Work-Life Mix: Navigating your Purposeful Journey

Hey everyone, it's Sean. And in this episode of the Meaningful Revolution podcast, we're going to be talking about work life balance, what people get wrong about that, and some things that you can do to help better design your work life mix for our new listeners. Your meaningful revolution is your action towards building your purposeful and impactful life. Our podcast helps to inspire you to follow your dreams and passions through personal development topics and interviews where people nerd out about the topics that they love. All that to say today's episode, what is work life balance? What isn't work life balance? First, I think work life balance is bad marketing because balance implies equality in time spent. And that is not the case. I prefer to think of it as your work life mix. And your work life mix should include your desired outcomes for your life, for your career, for your health, for your relationships, and be sustainable over time or prevent burnout. Now, what most people get stuck in is this mentality that hours spent equals productivity, right? So you work for a corporation, you work in your business. You think if I just spend that hour during lunch to work through it and get my work done, if I spend the four hours after work supposed to end, I'm staying till 9 o' clock at night to get things done and get things set up for tomorrow, that the time spent is going to be productive. And as a high performance coach, I can tell you that if you are consistently neglecting your health, your relationships, your family, your life outside of work, that you will burn out over time. It's been my personal experience and it's been an experience that I've seen over and over again in my clients. IT in the Harvard Business Review, they reported a study that ran about 200 professionals that said that many people believe that working long hours was necessary for their professional success, that 30 to 50% of those interviewees had strategies for maintaining a healthier work life mix. And that work life balance usually comes after big life events like a death in the family, the birth of a child, a big move across the country. Some type of existential question enters your life. You're like, I need to live a better way. I need to commute less at a lesser degree. But it's these big life events that tend to cause priorities and thinking to reshuffle. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. All right, so when I worked at Walmart, they had a couple of doom projects in the information systems division, which, where I worked as a software engineer, project manager, business analyst, Jack of all Trades, master of none type thing. But these projects were known to just be terrible, right? Anyone that worked on these projects looked just exhausted and they were very irritable to if you had to do anything adjacent to them, if your project was adjacent to theirs. Not the best people to work with. Not because they weren't good people, it's just they were dog tired. And so part of that was not handling the stress of the job properly. And part of it wasn't their fault, right? Some of these projects grew to be so big or the goalposts moved over time so much that there was never a feeling of progressing towards the end of it. There never was the light at the end of the tunnel. It was, I've been in this project for two and a half years and this is how I live, right? I wake up at six in the morning, I go home at seven or eight o' clock at night and maybe I'm on call too, so I get interrupted during sleep. And so there's these physical demands for the job that were causing stress. There was the psychological, like, this is never going to end or anything that I do doesn't matter in the grand scheme of the project. And so there's a little bit of helplessness, a little bit of nothing is going right here. And so the engineering team was burnt out and that was that. And part of my job at that time, I was tasked to help out with their release management schedule with my compatriot John. So John and I saw that this one particular project we were asked to help out on, that they had code that was supposed to be one code base that went into 4,000 different sites worldwide. And each site had its own unique version of the code. So you couldn't basically push the same code out to everyone because it would break these patches and things that people had found out. So things weren't making its way back into the code. And there was no strategy, right? It was just if something was ready to go into production, people rushed in and then it would take a whole week and a half of people sorting out the impacts of code that had not have been tested properly or broke something inadvertently or there's a whole host of things. And so it was varied. Frustrating to see this happen with people that we worked with and then to try to figure out how to help this. And part of what we ended up doing is we really needed to simplify the process. We also needed to understand going into this that people were just fed up. And so when we were asking questions on like, how does all this work, it was a lot of angry stares, it was a lot of very curt and short responses. And maybe if you've ever felt burnt out, maybe you've been at the sending part of that type of emotion where we take things out on other people just because you're just tired, right? You're wore out, you're frustrated, you're overwhelmed. And so whoever's talking with you is going to be the person that take you take out this type of frustration on. And so we got a, we seen a lot of that going on. But we ended up adopting this model real quick of we need to time bound when these releases go out. So we had like a train station mentality where every two weeks the train would leave the station and any fixes, any code had to be ready a couple of days before that or I can't remember the exact thing, but there's a point before each