Episode 21 Podcast Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Choosing your priorities and giving yourself permission to deprioritize things is purely your choice.

Speaker 2 (00:11):

Hi everyone. Rob Kropp and welcome back to another episode of the Trade Den. How are you Dan? Welcome back.

Speaker 1 (00:17):

I’m very good, Rob. I am very excited because we’re just about to leave Melbourne’s winter, so I’m super excited and happy about today’s episode two, I should say.

Speaker 2 (00:26):

Yeah, I can’t wait. We’re heading up to Gold Coast shortly, aren’t we? We’ve got our annual lifestyle mastermind awards weekend, getting our lifestyle clients to be able to all congregating Gold Coast for our awards weekend. Just a great opportunity. Last year we went to Fiji. This time we’re in Gold Coast. Just a great time to get clients together, celebrate the financial year that’s been, bring their partners. Just an awesome time to celebrate. Good times, isn’t it?

Speaker 1 (00:51):

It is. I’ve just got to find out where all the summer clothes are because they’re buried deep in my cupboard at the moment.

Speaker 2 (00:56):

You’re bringing the budgie smugglers or what?

Speaker 1 (00:58):

Hell no. We’ll leave that up to the likes of Wilson.

Speaker 2 (01:01):

Wilson. Chris Timmons, for those who are here listening, you boys love your budgie and keep ’em at home boys. Keep it away. Hey. Alright. Should we get stuck into today? Let’s do it.

Speaker 1 (01:13):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:13):

Awesome. Well, today’s a big topic and we’re going to be talking a bit about work-life balance. And this is a huge topic for anyone who runs a business. I’m sure you’d agree that one of the biggest challenges that we face as businessmen today is balancing the building of a successful business and living a fulfilling family life at the same time. Not to mention trying to have some time in there for yourself at some stage as well. One of the challenges is is that we often succeed in one area of our life, but it often comes at the cost and at the sacrifice of other areas of life as well. And sometimes when we get out of alignment, we often have that feeling of conflict, chaos, a lack of alignment within ourselves or what we call across the four primary legacies, which is health, wealth, business and connections. And this is why you and I both agree that something that we’ve learned over the years is that there’s no such thing as work-life balance. And that’s what we’re going to unpack today.

Speaker 1 (02:22):

It is, and I’d go one step further, not only is there, it doesn’t exist, I think the fact that we even try and chase it is what’s the cause of most of our problems? The reason we feel stressed is because it’s full of unrealistic expectations. Like we can have work-life balance that we should be thriving in all of these areas all at once, all of the time. And it’s just not true. Now what happens as a result of that’s where the damage gets done because then we pile on guilt, we start to play comparison game thinking that someone else somewhere is doing it way better than we are and we just lock ourselves into pursuing this fantasy of achieving this work-life balance which never comes. So when we talk about work-life balance, what we’re implying is that there’s a difference between work and life. They’re absolutely separate things and in business it is just rarely true. It doesn’t happen that you get to have separate things. There’s one life, it’s the same. When we think about our energy or just ourselves in general, we can’t divide ourselves up into different pieces. We can’t duplicate ourselves and make multiple copies of ourselves to live these separate phases or areas of life. There is just one of those.

Speaker 2 (03:33):

Yeah, this is where the problem appears because I’m rob, but part of me is Rob the businessman, Rob the family man, Rob the person who loves being out in his garden. It’s just Rob. In the end of the day, the complexity does come, is that we have to accept that there’s always going to be demands of business. And I think when we’re talking to a room full of business people or our listeners who are business people, we have to accept that running a business is demanding and that level of demand does not go away. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got three people, five people, 10 people or 50 people working for you. There’s always going to be an element of demands that are ever present when it comes to running a business. And I think that’s where people feel like they’re out of balance is because there’s always this undertone of demand that is placed on us as business people and we just wish that we had more balance in our world.

