Enhance your relationships with some creative TV placement

Unless you have special access to unprecedented technology or are Michael Keaton in “Multiplicity,” you can’t be in two places at once. So if you want to be out in the garden enjoying the sunshine and inside watching a baseball game, you’re going to have to make a choice.

Or maybe not.

Beth Lachance Hesson, CLU, CFP, a 24-year MDRT member from Midhurst, Ontario, Canada, first became a Toronto Blue Jays fan in 2015, a great year for the team that included a trip to the American League Championship Series, simply because there was nothing else on TV. For the 2016 season, she and her husband wanted to keep up with the games, but Hesson didn’t want to miss out on the valuable time she’d spend in her backyard if she weren’t inside watching baseball.

So her husband hung a big-screen TV on a brick wall in the yard, redefining the experience of watching the game at home. “Now we’ll be out on our patio and I can be puttering and making my backyard beautiful and have the Blue Jays games on, and we haven’t missed once since,” Hesson said.

It is helpful in giving her and her husband something in common, Hesson said, and allowing them to connect with each other as they are in tune with nature as well. “I think it’s added a lot of balance,” she said. “If we’re inside and he’s watching a movie I didn’t like, I might end up going down to the basement and working. But this makes me more relaxed and brings us together.”

It also brings the community together. People know that if there is a Blue Jays game, it will be on in the Hesson backyard.

“They know our house is always open,” she said. “If someone ever knocks on our door, we think, ‘Who is that? Must be a stranger.’”

This allows for a low-effort way to have friends over and entertain. Hesson, who works out of her home office, even has some client meetings in their backyard, which might include lunch, iced tea and cookies out on the patio.

But during those meetings, the game is turned off.

For more Whole Person ideas

•        “Well mind and body” (pdf)
•        “Don’t allow negativity” (video)
•        “Whole Person balance quiz” (pdf)