Think Work-Life Balance is Easy?
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I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Real Talk, San Diego on ESPN radio and was asked a really great question about how we at Buffini & Company teach work-life balance to our clients?
I don’t know that we teach about ‘balance’ so much as about ‘balancing.’ If you know what matters most to you, it’s easy to then adjust your business plan to where it needs to be. Right? Simple.
Unfortunately, most times, it’s not so simple.
The analogy I used on ESPN was this: sometimes business is like brining home a baby Rhinoceros, and you’ve got a little nice rope you use to lead it around and tell it where to go. And you feed and take care of your Rhinoceros, and wake up one morning and discover it’s not such a little Rhinoceros anymore. It’s a little bit bigger; you can still pull it around, and it still listens to you, but it’s offering a little more resistance than it used to. But, you continue to feed and care for it. And then one day, you discover that your baby Rhinoceros is now full grown, huge, and you can’t pull it around at all. In fact, now it can pull YOU around, and even potentially kill you if you are not careful.
The moral of the story is that we all need to pay attention to our businesses and make sure it’s not causing us to draft away from the things that matter most in our lives.
Look, everyone gets caught up in business, I’m as guilty as anyone. Business is fun, it’s exciting, there are things you simply have to do to keep it running. Right? Short answer is yes, it’s fun, it’s exciting, it requires our attention. But, without some reflection on our lives in total, one day it hits you that it’s been a year or more since you took a vacation or spent some real quality time with the family, or missed your kids ballgame. You might start noticing other things too, like when you step on the bathroom scale and get a nice little surprise. So you wisper to yourself, “hey, it hasn’t been that long since I worked out at the gym”, but it you are truthful you should add “yeah, it’s not that long ago, but it is four months!”
What happens is we drift into these places. It’s not an overnight thing. It’s a slow, little drift until it hits you and you wonder “how did I get here?”
The solution is to simply get back to what matters most. Why are you in business? How do you want to serve your customers? What do you want to do with your finances? What time off do you need to take? What things need to go on your calendar first? That’s what ‘balancing’ is all about. It’s about mid-course corrections back to where you want to be and making sure that those things that are most important to you are the first things that go on your schedule.
I’ve included the ESPN spot if you’d like to check it out.
Dermot