(04:30):

So it’s a big thing that we’re going to talk a bit about today, but something that we have to accept that is that to be successful on multiple fronts doesn’t mean we have to split up our 24 hours in a day and give that to equal balance across the different areas of life. So you don’t have to spend equal amount of times in your business equal amount of times at home or at the gym or whatever it is. And that’s where people find themselves caught up in a knot around trying to find that perfect work-life balance. So I think the key is it’s not about seeing your life as separate compartments, it’s about seeing it as one piece of the puzzle that we all just put together to find the perfect picture of how we want to individually live our lives.

Speaker 1 (05:14):

I like that. Yeah, absolutely. The puzzle analogy. Great. And then that’s where we’re going. In today’s episode, we’re going to bust open this work life myth if you like. We’re not going to talk too much about the ins and outs of it, but what we’re going to get you to do is probably break it up into two parts. One is let’s really face the facts as we always do at Pravar. That’s where we start. Where are you at with this concept at the moment? Just slow down and take stock. And then we’re going to give you three tools to start finding that ability to create this idea of integration or getting your puzzle sorted and being able to use these pieces. So that’s where we’re going today. So let’s start off with the first part of this, which is really assessing where it’s got you to today in terms of chasing down this idea of equal parts, everything’s got to be the same.

(06:00):

There’s got to be this balance or there is this sort of point that you can reach balance. So I’m going to start by posing a pretty bold question to people. Are you getting what you want out of your life and not just your work life but your whole life, including your family life? And as you listen to this and as you start to work through these questions, I want you to make a mental list even better. Write it down, pull over if you’re in your car of course. But what have you missed out on in your family life on account of work? What’s it cost you in terms of birthday parties, sports games, the disappointments, helping out of homework, spontaneous nights out, going to the movies, theatre productions, piano, recitals, you name it, whatever it is, overall quality of time to connect. There’s one of those legacies that Rob just spoke about before. List it all. How much are you missing out on it even though you are working as hard as you can, you’re pedalling as fast as you can to achieve this concept of equal or balance. And is the return you’re getting from your work at this moment worth all that you’re missing? We really need to start by assessing what the damage is before we can move on.

Speaker 2 (07:12):

I think with one thing we have to accept when it comes to running a business is if you do want to become successful in one area of your life and pursue success in business, that often takes sacrifice. But the problem is is that most business people sacrifice so much in this pursuit of success that they end up being what we call a one or two dimensional douche bag who often sacrifices the very thing of what they got into business for, which is their family. They say that their family is important. They say that showing up as a loving and present husband and father is important to them, but the very thing that they say is important to them is the very thing that they’re sacrificing in the pursuit of business success. And what often happens is that they do it at the cost of the very thing that matters to the most. So instead of being a four dimensional dude, which has balance and order across health, wealth, business and connections, they’re often a one or two dimensional douche bag who has gone all in on business. They’re still not achieving the levels of success that they want and they’re leaving this trail of destruction behind them, which is their family life and their personal life. And it’s pretty sad to see, especially when they’re not achieving what they want out of business.

Speaker 1 (08:39):

Yeah, it goes from being sacrificed I think, into a subconscious trade. It’s almost like I can sacrifice enough that I will get a return. And what they’re sacrificing really is trading. And what they’re trading is their time with family. They’re trading their family, they’re trading those relationships and memories in the hope that somehow I’ll have sacrificed enough to warrant a return and it just doesn’t work that way.

Speaker 2 (09:03):

Yeah, I think it’s accepting that running a business is hard, running a business takes time. Running a business, running a business does come at a cost. That’s the part of acknowledging the challenge that is being a business person. That’s the thing that we do have to accept. But it’s when it tips over that space where it goes to an unhealthy challenge where you sacrifice too much due to the way that they’re running a business. There’s a big difference between sacrificing and being smart in the way that they ran their business versus sacrificing and running their business in an archaic inefficient way which is causing a trail of destruction purely due to the way that they’re showing up trying to run their business in today’s world.

Speaker 1 (10:05):

Absolutely. And the inefficiencies, what kills you, it’s that idea that somehow the more or the harder, the more sweat that I put in, somehow this old outdated idea is going to pay returns and it’s a one way street. Going the wrong way is really what it is.

