The Work Life Balance vs. The Integrated Life

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I go by Ryan Daniel Moran, but you can call me Ryan Daniel Moran and you can call the show that you're listening to Freedom Fast Lane. Hey, today I want to talk about something that really defines what Freedom Fastlane is. You know, I talk about my five steps to freedom a lot. They are decide what you want out of life. Cut out the things that don't serve you. Expand your possibilities and your incomes. Invest in yourselves and your long term wealth and give back out of your abundance. Well, I discovered recently, and by recently I mean about a year ago to the day, that I was not following my own advice, specifically when it came to step one, deciding the exact type of lifestyle that you want to live. You know, we hear a lot about this term, the work life balance. And there is this big push right now to talk about how the work life balance is a myth and there is no work life balance. I read an article recently that was written specifically to entrepreneurs that was saying that if you want to be successful in life, then you have to throw out the idea of a work life balance and you have to just work all of the time. That no one is success, no one is successful. I can't even say successful. You don't even need to pronounce your words correctly to be successful, folks. That's today's lesson. At Freedom Fast Lane, I was so focused on being successful and this article suggested that that was the way to go. You have to work so hard to be successful. And it's true. But I also think it's very misguided in the way that this new idea that's going around is being presented. I recently saw Kevin o' Leary do a keynote presentation. And Kevin o' Leary is the mean guy on Shark Tank. He's also extremely successful. And I was sitting in the back of the room and he mentioned something about the work life balance. And he said, if you think that you can have a work life balance and be successful, then you're going to fail. And I yelled out, you're wrong. And everybody turned and looked at me. I didn't even realize I had said it out loud. I was, I got really passionate about this idea and because, look, I can only speak from my own experience. I can only talk about where I've been and where I'm going. But I know a couple of years ago I had no work life balance and I was absolutely effing miserable, okay? And today I work less than I ever have in my entire life and I make more than I ever have in my entire life. By a multitude. And I'm happier than I've ever been in my entire life. And my trajectory is going way up. Whereas before, when I was working like a slave, my trajectory had. I had to work all the time just to maintain my trajectory. There was no growth happening. Now, part of that is becoming a more savvy business person. Part of that is cutting out the things that I wasn't passionate about a couple of years ago. But a lot of it is getting really clear on the type of life that I want and what's necessary to build that life. So today I'm going to be talking about this work life balance idea and what I think is the correct way to go about it. Again, sorry to belabor the point, but there is this common, common idea being pushed around right now that there is no such thing as a work life balance. And I disagree with that idea. Now, there's one other.

Popular idea of thinking about this that is closer to the truth, but it's still not all the way there. And that's this idea of an integrated life. Now, what is an integrated life? An integrated life is when your life, your passions, and your work all seamlessly feed each other and continue to pull you on the direction towards the goals that you have in mind. And they all feed one another. Now we're getting closer when we. When we have this idea. Now, I live what I consider to be an integrated life because my passions and my work all feed each other. I'm passionate about freedom. I'm here talking to you on a podcast about freedom. My website, my podcast is called Freedom Fast Lane. I'm passionate about inspiring people and inspiring men to be leaders of the world. I have a men's health and fitness company. So these are all things that participate in an integrated life. When your passions and your work and your life all feed each other, that is an integrated life. And when you live an integrated life, you're getting closer to what I think is an ideal work life balance. However, I still think that there is a balance that needs to be done between work and life. And I'll talk about that before we go into that. Specifically, I want to talk to you a little bit about what my life looked like two years ago. Two years ago, I was living in Cleveland, Ohio, and I worked all the time. I had no free time, I had no friends.

When I woke up, I thought about work. When I went to bed, I thought about work and I had no free time. Which was kind of funny because I got into this Internet thing because I wanted to have more free time. Because I wanted to pursue my passions. I would go to bed at night, shut down the computer, and wonder what the heck I was doing wrong. I was miserable, wondering, what is this? I'm making tons of money, I think about work all the time, and I have no fun. I don't even know how to have fun anymore. I remember having that thought and saying, I don't. I don't even remember what it's like to have fun. And I had this idea of having this integrated life, and I realized that I had an integrated life, but it was all work. So really I just had integrated work. I had no life. My life was work. And I think some of you can resonate with this idea. Even if you're working a job.

