you're building, not separately from it. Balance isn't a thing you find. It's a thing you design, one honest answer at a time.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au