Speaker 2 (10:19):

Correct. And when we see that is that’s when we see there can be a business owner who runs a million dollar business who does 80 hour weeks, yet there’s someone turning over three to 5 million doing it in 30 hour weeks. It’s not a matter of time and it’s a matter of all these things which contribute to that size of that business. And so to run a successful business, you have to make sacrifices. But where guys go wrong is that they accept that they’ve got to make sacrifices to show up and run a great business, but they just do dumb things and focus on the wrong things and they don’t build team and they manage their time ineffectively and they don’t have good systems and structure in place. And that’s what compounds the challenge of running an inefficient business. And then that’s when they find themselves out of balance because they’re spending so much time overcompensating for the inefficiencies of the way that they’re running their business. And then that’s when the problems show up like you were talking around before or around assessing the damage. That’s when they find themselves out of balance. But that’s what then triggers them to go on this journey to be able to go, well, how do I get back into some level of balance? Because they’re out of that, they’re getting feedback of that, they’re acknowledging that things just aren’t right at the moment.

Speaker 1 (11:40):

And I think acknowledging the challenges we’re talking about here, it comes down to that idea. If it feels like it’s hard to keep up, it’s because it is. That’s what we’re sort of saying. Acknowledge that this is a challenge, acknowledge that it is not an easy game to play, but there’s a smarter way to play it.

Speaker 2 (11:56):

The punchline out of all this is it’s absolutely important to be able to assess the damage and also accept the challenge, but you have to stop comparing yourself to what others are around you are doing because your life is completely different to them. And so we’ve got to stop playing this comparison game, especially of the comparison game of what you see other people doing on social media and everything down the line.

Speaker 1 (12:24):

It is, that’s the absolute trap before you can take ownership of what we’re going to go into next, the tactics and these three tools, we’re going to give you absolute starting point about how you maximise your world and what’s available to you, not what might be available to someone else. So really important first piece there. So go back if you haven’t, go back and assess that damage, really get in touch with where things are really at and face the facts and then move into accepting the challenge that lays ahead. So let’s go into topic two. Let’s go into the second part of this episode and let’s look at these three tools to start to find that position, that sweet spot within you as part of the puzzle like we talked about. And the first thing is giving yourself permission. So once you accept the challenge, you’ve got to give yourself permission to choose what’s important to you. So balance and order is a personal thing, it’s about what’s internal to you and it’s about choosing what your priorities are and giving yourself permission to drop the other things. For now, it’s that ability to accept that it’s not equal parts. There is a way of doing this. And that comes about by choosing your priorities.

Speaker 2 (13:29):

I think the key there, what you said there is it’s about giving yourself permission. You said there before around choosing your priorities. What do you mean by that? By choosing your priorities.

Speaker 1 (13:40):

Yeah, I think if we could underline it’d beyond the word your they’re your priorities. And I think this is where feeding back into comparison games and things like that, there’s a lot of shame and pressure that comes out. There’s a lot of stress that happens the minute we think about what should we be doing right now, there’s always where we’re in the middle of doing something and thinking about what else we should be doing. We’ve created a situation where we’re wondering how else we could have created a better situation or why aren’t we doing something different right now or why isn’t the result showing up? So I think this idea about choosing what’s important to you and really giving yourself permission to be okay with that, I think that’s what lets people as business owners act as business owners, the freedom to choose, the freedom to go after what it is you’re going after without the expectations of what everyone else is putting on you, your priorities.

Speaker 2 (14:28):

That’s why I like this one around finding the balance within you because everyone’s got a different perception of what balance and order means. It’s individual and balance and order is different to even a different definition, Dan, to what it is a different definition to me. And the problem is someone will always say, gee, you are doing this or you’re not doing enough of that, but that’s just them projecting onto you through their lens of what their priorities are. And there’s been times where it’s like, gee, rob, you work too much or gee rob you do this, or gee rob you don’t do this or don’t do enough of that. And that’s people making comment based on their values and their priorities and what’s important to them. Whereas there’s times where I don’t feel like I’m out of balance because I feel like there’s been times where I’ve absolutely been out of balance.