There'S this idea that we have to work more order to succeed. Now, there was one time that it was different. There was one instance where I could get away from it, and it was when I traveled. I would travel all the time in order to escape this trapped feeling of being at work. I would travel and have something else to do. And so I didn't have to think about work. And that was the only time that I didn't feel this pressure of building something, of being Superman, of building the next billion dollar idea so that I could buy the Cleveland Indians, which is my dream, of course, and I'm gonna do it one day. But I felt this pressure to be constantly driving towards this, and I had no life. And I. And I'm sorry to belabor the point, but I know that some of you listening know what I'm talking about, that you got into something because you thought that it would provide a better life for you and your family. And what you find is that thing has become your life, and you have no real life. Your life is work, and you have no life. So this idea of living an integrated life means that you've got integrated work and that you have no life. So for me, my escape was travel. So I traveled all the time. It was my escape. I couldn't get away from work anywhere else except when I was traveling. And that's when I felt like myself. And I would have these moments. I'd have these. These portals, I guess, into myself where I would realize that I was capable of feeling that way. I was capable of feeling light and free and happy in myself. And I knew I didn't like how I felt when I went home. And I thought about work all the time, because turns out, I did better work when I was traveling anyway because I was Happier, and I got more done and I was more productive. So I actually started to study how the brain worked and what was happening with me. Why was I having this experience? Why was I having this complete change when I would travel versus this pressure to just drive forward all the time and have no fun when I was at home And I discovered a few interesting things. First of all, I learned that the brain has a certain capacity to make decisions. The brain has basically a cup of creativity in it. And when you use it up, it's out and you have to refill it. And one of the biggest sucks, one of the biggest drains of your productivity and creativity cup. The keg of creativity, we'll call it. I like that. The keg of creativity. The way that that gets tapped the most is when you have constant, unforeseen distractions come up. So in nature, like when in our biology, that would mean that you could be creative to write music unless an attacker appeared in the bushes, and all of a sudden you had to defend that. And at the end of the day, if you had 90 attackers, you probably weren't gonna write very good music. Well, we don't have that anymore. We have other unforeseen distractions. And the biggest one, as far as the effect on our brain and ruining our creativity, our productivity, and our happiness is email and Facebook. Here's why. Because every single notification, every single email that comes into our box, we hear the chirp, and all of a sudden, there's an attacker in the woods. Biologically speaking, we have something that is tapping the keg of our creativity. We have a fire to put out. And the more time that we spend on those distractions, the least. The less amount of work that we actually get done, the less amount of productivity that we get done. And when we don't feel productive, we don't feel like we're growing or we don't feel like we're growing. We don't feel happy. When we don't feel happy, we can't enjoy our life. And this is what was happening to me, was I was constantly feeling like I had to put out fires. I constantly was feeling like I had to push everything forward or everything was going to fall apart. But I analyzed my day. The majority of my productivity, my productivity time was spent in email and Facebook, answering questions, answering emails, responding to notifications. Now there's a place for that. But when it becomes the central part of your day, which we unconsciously do, we unconsciously spend this amount of time in things like email and Facebook, it completely distracts us from the things that are important, not just in work, but in life as well. So I started batching email. I started batching my Facebook time, meaning letting the email build up before I answered it, rather than being right on top of email, checking email a couple times a day. You see, the reason why I felt so light and free when I was traveling was for two reasons. These are brain hacks, if you will. The first brain hack was that I wasn't checking email all the time, so I didn't have a bunch of distractions. And second, I had something else that my brain was focused on. And if you look at people who study happiness, people who study productivity, these are contributors to those less distractions and focus. So for me, I was hacking my happiness by traveling because I would turn off distractions of email and Facebook, and I would be working towards something. Now, what was that thing that I would be working towards? Well, it could be something as simple as getting to know a town, or it could be learning a language from where I was traveling, or it could be just discovering some new thing that I was doing in the place that I was traveling to. It could have even been reconnecting with a friend. These sound simple, but really all it does is it identifies what your brain is currently focusing on. And because I wasn't focused on all the distractions coming in and my brain had cut those off and was focusing on something else, it freed up all of this mental space for me. And all of a sudden, I would be creative. So I would go on