train left that you had to be on the train for it to go. And if you were one minute late from everyone checking to make sure the train was ready to go, you'd have to wait for the next train. And so what this did is it slowed down the amount of churn going into the code base and then going out into all these locations for this particular project. And we had to take an initial hit too of getting everyone on the same type of train. And then anytime we had a fix that we needed to do, we needed to make sure it worked in all the sites. And so there's a rollout schedule where you do part of the 4,000 sites on Monday and then Tuesday and then. And it would slowly get larger and larger the amount of sites you push this out to in order to make sure that we weren't breaking the whole system. And this was a logistics system that was very important to Walmart. We needed to take the hit of causing a lot of churn and pain by getting everyone on the same code base as probably our biggest hurdle, the biggest point of resistance we got from the team that is just more out. But after working with the team, I think over a couple of months we were able to get that accomplished. When the dust settled, we were able to cut down on release time and patches and emergency patches all because we had simplified the process and it slowed down the rhythm that we were updating things. So what are the key takeaways to this story? We needed to have someone with a perspective. It was John and I who had, we could do this a lot better guys. And we were kind of like fresh troops in that particular Manner where we just fresh faces, right? We weren't wore down by the gears of this project. So we can objectively be like this doesn't have to be the way that everyone lives and let's try to change that. We needed to get everyone on the same page and convince people that even though there would be a little bit extra pain short term, that we could sell the idea that this change would make life easier going forward. And we needed to get some momentum to help get some of those burnt out people on board. So we needed to prove out at a smaller scale and kind of ramp it up and then get through that initial change to lead to the happier times. So when you're thinking about your work life mix and why does what does this have to do with work life mix? This is a whole organization forcing a whole large group of people, probably a couple hundred people on this project total. Between engineers and analysts and all that and business people, the organization put the sole focus on work at the expense of people seeing the sun right there. I would call it vampire hours at Walmart where there would be days you'd wake up at 6 and never see the sun. Cuz you were in the office before the sun was up and then you'd leave after the sun went down. And so you could go weeks without seeing the sun. And that is not super great for human beings. It's doable in short bursts, but not over the long term. We needed to make sure people are taking care of their health. And like I said, this is the case of everyone focused on work. People weren't seeing their families, people weren't doing things that made them happy. So it just made it all a slug through life. And there are times in everyone's life where this happens. And it's not that the mix needs to be perfected or it's going to be the same at different phases in your life either. So if you are trying to close down a project for two weeks, for two weeks, it's gonna be crazy focused on work after that. Maybe you have some comp days or you have some days where you could reconnect the family or make up time that you lost with family and friends or go for a run or whatever you do. And so that's why this work life mix is important. So as we think of work life mix, I have a couple of things to help you think through yours right now. So if you are feel like you are excited and you are getting after your day every day and that your work life mix is great. This is Gonna be things that you can maybe tweak to help optimize. If you're like, I am just miserable every day and overwhelmed and irritable and exhausted and just don't wanna deal with, I'm not really engaged in my work or I don't wanna engage with people at work, then this could be a diagnostic and hopefully a brainstorm session for you to have a little bit of hope, come back, have a little bit of that light at the end of the tunnel that you can see if I can change. If you have a little bit different perspective going back to that story, things can change for me. And that could be a happier life going forward. Okay, so the first thing to think of is a holistic diagnosis, right? I like to call it the four life domains, which are your career, your health, your relationships, and your well being. And if we were to open up your calendar today, would we see time dedicated for you to get your big work objectives done, to get your big health objectives done, to have and build intimacy and closeness and have fun with your close relationships and friends. And time dedicated for you to get your head in the right place, your heart in the right place, to generate good will and good energy or just happiness. Right? Things that you love to do, you like to cook, you like to play guitar, you like to run. Is that on your calendar? And the easy check is if you go back the last two weeks on your calendar and you don't have any of these or just one or two of them, we need to add that into the mix. Because things that aren't on your calendar are things that you are probably not thinking of. And it's so much easier to get distracted. And a lot of people are built off their calendar. And I know a lot of high performers that I work with, especially in that run businesses or in corporate or have a corporate job or professionals tend to run their lives on their calendar. It's such an important thing that you can do to really help see and visualize your mix too, right? Some of us are