(15:21):

And I think that’s one thing we have to accept. There’s going to be times where you are way out of balance, but there’s been times where I feel like, yeah, I’m in balance. Things are great, yeah, I’m working a lot, but that’s okay because that’s what’s important to me. And so I think we have to be very careful around listening to what people say to us. There’s a difference between getting feedback and other people projecting onto us around their priorities, but it’s our ability to self-regulate that and know, well what is an actual priority to us to make sure that we are living true to who we are and that we’ve got our own level of balance and order not someone else’s version of what that looks like.

Speaker 1 (15:59):

And this is where shame kicks in and this is where pressure creates stress. This is where the friction comes into it because our expectation of where we should be and where we are and what other people think all collides into one spot and that’s where we start to crash. So choosing your priorities and giving yourself permission to deprioritize things is purely your choice. It’s doing that consciously and under your own steam and your own value system if you like, is what’s important at that point. So really giving yourself permission to do that’s important. If you think about absolute elite athletes, they go into the zone, what do you think they’re doing then they’re not worried about balance. It’s all in that moment and being able to do that’s really important. They deprioritize everything else to the thing that is most important in the moment and being okay with that is a big part of how these people succeed.

(16:48):

Save in business, same sort of thing goes. So really important concept, giving yourself permission. Second one that we’re going to talk about today is sharply defining your work time, setting your boundaries, getting to a point where you know what your on time is and what your off time is. It’s a critical one I think, Rob, that people underestimate, especially in this day and age of we’re always on our phones, have got emails on them, we could have something ping off at any one time. No, you don’t leave the office and the phone rings in the office, you can’t hear it. It’s in your pocket.

Speaker 2 (17:19):

This is probably one of the biggest areas that I know I struggle with is having an off switch, if I’m honest. When it comes to finding that balance between family and business is I think because I just love business so much and I love my family so much, I find that they just blend. And that’s where I don’t have a boundary from time to time between the two. And that’s where I feel like I’m out of balance at times. That’s my own feedback regulating system going, Rob, you’ve got to make change here, make change there. An example might be is when I’m at the kids with a park or teaching Grace how to ride a bike, I’ve finally got the training wheels off and I’ll be doing that, but then I’ll check my phone, look at something on socials and look at an email and there’s a blend and a mesh between the two. And I’ll be like, Rob, what are you doing? You idiot. You’re here spending time with your kids, but here you are working as well. And I think that that’s where I’ve personally struggled the most and an area that I work so hard on is to know is to teach myself an off switch. And that’s been my biggest challenge as a business owner if I’m honest.

Speaker 1 (18:38):

Yeah, I think, and it’s not trying, we’re not talking, let’s be really clear. We’re not talking about time blocking and setting it up. It’d be great if you could and everyone’s got this right? I don’t work weekends or when I get home I don’t do this, but people bleed into that time all the time. But I think it’s capturing yourself, like you said, having an off switch or developing or practising an off switch where in the moments that you do things when you go to the park, make that declaration to yourself that this is an off time. So in your world it’s like Rob, this is off time phones. If it rings then I’m not going to answer it or I’ll leave it at home, make a pro-choice about it and really sort of come up with that it’s work time or not. And that can be done in the moment. It doesn’t have to be in a diary, it doesn’t have to be pre-planned good, but really when the crunch hits, it’s when that phone rings in the moment, are you going to pick it up or not? And if you’ve made that commitment to yourself or to the girls or whoever, then it’s going to be a lot easier to follow through on that if you’ve already pre-chosen and pre-selected what you’re going to do when it does happen, not if it happens.

Speaker 2 (19:39):

And I would agree, when we are coaching clients around this, we always talk a lot about productivity burners and one of your biggest productivity burners or one of the biggest areas that does impact your family life is your phone and God bless it, our phones are one of the best things is because we can pretty much run a lot of our businesses with job management systems and task management systems and accounting packages and everything. Every business owner can run their businesses via their device now. But what it also means is, but it also means they’re a hundred percent connected with phone, text, email, socials. It’s one of the biggest areas that blends life. One thing as we spoke around before is we can’t just, businesses are part of who we are. We can’t just go, okay, I’m going to chop off my leg today because that’s the business component of Rob and I just don’t want to have that leg for the next week because I’m just going to forget that I’m a business person.

