Finding Space For Yourself

So a client recently came to me struggling with finding time for himself. Right. So you have your family life in the morning. In this case, he has a family, has children. So it's quite busy getting everybody ready for kindergarten and for school and stuff. And of course, his spouse and, and being together with her. And then the moment he kind of steps out of that, he steps into work mode, either on his phone, video calls, Going to the office, being with the team. Oftentimes, he would then also have like events in the evening for work, and then he would come home. Sometimes the bed would— the kids would be in bed, sometimes they wouldn't. He would have to have quality time with his spouse, of course, and then kind of the whole thing repeats. On weekends, it was packed with family activities or friends' activities. There was always people around. So his biggest issue essentially was, how do I find time and space to be just by myself? And I think many founders struggle with this because they are fully dedicated to their business. They're fully dedicated to their families. They're fully dedicated to their friends. And before you know it, you kind of forget to be fully dedicated to yourself. So the first thing I suggested was to try and find moments times when you can actually be by yourself even though you're with others. And that may sound a little bit counterintuitive, but the easiest way to sort of illustrate it is to say when you're in the office, for example, book time in your calendar, half an hour, an hour, a couple of days a week where you're in a conference room or you're in a place where you will not be disturbed, where you can sit by yourself. Now, you can sit there and you can do your work on your laptop or your phone or whatever, or you can actually sit there and do what I suggested to him, which was practicing meditation. So I said, put on your headphones, listen to a 5, 10, 15-minute recorded guided meditation, and that's all you have to do a couple of times a week. Let's start there. The next step would then be to say, okay, once I figured out how I can do that, I need to start saying no to stuff. And that's the hardest part for most people. How do I say no to events? How do I say no to meetings? How do I say no to perhaps even family gatherings that I don't really get a lot of energy from? Am I allowed to do that? And the answer is yes, you are allowed to do that. Because if you're not good with yourself, if you don't have that mental space for yourself, you're not going to be good with any of these other people and any of these other interactions. So then we started practicing saying no to stuff. The easiest thing again is to look at the calendar and say, of all these things that are happening over the next four weeks, which ones can I say no to? And then once you've done that, then do it again because there are probably more things than you think. And so then we started doing that, and then the third thing we started doing was to say to him, well, actually start communicating about this. Start telling your team. Hey guys, I really need some space to think and reflect. And therefore, I'm delegating these tasks to you so I actually get some room in my calendar. Or even say to your spouse, say, hey honey, I love you. I love our family. I love the kids. But I realize that I'm not the best version of myself when I don't have some time to myself. And so, talk to your partner about how can you each have moments during the week where there's no obligations with family, no obligations with friends, no obligation with work, where you can just be by yourself and do whichever thing you want to do, whether it's going on a walk, sitting alone with a book, meditating, whatever it is, doesn't really matter as long as you get that mental space for yourself. So if you're a founder or CEO who is struggling with all the demands of your work life and you're trying to find ways to carve out some space, I hope these tips helped you. I have talked about this recently, but I'm doing a new group of CEOs and founders that are coming together every week to talk about all the many challenges there are running companies, whether it be dealing with your board or dealing with your investors or dealing with yourself. And if you want to be part of that, I'd be happy to hear from you and we will sign you up for the, for the next cohort.