Are You an Earth Element Type?

Do you often end your day without having crossed one item off your to-do list? Not because you’re a slacker. Quite the contrary. You’ve been running on fumes since sun up. While checking your Facebook feed with your morning tea, you’re careful to wish every celebrating friend a happy birthday. When you see a post about a neighbor’s surgery, you have a pan of veggie lasagna in the oven before breakfast. You’re still damp from your mid-morning shower when an old college friend calls with another list of reasons she is considering divorce. You listen sympathetically for over an hour, careful not to take sides since you consider her husband a friend as well. Even though their marital problems leave you with a heavy heart, you skip lunch and focus the next 4 hours on a rush job requested by a client’s urgent email.

Your afternoon goes even farther off schedule. You arrive on time to help with spring planting at the community garden. A volunteer who promised to help never shows. You take their share and keep working the rows, reminding yourself it is more important than the yoga class you had scheduled. After the garden work is complete, you run errands for three extended family members, quieting your growling stomach with a candy bar stashed in the glove box.

Errands complete, you deliver the lasagna to the neighbors and make dinner for your own family. Before helping with a social studies project due tomorrow, you call to check on an ailing, elderly aunt. She’s having trouble sleeping, and you make a mental note to mix an herbal tea blend tomorrow and drop it off to her. When the house is quiet, you revisit your to-do list. There is nothing on the list you have the energy to tackle. Like the yoga class, it will be there tomorrow. You toss and turn all night with worry about your college friends’ marriage. You wonder if planning a reunion party might take them back to the days they fell in love and all their dreams seemed possible. Your summer schedule is already tight with family visits, but perhaps you could find a weekend. You spend the night planning the event.

If this sounds like the shape of most of your days, you are an earth element personality type. Your priority is the wellbeing of others. You are there, hands-on, for your family, friends, co-workers, and anyone with a need you can fill. You rise by lifting others.

In our next blog on earth dominant types, we’ll address the importance of maintaining balance. Tireless giving can have an adverse effect on the emotional and physical well being of those who live in service to others since they often neglect their own needs.