Work Life Balance Is Something You Earn

The following is an edited excerpt from the book Blissful Ignorance: The Art of Being an Entrepreneur by Cassidy Phillips.

***

Don’t undervalue who and what you are.

TriggerPoint grew at an amazing pace. We had an office, a dedicated workforce, an established brand, a groundbreaking marketing strategy, and a steadily growing profit margin. However, I’d begun to notice that my ass was spending a lot more time in a chair than it did on a bike. Running a successful fitness company didn’t mean fitness would just show up in my life.

At the same time, I saw that my employees were working just as hard as I was. They were putting in the same sacrifices to serve TriggerPoint’s vision, and I wanted to make that work-life balance easy for them too.

Fortunately, I had the resources to make balance easier. First, I put a CrossFit gym into TriggerPoint’s office. Next, I started bringing in healthy food for everybody.

Looking back, I wish I’d done more. I wish I’d been as aware of other imbalances in my life as I was of the physical imbalance. I wish that I had the discipline to create those balances ahead of time, instead of letting them go for so long.

The Myth of Balance

Balance is a big buzzword these days. Everybody wants this thing called work-life balance. I’ve seen it mentioned as a reason that people quit their corporate jobs and strike out on the entrepreneurial trail. They’ll claim that the nine-to-five grind was sucking their soul, that they needed to create something that gave them freedom and flexibility to enjoy their life and find fulfillment.

That kind of rhetoric makes me laugh. The entrepreneurs I know are some of the least balanced people you’ll ever meet.

Work-life balance is something you earn. You don’t just fall into it as a result of starting your own business. Sure, when you own your own business, you can do whatever the hell you want, but what you don’t realize before you start your business is that entrepreneurship changes what you want to do.

Where you used to plan vacations, count on time off for holidays, and forgot about your job as soon as you walked out the door at six o’clock, now you’re connected to your phone or laptop no matter where you are. The ability to schedule anything anytime ends up making your schedule more packed, not less.

Unless, of course, you practice the discipline to remain balanced.

Technology makes it easy to divide your entire day into a set of timers. This is what I did. At two o’clock, I went for a run. At three o’clock, I returned emails. At four o’clock, I went home to make out with my wife. At five o’clock, I spent time meditating and giving thanks for everything I had.

You know who else does that? Almost no one, especially not entrepreneurs.

They wake up super motivated to make their business succeed but completely clueless about what specific tasks will achieve that success. They go about their day with no personal intention or purpose, responding to other people’s expectations. The craziest part is that they expect to come out the other end of the day feeling good about what they’ve done.

Ask any professional athlete how well time management works, and they’ll tell you there’s no way they could succeed with no time discipline. Contrary to what you might imagine, these people who look like beasts do not naturally drift onto the track or the weight room as soon as they wake up.

When they’re in training for a competition, everything about their life is preplanned and programmed beyond the possibility of error. As a result of this discipline, they don’t have to wonder how many calories to eat at each meal or whether they should spend the day on their sport, cross-training, or allowing their muscles to rest and recover. Discipline is what enables them to develop the physical and mental balance required for greatness in any sport.

If you’re intent on achieving greatness in your career or business, you must practice discipline.

Hire For Your Weaknesses

Don’t struggle with doing what you can’t do. Thrive at doing what you can do.

It’s important to be real with yourself about your bandwidth. When you’re running a company, you can’t expect yourself to manage everything in your life at the highest level of performance.

We as entrepreneurs don’t like to be vulnerable. We like acting as though our dysfunctions make us badass and help define our brand. But over time, these habits turn into liabilities for a person or a company that wants to grow and live to a ripe old age.

Don’t take for granted your desire to be healthy, to grow, and to mature. When something’s not right in your body or brain, don’t waste valuable time trying to self-diagnose. Get someone to help you fix it, whether it’s a marriage counselor, a massage therapist, or a business mentor. Bring in specialists who can strengthen the balance of your life for you so that you can give every area of your life the full focus it deserves.

When you’re at work, give everything to your business. When you’re at home, give everything to your family. When you’re working out, give everything to the machine or the exercise. When you’re engaging in your spiritual practice, give everything to your faith.

The great thing about discipline is that it lets you change who and what you are. Memories are short — other people’s and your own. Once you’ve implemented your new discipline ten to twelve times, it becomes a rote behavior. You barely have to think about it anymore. It becomes just who you are. It doesn’t take much longer for other people to start recognizing you as that disciplined person as well.

