Learn to Balance Your Life: A Practical Guide to Having It All

Pretty illustrations may draw browsers to this ambitious self-help guide, but its dry prose and its rapid treatment of many complex subjects make it little more than a primer to""having it all."" Husband and wife psychologists Michael and Jessica Hinz organize their book into six major areas, devoting one chapter each to career, money, relationships, home, health and self-actualization. Introducing them all is a section on""Equilibrium,"" in which the authors explain their belief that""balanced living is self-perpetuating--the positive things you do in one sector of your life spread into other areas."" The first step, they say, is to set priorities and identify goals, since having a""vision"" of life can help people realize their dreams. In each of the subsequent chapters, readers will find true-to-life examples of stressors--such as feeling trapped in an unrewarding job--as well as a few suggestions on how to smooth out such problems. For example, one solution to the stress of having a disordered house is to conduct 15-minute daily tidy-up sessions. Some of the suggestions (host parties, have massages, book hotel getaways, install a sound system in the bathroom, build an extension onto your home) will be reasonable only for relatively affluent readers, though. And 20 pages is hardly enough to fully discuss career, money or relationships. Nonetheless, the authors do succeed in showing how seemingly unrelated areas--such as work and health--can be connected, and their book might serve as a useful overview (and inspiration) for readers looking to improve many areas of their lives at once.