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Transcript
It manifests in little things, unfortunately it starts with little things. So there will be things where you will compromise on: sleeping less, I think that’s the most obvious one. So “I’m so busy. This project has to go off track or is going off track, it has to go back on track. So I’m going to spend an hour more doing work. I can make up for it on the weekend”. That weekend will never come and it will start creeping into your life.
I think a poor work-life balance also is when you start denying that something is going wrong. When you don’t have time anymore to discuss the really important questions. When you push away friends and family members asking you, are you okay? “Yeah. Yeah, sure. Life’s great. Everything’s perfect”. When you stop going to your sports exercise or whatever you enjoy doing, a hobby, you start deferring appointments, you start turning up late. You don’t care about how you look any longer.
Poor work-life balance, I think, has far greater effect on your family and your social environment than you can imagine. Things like self-destruction in many, many different ways, right? It can be little things. It can be like biting off your fingernails, but it can also be really doing harm to yourself, ignoring your real needs and requirements. Starting to make really terrible decisions that can be financial, personal, family related. And all of a sudden you’re putting people into jeopardy. And the moment you do this, maybe you won’t discover, but the stress hormones and everything that’s happening in our bodies is starting to take real, real momentum. And it’s going to grow and you’re going to start to change. You’re going to start to change in your behaviors, you might get a bit more impatient. You might get a bit more aggressive in your asks or in your expressions. You might get less tolerant to situations: this is not what I wanted, this is not how I wanted it, this is not when I wanted it. So there is a lot of those little signs I would pay attention to. And they will tell you a lot.
If you don’t see that, or if you’re worried about putting up a mirror and seeing that, then you have to find somebody you can trust to hold that mirror up for you. Sometimes that can be your partner, that can be, you know, your spouse or any close to you, a friend. And sometimes it’s better to ask a stranger, like hire a coach, we’ll hire a trusted advisor or hire just somebody and say, look, I really need you in this capacity. I need to understand what’s going on here. I don’t like what I’m seeing. I don’t like what I’m expressing or maybe I do, I just don’t know what’s going on. It might also be a situation you feel like, just don’t know what is going on here, but somehow something feels wrong. This is really the time you have to put a pause on everything and then find solutions. And I don’t know what they are for you. And I hope you will never come into those situations, but find one or two places that you can turn to. [It] can be people, can be places that you feel safe and kind of rebuild your confidence and rebuild your joy and your energy, and also the good feelings, right, and the good thoughts. And with that start finding solutions.
But again, don’t ignore, don’t ignore those little effects of “Yeah, I’m just busy. I’m busy as great” or “Yeah, financially, it’s not working, but that’s just life, right? That’s what it is. And this is how it’s going” or “No, I don’t need that hobby any longer. It didn’t serve me. It wasn’t fun anymore”. If that is not true, then you really have to look into it. If it is true, fine, change it. Get a new hobby or do something else. But you have to listen to yourself. That’s the hardest because you can’t escape from yourself. That’s a big learning, I can tell you, but certainly it is something that you have to put time in. That’s part of your investment in your business. If you don’t function, if you don’t operate at your highest possible level, that goes to business, just like in family, then don’t do it at all.
Make some conscious choices, conscious choices about who you want to be, how you want to come across, what you want to be known for. And the minute you realize that something is creeping in, you have to really recognize it or find people who will tell you that something is going wrong, but don’t let it manifest. That is really, really hard to get out and it won’t serve you and you will have a lot of, you know, broken dreams and then broken situations that will be super hard to fix. So don’t even go there. There is no need for that. There’s other ways.
