Hey Everyone!

A few of you have asked to get to know me. Since I have a few posts up now, I figured that today I’d give you a little insight into my story. Hopefully, I don’t scare you off by showing you the real me haha!

Prior to the Excellence Addiction

I’m not going to lie to you, my life was fairly average before the Excellence Addiction. I was a pretty normal young guy.

I got good grades in school. I was involved with a lot of different teams. I was well liked (to the best of my knowledge) by most of the people around me. But I think the most important thing for you to know is that I was a people pleaser.

I never wanted to upset anyone. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t afraid of confrontation. But I did everything I could to keep everyone in my life happy with me.

HUGE mistake!

I ran around trying to get the best grades to please my parents (and partly myself because I became addicted to them). I tried to make it out to all of my friend’s social events to keep them happy. I did my best to achieve everything my teachers and mentors wanted to achieve.

 And you know what… I was pretty good at it. I worked my way towards a lot of great achievements. I became the captain of my home soccer team. I graduated with a 90% average from University, following which I continued on to complete a Health and Rehab Science M. Sc. degree. And overall, I kept everyone pretty happy and made them proud.

That might not be what you were expecting since people often say, “if you try to please everybody you’ll end up pleasing nobody.” Fortunately, that wasn’t the case for me. However, that type of lifestyle did have one huge flaw that I’m still battling to this very day…

The People Pleaser Flaw

Let me be clear, I think it’s important to keep the significant people in your life happy. I’m definitely not advocating that you ignore everyone haha…

But constantly trying to please everyone did have a huge drawback for me.

That flaw was that it left me out of touch with myself. I didn’t have a firm understanding of what my values were. I had spent so much time pursuing their goals that I wasn’t sure what my own life goals were.

So, inevitably, when I finally slowed down and took a break. I was flooded by emotions such as emptiness, uncertainty, and lack of direction.

This to me was odd because I had no reason to feel this way. I was well taken care of growing up. I was raised to be intelligent by good parents. I had good teachers and mentors. I had a great supervisor throughout my graduate studies. Overall, my life had been a good one.

So I was confused why whenever I took a break these emotions of emptiness, uncertainty, and lack of direction found their way to me. Eventually, it got to the point where they bothered me so much that I had to dedicate some time to figure it out.

The solution I arrived at was beautiful in its simplicity. I wasn’t self-aware. As I said before, I didn’t know what my values were or what my life goals were. I hadn’t taken the time to define those for myself.

This lead to a lifestyle which, despite my success and achievements, hadn’t really been satisfying to me and left me unhappy.

After figuring this out I was left with a burning question. What can I do about it? It was then I decided that something needed to change in my life.

How I Met and Fell in Love with Achieving a Balanced Life

Since I knew something needed to change in my life but wasn’t exactly sure what, I did some self-reflection. I took the time to define my life values and goals.

I answered questions like:

“What’s the most important thing to me in life?”

“What do I want to achieve in my professional, social, and family life?”

“What do I want to give back to this world?”

After all that, I realized the life I was heading towards was not aligned with my desired lifestyle. I wasn’t on a path towards achieving the goals and values which were most important to me.

At that time, I was heading towards a career in medicine. Don’t get me wrong, medicine is an incredibly important, valuable, and rewarding career. But I wanted to be able to spend regular time with my family and friends and my creative pursuits.

I didn’t feel like medicine was going to allow me to pursue those goals.

It was around this time that I stumbled onto the topic of balanced living. I began learning about all the different domains of living and how they mix together, achieving a balanced life unique to us.

What I learned was enlightening. I discovered that when our life balance is aligned with the lifestyle we desire we’re much more likely to be happy and successful. Conversely, when they’re out of alignment, we’re more likely to be unsatisfied and unfulfilled.

That may seem obvious, but I bet you’d be surprised if you began proactively assessing your own life. Once you know what to look for, it’s easy to spot where your life balance is out of sorts with your values, goals, and desires.  

Though it took some effort, I eventually figured out the “balanced living formula” that facilitated my own success and happiness.

What Happened Afterwards…

I won’t go as far as to say that achieving a balanced life completely and drastically changed or saved me. I find that people tend to exaggerate a lot online.

But what I will say is that the impact of achieving a balanced life was more than significant. The feelings of emptiness, uncertainty, and lack of direction basically vanished. What they were replaced by was feelings of security and happiness.

Since then, the road has been just about as difficult as before. What’s different is that my goals, actions, and life balance are in agreement with my desired lifestyle.

So now I find that my passion and motivation to go achieve my goals is greater than it’s ever been. As a result, I’ve had a fair amount of success since I had this revelation.

This is partly why just over a year ago I developed the Excellence Addiction Balanced Living community. It’s definitely been one of my successes. So far, that community has grown to over 9000 community members who have committed to achieving a balanced life. And it’s growing every day because of you guys.

Congrats if you’ve come from Instagram. You’re one of the Excellence Addiction OG’s!

Where Am I Going Now?

My goal with the Excellence Addiction is to help others learn about achieving a balanced life and figure out their own personalized balanced living formula.

I want to help others align their unique values and goals with their lifestyles so they can also feel happy and fulfilled. Just like I do now.

So my only real goal at this point is to keep learning about how achieving a balanced life benefits us. I feel that by doing so will really help this community continue to grow.

As I said above, we’re already at over more than 9000 members. Which is incredible!

I have put in a lot of work, so I’ll take some credit and pat my back a bit there haha.

But I think the more important reason behind the growth of this community is the type of members it attracts.

I think it attracts people who are looking to become more self-aware. People that are seeking to maybe learn how they can adapt their lifestyle to suit their goals and values. People that are looking for happiness and fulfillment.

You’re a motivated bunch seeking the right things from life. Which makes you all really easy to engage with.

Basically, what I’m trying to do is thank all of you for being such amazing community members. I absolutely could not do this on my own and the Excellence Addiction would not exist without you!

Let’s End There

Well, I think I have given you guys a fairly good glimpse of who I am and how I got here. If you have any questions about me or achieving a balanced life, please feel free to leave it in the comments or send me an email directly.

Until next time, stay excellent!

Your host and Excellence Addiction Founder,

Mark Lynch