The Holidays are finally upon us. For many of us this will give us a reprieve for a few days. Probably for you, as for my partners and I, this was an extremely busy year. We held workshops all over the country, helped companies to revamp their sales force and upgrade their leadership skills and spoke at several conferences. Some weeks it felt like we saw more of the Continental attendants than our own families. You can imagine my surprise and strong reaction when my wife returned from a recent Chamber of Commerce event where a speaker proclaimed, that in order to be successful, there cannot be a work life balance.
When I look at this statement I can only wonder in bewilderment what that person might have accomplished in life if she would acknowledge her own needs. Spending a lot of time in those aluminum tubes I always feel that the airlines have it right. In case of a pressure loss -they announce prior to every flight- secure the oxygen mask first on yourself before helping others. The message is clear. You cannot help others if your body is starved of oxygen and you have passed out. The same message is true for all leaders. One cannot lead or be a potent team member when your mind is on constant overload. From working with numerous successful leaders over the past years, I clearly can prove that the quality of their decisions made and the strength of their relationship with their team and stake holders suffers greatly when they miss the critical task of balancing their work and life. We can take another analogy from professional athletes. If they overtrain and underrest, their performance suffers greatly.
In order to make good decisions, one needs to be able to quiet the mind, listen to one's emotions and look at the facts in detail. The same is true with managing and growing deep relationships. Connecting to people requires that we are able to empathically listen. In both cases we can only accomplish peak performance by quieting our mind and eliminate all distractions around us.
Enough evidence? I think so. Balancing work and life, however, will not happen without your strong focus. Start with documenting the tasks, challenges and duties you perform at work and home on a daily basis. Keep a precise diary for at least a couple of weeks and then block out some quiet time to analyze what happened to your time. Classify the tasks you performed into necessary tasks, managing crises, planning so that your future is smoother, preventing future crises, and busy work. I bet you will find a lot of busy work and crisis management and not a lot of hours planning efficiency improvements or putting plans in place to leverage your time. If you are unsure how to classify a task, just look at the impact it had on you, your business or your team. You will see that most issues you considered "red hot" at the time and which consumed your day, really did not have any impact on your successes. Most of them even seem trivial in the rear view mirror. Then do three things:
- Block out "me" time in your calendar. Me time should be used to lay out and
communicate your vision and to manage and deepen relationships. Plan it
first and use time slots that work best for you
- Write a list with tasks you will avoid doing
- Write a list with plans you need to implement to perform better tomorrow
As you go through several cycles of writing a diary and analyzing what happened to your time, you will get better and better at focusing on the issues you are good at, which are differentiating yourself from others and are making a difference. And I bet that you will end up with a plan for a better future and to recharge your inner battery. If you need help, we have several exercises and coaching modules to support your quest.
When out of balance, struggling to breathe, nobody can give peak performance. Use the time over the Holidays to get started. Work life balance is a must for all high performers.