visual learners. So having it on a calendar or having it on a list for the week for things you gotta get done on your calendar is how people operate. So how does that look in the last two weeks on your calendar? And take some notes on and brainstorm. If you had. If it's just like 1% of well being, 1% of relationships, 5% of health, and the rest career, right? If that's the mix you have or the mix you desire, I would encourage you to really start playing with how much time am I spending in each of these buckets and how can I maybe tweak it to where I might feel happier? And so that's the first thing to consider when thinking about your work life mix. Second thing is there are three things that we fear. And fear comes into the work life mix because a lot of people solely focus on work because they're afraid that if they don't dedicate 18 hours a day towards their profession that they will lose their job or they will lose the bonus or they will be looked at as lazy and judged by their peers. Excuse me. The list goes on and on. The three types of fears we talk about in high performance are losses fear, process fear, and outcome fear. And so for each of these, loss fear. If you haven't been with me for a while, loss fear is just, you're going to have to give something up in order to do the change. So if you're going to change up your work life mix, you might lose a promotion, right? That could be a fear or lose that edge, the competitive edge you have at work. And that could be loss fear. There's process fear that just by changing your the way that you do your day, it's going to throw you off your rhythms, it's going to throw you off of your routines, and that could be very frightening for some folks. And then outcome pain, that if you change your work life mix that it doesn't matter what you know, you'll still be as stressed or as worried or as overwhelmed, or you still won't see people enough. These are three very valid areas of fear. And for each of these, my question to you is what do you have to gain in each of these areas? So you might lose a promotion, but you gain more time with your family and your overall are happier. And because you're happier, then you get healthier, you're able to do the runs when you want to, and then you start losing weight and your wife thinks you look fantastic and that leads to increased intimacy and romance at home and then you're really happy, right? So maybe that's what you have to gain from getting this mix proper, right? Maybe it's, you just have a little bit more time to get perspective, right? Sometimes we're so in it and fixing things that we forget that it's really important to have breaks so that we can think about it in a different way, right? So many times if you've ever been seen somebody or been the person that's trying the same thing over and over again because you're stressed out and then you're getting more stressed out because it's not still not working. It's usually because you are in go, go do mode. Do you know, get it done and you're not thinking about what you're doing. Now. That's been definitely true in my career and those times, going for a walk, seeing a friend, grabbing a cup of coffee, putting the problem in the back of the brain ends up solving the problem or helps me come up with a better solution going forward. So that is loss process thing, the act of changing your work life balance. Like what do you gain from spending more time getting healthy, spending more time with family and friends, spending more time on the things that make you feel happy. Yeah, maybe again, like you're worried about being judged as being lazy at work, but your kids know your name, the kids recognize you when you come home, the kids want to play with you. You get to see people in your life that matter and that type of social interaction is maybe worth not being so focused on work, right. Allocating a little bit more time towards social events and then outcome. Right. If nothing changes on your stress levels or your health or your relationships after you do the this work life mix change, I bet you you're just not being honest with yourself because if you spent more time with your family and friends, if you spent more time working out, if you spent more time doing the things that you loved, you would feel happier, you would feel better. And I've seen this time and time again where people think, oh, I can survive on two hours of sleep a night. Have you ever had this guy on your team and that, this guy, this particular person I'm thinking of was one of the grumpiest people I knew at my job at Apple. Right. He's. No, I don't, I don't need to sleep more than four hours a night. And he was terrible to work with. Nobody wanted to work with him because he was so grumpy and he snapped and he didn't really make think clearly a lot of the time because he was sleep deprived. That's the important of focusing on what you're going to gain from facing loss process and outcome fear. Okay, now third point. Your quality of life outcomes are the things that we do and go into our day. So the people we have around us, time, money, resources, focus, attention. These types of things go into our life and the outcomes are abundance. It could be financial, it could be abundance of love, it could be abundance of freedom, it could be quality of life, could be your health, it could be how Happy you feel. So there's emotional outcomes and getting clear on what you're doing in your life and the outcomes that you want is very important. And so in a very quick kind of exercise is think of what are the quality of life outcomes you want in your life, that in an ideal world you'd have a million dollars, you'd be able to play music all day like you love and you'd be with your favorite people on a small island in the Pacific maybe, right? That could be the quality of life that the that you're going after. And so it's really important to get clear on this right again as a certified high