(20:34):

It just doesn’t exist that way. It’s the acceptance that Rob is Rob, A big part of me is business and a big part of me is family, but it’s knowing what areas of life that I want to spend and be fully present in. I think the key word here is being present, which means being super present in that and it means switching off and creating a boundary around that. And so the biggest part around this is when it comes to work is knowing your boundaries around this. What’s some of the things that we’ve seen with clients that have worked super well with them around boundaries, phone, email, switching off and all those types of things. What have we seen that work the best?

Speaker 1 (21:17):

I think in terms of the standard ones is really putting it away, making it hard. It’s the habit deletion type stuff. It’s making it hard to do. It’s making it difficult. It’s putting your phone in a space where you’ve got to get off your ass and walk halfway down the house, grab the car keys, get to the car, get it out of the glove box, that sort of thing. That can work. And I think that’s sort of something that’s becoming more well known. I think the other thing though is really getting clear on the measures of success in your job when you are at work. Because otherwise there’s this idea of have I done enough? Have I done? What’s important? If we never define that upfront, we don’t set goals, we don’t know what our most important deadlines are. Go back to an episode we did on what’s important now if we don’t go back and really define what’s important deadlines, what are our goals we’re trying to hit for a quarter, what are the touch points that absolutely matter today? Those critical conversations we’ve got to have. It’s not an ever ending laundry list. It’s the top 1, 2, 3 things. So when we’ve done those things, there’s automatically that sense of, hey, we’ve been on, we’ve achieved, we’ve done some cool stuff. It just reduces that burden to sort of saying, well, I’ve got to keep going, I’ve got to be doing this nonstop. There’s always something else. There will be other stuff. But is it as important as what you are paying the price on in terms of presence, like you said,.

Speaker 2 (22:32):

Other areas, other ways guys have done it is they’ve got to a trigger, which is an off thing when they get to a certain street leading into their house or they pull up in the driveway, they just have a couple of minutes to be able to create separation between work and before they go into the chaos of witching hour. Often with young kids, there’s that separation. They’ve got a strong boundary of that. And then it’s the ability to be able to go, okay, I’m backing out of being Rob the business owner now I’m showing up as being Rob the dad and Rob the husband. I know what works for me is shutting the door.

(23:11):

And I try really hard to keep my phone in my office, especially around dinner time and bed and bath and everything and the times that I don’t live and breathe at, what often I find is where I don’t live true to those boundaries. I’m doing bath time and I’ve got my phone on me looking at shit on my phone. And that’s feedback for me going, Rob, you’re out of balance. You’re not being present. You’ve got to sharpen up on that. And so I think that’s the awareness conversation we were having earlier. We’ve got to accept the challenge that running a business is going to be demanding, but I think we can overcome the demands of business by having these strong boundaries and putting triggers in place which prevent all these areas of life just bleeding into each other and it just being a melting pot of life where everything just all collides, creating chaos in our world,

Speaker 1 (24:03):

Taking back control a hundred percent and giving yourself the chance to make it that little bit easier to deal with when it happens, not if or how do you stop it, you can’t. So I think that acceptance hugely important. The third concept we want to talk about and the last of tool we want to give you listening today is a concept that we call personal ballast. And this is a really important one, it’s a bit deep, so bear with me as I go into this, but the idea of personal ballast is replacing balance. So if you think about a ship, I’m talking about ballast for a ship, how in particular how a submarine might regulate the depth it dives to. It uses a system called ballast and a ballast tank. So when we talk about this in terms of well, what the hell has that got to do with work-life balance?

(24:49):

I want you to think of it as if you’re in a submarine, you’re in a metal tube, you can’t go anywhere, you’re under the water, right? You’ve still got to move forward to get to a destination. You go at different depths and different things dependent on what you need to be doing. You don’t jump off one submarine to go on another ship to get to another destination to jump back on the submarine to get off and go and jump on another ship. And that’s how most people approach their life. They think if you don’t approach work-life balance, there’s this part of me that’s separate. I can jump off my work submarine, jump into my personal submarine, I’ll drive that for a while and then I’ll jump into the other ship, which is my hobbies and I’ll do that for a while. It doesn’t happen. Basically your life is your submarine.