trips and I would write the most beautiful things I've ever written. Every good thing that I've ever written, I've written on a trip or an airplane. I have written the most profound things, the things that make the best impact. The things that I go back and read because I'm so proud of them are written on airplanes and written on trips. Because I don't have the distraction of email and Facebook and my brain is thinking about something else. Therefore, I have this space created to be creative, and I have this space to invent new ideas. I do my best work. I create the best things. I am most productive. When those two things are in place now, I didn't recognize them as what was factoring into that. I just knew I was on a trip, and as a result, I felt really good. So I would travel all the time. Now I know that there are things that you can do in order to hack that system, and for me, it's shutting off distractions and focusing on something else. Now, in My life. That means I need to be focused on something other than work in order to be performing my best. And that could be as simple as. It could be a new relationship, a friendship, or a romantic one. It can be learning a new skill, it can be exercise, it could be growing in some area that is not work. But it also. This is really interesting. It also can be triggered if it's a work activity that I am 100% focused on. Meaning right now, I have email shut off, I have Facebook shut off, and I'm only thinking about podcasting. Today is my only thing that I'm thinking about. And as a result of that, I'm completely focused. At the end of the day, I will shut down the computer, I will leave it, I will walk away, and I'll return to my life. This is where the work life balance meets the integrated life. Because my purposes and my life are all very integrated. But I also combine that with a work life balance that is fairly rigid. Meaning I know that I'm happiness when I leave work at work and I go home and play, and it's all integrated. They're just separated. You see, I spent years, seven years working only out of a home office, and that made me freaking miserable. They say that working at home is such a great thing. I think it's the worst thing in the world. It's worse than Kim Jong Il.

It's just worse than North Korea, actually. In fact, it would be better if you worked in North Korea than if you worked from home. That's how bad it is to work from home. I'm going on a little bit of a tangent. Forgive me. I'm walking away from my notes and this is what happens when I don't read my notes as I'm doing these podcasts. But I lived an integrated life that had no life. And so the first thing that I had to do was to focus on rebuilding my personal life and building friendships and showing up as the real me and doing fun things, because I had forgotten how to have fun. And I had this idea that I couldn't do that because I had no time, because I was working all the time, except when I was traveling, when all of a sudden I realized I had all this time and I felt really happy and I still got everything done. And that came from shutting off distractions and focusing on something else. So the way that I started doing this at home, and I have to credit my girlfriend for pointing a lot of this out, was she helped me rearrange my schedule so that everything was batched and everything had a place. I focused on email at a specific time, and I didn't check it outside of that distraction. Gone. I put focused work into certain projects at certain times, and when they were done, I did not think about them. And as a result, I found that everything still got done in less time better than I would have done it before. And all of a sudden, I'm working like half the time that I was before.

Great. Well, now I have free time to do things like make friends and play kickball, which I do every week here in Austin, Texas. And now all of a sudden, I feel like I'm starting to have a real life again. Now I'm a single man. For you, it might be spending time with your kids or spending time with your husband or traveling, which you've never had time to do before. And when you cut out the things that are holding you back. Step two, you all of a sudden get to live the life that you define for yourself in step one of living a free life. And I found for me that I had just forgotten my own advice a couple of years ago. This is when I actually really started to develop the framework for my five steps to freedom. Because I looked at the exact order that I followed to start to rebuild my life, and I knew that I was starting to make progress. When I was sitting in my girlfriend's living room and I was playing with her cat. And all of a sudden I looked up in panic and she looked over at me, she says, what? What's wrong? And I said, I just realized I'm not thinking about work. It was the first time for me to not be traveling and for me to realize that I was not thinking about work all of the time. And all of a sudden, the difference of the integrated life and the work life balance and why they're both important started to become clear to me. So when people say that there is no work life balance, I think they're wrong. And then they come back and they say, well, I believe in integrated life. And I say, me too. But I cannot be my fullest expression of myself if I don't have time that I completely refuel. And I refuel by doing things that aren't work related. Now, are most of my friends people that I met from. From being an Internet personality? Yes. And I enjoy those relationships. But I have a rule. We don't talk about work when it's not talking about work time. So let me put this into a bit of a step by step format for developing a healthy work life balance while Maintaining an integrated life. The