performance coach or talk and we know that finding clarity is something that high performers constantly are seeking. And here is where it's very practical and it's very powerful to get clear on the quality of life outcomes you want. So be thinking about that and if you're like driving or you're like, man, this is a lot of journaling and stuff. I don't have time to do it now. I do have a link in the show Notes today to a free PDF that you can download called the Ultimate Work Life Mix where we talk about a couple of these ideas of doing an assessment on your life and brainstorming the quality of life outcomes that you might want. So It's a quick like 23 pager PDF and you can download that below if you want that help. Just provide your email address after hitting that link and we send you an email with the PDF. So go check that out now. Getting back to it. So we so far we've had holistic diagnosis in the four life domains. Career, health, relationships, wellbeing. We've talked about the three things, fears that people face in making change to their work life mix. We talked about quality of life outcomes. The fourth thing I want you to think about as you are brainstorming your work life mix is what legacy do you want to leave to for yourself, for your family, for your community, for your organizations? Like what impacts do you want to leave on society, on the community and everyone around you? This can be a very motivating question for people. This is why I put it as a number Four is the kind of life I want to live. The stories I want to tell, the person I want to be and how I want people to look up to me or how I want to impact those around me is very vital in thinking through quality of life outcomes because it could be I just want a million dollars and to lay on the beach for the rest of my life. And I'm 30 and that's a very sad life, at least to me. Like, it would be fun, don't get me wrong. Like, get one of those coconuts with the umbrella in it. I'm down for that. But for the rest of your life, I would go nuts, right? I would. I don't know what I would do. I would absolutely go nuts. So that's just me. But it's a great vacation. It would be great to do that. Four times a year is to take a week off or a couple weeks off every quarter to take vacation and just go somewhere fun with my wife. I'm down for that. So what legacy do you want to have? Like, more than just laying on the beach, I guess is what I'm saying is I want to help people step into leadership positions, especially if you're more introverted. I want to help people not be overwhelmed by technology. I want to help people tap into their heart, more into their dreams and get after their. They aspire for themselves and their families. Because that's what I find fulfilling. That's what I love. That's what I nerd out about. That's why I do a show like this, guys. What impact or legacy do you want to leave? And then we'll get to the last and final point. Authenticity. So how much of you is in everything you've thought about so far? So if you're going, if you're taking notes, if you downloaded that PDF with the link below in the show notes, how inspired or how exciting are the things you wrote down? And how much of it would, if you were to share with others, be like, oh, that's Susie. That is a hundred percent Suzy. I get what you're get. You're going after right there. Or that is so Sean. That is so James. That is so Jim. That is so Jill. Right? How much of you has shown up in each of those? And the question is, if you could rewrite it as something that was more authentic to your values to. To the best version of yourself, how would you change it? And maybe for 80% of it, you got it, you nailed it. And at 20%, you're like, okay, I gotta do some work on this. Going through and making sure this is representing your values and who you want to be in the world. Eliminates the friction that comes up when you write a goal that is just not aligned with you. And so meaning that if you are an accountant and you know you really want to be a software engineer, you are not going to be effective as an accountant because you're always going to be thinking about the career that could have been. And you could take small steps today to start learning programming, to start learning accounting, to start doing the new thing that you want to do. It doesn't have to be a big change, but you can start that today. And you could also really be excited that you're taking the reins of your life again, that you're taking. You don't feel out of control and burnt out and overwhelmed and exhausted because you're adding on something that sets a deep fire in your belly that you're excited to get after that, that adds a little bit of that joy, a little bit of that edge, a little bit of that learning, a little bit of you back into your day and your learning. So these are the five things to consider about your life Work mix against the four domains Diagnosis, which is in the PDF linked below. The three Fears of change the Quality of Life Outcomes mix, which is again in that PDF linked below. Thinking about your legacy and thinking about how your goals and your brainstorming so far has been authentic to you, your values, and your best future self. That's it for this episode of the Meaningful Revolution podcast. I appreciate you guys listening. If you would share this with three friends who might enjoy this particular episode or any of your other favorite episodes and just get the word out really helps me out. If you liked this episode, check out my last episode with Neil Rogers on the hospitality of sales. He has an amazing story of trying to figure out what his purpose is in life, trying to find the thing that lit that fire, hunger for something more in his life. It all started when he was a bartender. It's an amazing episode. I know you'll love it. Check it out over here. And with that, we'll see you on the next episode of the Meaningful Revolution podcast.