(25:30):

So when we talk about ballast and how submarines adjust and keep moving in water and what they’re doing is taking compartments and there’s different tanks that they have in order to sort of say, well, this is how we move around. We move and have direction and we do things by shifting, we shift and we identify what goes into those tanks and how much do we need of each one to deliver the results that we’re after. And I think as we describe personal ballast as a concept, this is what we need to start thinking in terms of how we’re doing this in our life. So how do we promote the areas we need to deliver the results we need at any one time? It means that one tank might be empty, for instance while we’re full on the other one, but that’s getting us closer to where we need to be, but we know we need to adjust that as we go. But it’s always been taken into account how much ballast we’re using in different areas of our life. We’ve got permission to have full tanks in one area, empty in the other bid in each one depending on where we need to go. So as a concept as personal ballast, I think it’s way more beneficial to think in those terms as opposed to balance, which suggests that multiple shifts and ships and running around from one ship to the other.

Speaker 2 (26:44):

I love that concept because what it helps us see is that we don’t want to chase work life balance. We’ve got to find the balance that’s within us. And that’s reinforcing that point that we said before is that balance is an internal thing that’s individual and unique to every single person. And the reason why it’s unique and individual to the person is because each and every one of us have our own unique hierarchy of values which are highest of importance and lowest to of importance to us. And if you think about someone like you used the example before around an Olympian, you don’t have to ask them to train five hours a day. You’ve probably got to ask them to stop training. But what that means is there’s areas of their life that they’re sacrificing and not putting attention into, whether it’s their social life, they don’t often go out for nice meals and have wine and drinks and all those types of things because that comes at a cost that they’re training.

(27:47):

They don’t often have high paying careers because they’re training so much. So they’re in pursuit of something at the expense of other areas of their life. I know for myself personally, you don’t have to ask me to work, you’ve got to ask me to stop working. And the way that this balanced concept has worked really well for myself and for other clients is that you identify what are the areas of your life that you do want to give attention to and empower those areas to find that balance so that you don’t pursue what’s really important to you, your priority and blow everything up in the meantime. And I think that’s when you might see a super successful business person who might be on the Forbes list, but they’re divorced three times and they’re 60 kilos overweight and that’s because they haven’t regulated their own internal balance system.

Speaker 1 (28:49):

Absolutely. And we’ve got to work out and identify what makes up those tanks for us. That’s that bit about prioritising for you. It’s your system, they’re your tanks, so be it nutrition, exercise, lifestyle, how you’re showing up as a father or a partner, what’s going to keep you moving forward in that area at that time. We’ve got to find that right to do it in a way that works and keeps everything together. Otherwise we risk tearing ourselves apart in the pursuit of one type of success and be it business, financial, home, whatever it is, and we lose everything else and the whole ship ends up sinking no matter how successful that one area is. So I think that’s really important as a concept. And you think about it in terms of the athlete, they know that their ballast tank in terms of training is absolutely full. They know when to empty that and they know after a competition if they’re worth their weight, they can empty that out and put that into other areas. So having this internal balance system for them is just as important. They don’t overdo it. They might for a moment or for a period as long as it serves, but they’re very mindful in terms of assessing what levels they’re at in each of those areas.

Speaker 2 (29:59):

We’re going to record probably two episodes around this. There’s an episode that we’ll record around the true cost of running a successful trades business. I think we need to really open the curtains on that or what it really takes to run a successful trades business. The other one that I want to record coming up, so make sure you watch out for this in a future episode is our Bevin framework named after Michael Bevan, the very successful one day batsman. And we’ve got a whole framework around how do we create balance and order and integration in our world across the four primary legacies. The reason why many, many years ago we created this Bevan framework was purely around this ballast concept. And that’s because I was once that one dimensional douche building a business at the expense of a lot of other things. And I got way out of balance and I got feedback around that because my relationships were suffering financially.