first is to give your brain the space that it needs in order to be creative and productive. And that looks like this. It means cutting off your regular distractions of email and Facebook, except for their designated times. And it means focusing on one important productive thing that you can do today, now that you have time for it, because you don't have all of these distractions going on. The second is leaving work at work. Now, I did this by spending the money to get an out of home office. I'm sitting here right now, it's a 15 minute walk or a 4 minute scooter ride from where I live. And when I leave here, I shut the computer down and I go home and I live a normal person life where I do things like read and make food and drink wine and be with people. That's my personal life. And third, which we haven't talked about yet, is scheduling time for the things that are really important. Actually scheduling time for the things that you want to do. Look, most people want to be successful so they have a desired outcome, so they can have a certain desired outcome. So it's time for us to start integrating that desired outcome into our life. So the things that you really want to do, it's time to start integrating those into our life. So what are the things that you really want to be doing with your time and schedule those? We need to schedule work so it gets done, and we need to schedule life so that it gets done. So if you got into a business or if you want to be a successful person so that you can spend more time with your kids, block out time for the kids, block out time for the wife. This became so clear to me when my girlfriend told me that she felt neglected and like she was on the back burner. It broke my heart. I didn't even realize I was doing it, but I was filling my life with so many projects that I literally had pushed her out and I didn't want that to continue happening. So then it became, okay, let's start scheduling time for the things that are important. If you want to give back and volunteer more, start scheduling it, schedule work and leave it there. And schedule life so that you actually do it. Your total happiness is dependent upon this. This is how our brains work. Our brains work best when there aren't distractions. Our brains work best when we are focusing on a specific thing. And we can hack that by bringing work into a designated spot and leaving it there. We can also hack it by having something else in our life that we're focusing on outside of work. This does two things. One, it enhances our work life balance and two, it enhances our productivity when we sit down to work because it has a structured place for it to think about work and it knows that it's going to get refueled by the other thing that we're thinking about, whether it be spending time in something we enjoy, learning a new skill, growing at something, reading a book, focusing on exercise. These are the things that are that if we work them into our life and schedule them into our life, refuel our brain so that we can be productive at work. This is why when people say that the work life balance doesn't exist anymore, I disagree. I don't get it. Because your brain has to separate them. Your brain has to refuel. Even if you live an integrated life. I would say especially if you live an integrated life. I live an integrated life. I believe in the idea of an integrated life where your work, your life and your passions all fuel each other. They all are very much aligned with your purposes. I think one of the best examples of this is my buddy, Jordan Gray. We have a podcast with Jordan Gray. Jordan is a relationship coach and he just is fascinated by relationship psychology, as am I. But him even more so. And he studies it so much that he is actually able to help other people in relationships and consult with them and charge a whole lot of money for that consulting. I'm one of his clients. I pay him money to talk about life purpose, relationships, dating. And he's very, very good at it and he enjoys every minute of it. That is an integrated life. And that's what I believe a free life should be. I live an integrated life. I love talking about business, I love traveling, and I love to be in front of a microphone. And I get to do all of these things and they fuel each other. That's an integrated life. But there are still times when Jordan and myself and you have to escape it and go refuel with something different that is not work related. Otherwise you burn out, otherwise your brain says no more and it starts to shut down. Forgive me for belaboring these points, but I know what my life was a few years ago. And I know that there are some of you listening that feel like your life is there right now. This is how we start to shift it. Because listen, people who wake up in the morning and can't wait to get out of bed to go to work, that's rare. We hear it marketed a lot. That passion is where the money is. But it's rare. That people get there. For most people, your work is reserved so that you can live a real life. But if you don't actively build that life or actively integrate work into your life and keep them balanced, you burn out very quickly and you live a very unhappy life. In we weren't meant to live that. Hey, do you have any brain hacks you'd like to share with the Freedom Fast Lane Nation? Share them over at the blog@freedomfastlane.com please share with your Share your thoughts over at the blog. I'd love to hear your take on the work life balance. And do you know that it really helps us rank in the itunes store when you leave a review inside of itunes. So if you would go there and leave a review, I would appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Freedom Fastlane and I'll see you on the next episode.