Use Your Time Wisely

There are only twenty-four hours in a day. Hire around all your weaknesses. Find people who are more educated than you in your space and collaborate with them in the same “with, not for” mentality.

In the end, you’ll have created a team around you who all believe in the same mission. By believing in the same thing as you, they can help you get to the next level.

I’ve been surprised to find that the more collaborative I am, the more I enjoy my work. The times that I tried to retain control of everything, held back from sharing my knowledge in fear that people would screw it up, guess what? They screwed it up anyway. They could never meet my expectations because I didn’t communicate my expectations. Instead of a group of people striving for the same mission, all I created was a melting pot for conflict and disappointment.

At the inception of your company, you’re rich on time and poor in finances. There’s nothing you can do about it except keep working in hopes that the proportion balances out over time — that you make more money so you don’t have to keep pulling those twenty-hour days.

As your company grows, that proportion does shift. However, if you’re like a lot of entrepreneurs, you remain stuck in the “not enough money” mindset.

You have to take a reality check and realize that you need to buy back some time. Part of that investment is hiring the right people. The key here is hiring for consistency in your life, especially where things don’t come easily to you.

If you find it hard to remember things such as regular date nights or planning a family vacation, hire a part-time nanny who will come in once a week, and engage a travel agent who will do the vacation planning for you.

If you want to really succeed in bringing balance back to your life, consider hiring for even the things you do know about. For example, even though I had expertise in fitness and athletics, as my company grew I still hired a personal trainer to help me get back in shape. That way, I didn’t have to spend the time planning out my workout. I just walked into the gym and did what my trainer told me to do. It felt great to turn my brain off and allow somebody else’s expertise to take over that area of my life.

Paralysis By Analysis

You can overanalyze anything. When your mind encounters uncertainty or fear, it turns the situation into a complex knot of variables that keep you endlessly thinking through the situation and never doing anything to change it. I call this paralysis by analysis, and most of the time, all it does is delay your decision until the eleventh hour, when you’re out of time.

At that point, you undermine the confidence of everyone who works with you and usually end up making a move borne of desperation, one that compromises the very goal you intended to achieve.

There’s a simple solution to paralysis by analysis. Instead of letting your mind get tangled up in complexity, you can simply trust your gut. It’s unbelievable how your gut is typically right.

Think about when you’ve been in a bad situation. Usually, it starts out good. You wouldn’t put yourself in a bad situation on purpose. But then your gut starts sending you warning signals. Something’s not right here. Get out while you still can.

Immediately, though, your brain tries to override it. It’s that paralysis by analysis. Your brain tries talking you into staying where you are in order to not take the risk of changing what you’re doing.

Meanwhile, your gut is telling you the reality of the situation. If you let it lead you, you might never know what it saved you from, but if you ignore it, you’ll end up spending a lot of time afterward wishing that you’d gone the simple route and trusted your gut.

Give Change The Time It Deserves

We’ve already talked about how to make balance simple. Instead of trying to handle all the details of your life individually, you program them into your schedule, create habits out of them, and find people who can support you in making sure those disciplines get executed.

The same goes for each individual area of your business. Branding, marketing, sales, product, and of course, operations and administration — all of these fall into place when you strip away the complexity and focus on simplicity.

Every area of your business is made up of organizational procedures. These procedures are to your business what joints and fascia are to your body — they allow it to move forward in an intentional direction, with varying degrees of speed and efficiency.

You need healthy, high-functioning organizational procedures to move forward over the long haul. At the same time, you need purpose to determine which direction constitutes “forward.”

Most entrepreneurs are nonlinear thinkers. It comes with the territory of being a visionary. You imagine the company you want to build and expect everyone you hire to intuitively understand what you have in mind. If you do acknowledge the need for processes and even go through the trials and tribulations of creating that process — an exhausting labor for many entrepreneurs — you feel entitled to instant implementation.

You forget that even the best processes don’t deliver results overnight.

Ultimately, what it really requires is respect. You have to respect the process itself and allow it to build results over time, which is the only way a process works. You must also respect the people implementing the process and the situation into which you’ve introduced it.

To keep reading, pick up your copy of Blissful Ignorance: The Art of Being an Entrepreneur by Cassidy Phillips.