(31:02):

I wasn’t doing great and my health and wellbeing was way out of whack. My adrenals were just absolutely busted and I was stressed to the eyeballs. And that’s where the Bevan framework come from is to be able to empower other areas to be able to regulate internal around that. Now there’s been times in my journey over the years where I’ve been in super balance and things have been in balance in order. There’s been times where I’ve been way out balance because shit’s just gone sideways whether personally or in business, but I think it’s having the self-awareness to understand what can we build in around us as little lead dominoes that we can push over on a daily, weekly, monthly basis to create that balance and order in our world. For me, I know it’s taking Doug for a walk every morning and getting him and I out of the house.

(31:54):

I know it’s me eating healthy. If I eat well, I feel great. It’s me keeping alcohol to a weekend, not during the week. It’s making sure I get seven to eight hours sleep a night. It makes me feel rested and less stressed. It’s making sure I spend quality time with the family during the week and especially on weekends. It’s me getting out of the garden. That’s my way of de-stressing and getting a little bit grounded. They’re the things that I know work for me. I think Dan, you’ll have yours and I think the listener for you listening here today, you got to find what works for you to be able to get your habits in order and get your internal ballast system right and that’s what’s going to help you move from being a one or two dimensional douche where you’re building your business at the expense of family life to finding the balance and order within you not pursuing the fantasy of perfect work-life balance. This is the key around getting this right.

Speaker 1 (32:54):

Yeah, totally. I think you summed that up really well Rob. It is, and I think everyone’s got their own way of doing that. Once you do this, it becomes actually simpler because you’ve got these ballast tanks as a starting point. It’s what are the levers I pull to release or add to each of those. That’s all it needs to be. So you don’t have to overthink it at that point. If you get the concept right, you follow through on what we talked about today. So I think we can probably wrap it up there and start off with our key takeaways for the episode. And I think for me it is that one to start with, it’s really choosing what your priorities are and giving yourself permission to drop the other things as and when you need to. Creating that balance system, as we talked about, permission is absolutely key.

Speaker 2 (33:34):

For me. It’s trying to do all things and thrive in all areas of life all at the same time. Creates pressure, stress, and that constant feeling. You’re just not doing enough and that’s what creates the additional pressure that you just don’t need to put on yourself.

Speaker 1 (33:51):

And when you get to this point, you sort of threw these two, I think those areas, those balance tanks, those four legacies we’ve talked about today, they can start to feed each other. The more you learn to extend those getting out in different areas, then you can focus on growth and expansion and legacy and all that requires focus. So unless you’ve given yourself the permission, unless you’ve let go of trying to do all things all the time at once, all that sort of stuff we spoke about earlier, then it’s really hard. But when you start to approach it this way, all of a sudden growth and expansion and legacy become something that’s really achievable.

Speaker 2 (34:28):

Absolutely. Alright, let’s talk some action steps from today’s episode. What have you got for those listening today?

Speaker 1 (34:35):

It’s a bit of a recap, actually face the facts. Let’s start with that. Really assess the damage that’s going on. Face those facts. Look yourself in the mirror and accept the challenge that you’ve got ahead of you. It’s not easy, it’s no magic bullets to this. There is work to be done and it is hard work, it’s constant assessing, it’s constant adjusting. There’s something to do all the time. So really getting clear on where you are at right now is probably step one. Alright, action. Step number two is create those boundaries on the business front. Like we said, make some pre choices about things in the moment before you start an activity. What is on? What is off? That’s sort of in that moment, go back and start to look at, well, what can I do to create separation between the two? To have that moment of clarity where you have made a switch in your world to go right, I’m into this mode, this area, this phase of the day.

(35:26):

That makes a huge difference. And also being clear on what are the goals for the day? How do you know when you’ve done enough? That’s a really big question. It’s not meant to be who can do the most. It’s about who can be the most effective. And to do that, you’ve got to understand what your priorities are for the day. So getting that set up is really important. And last start to explore, we’ll go into this in more detail as Rob said, but start to explore the four primary legacies that you’ve got, health, wealth, business and connections. And really start to understand them as ballast tanks and what are the things that help you remain ballast? Well, how can you add ballast by maybe getting more sleep, looking after your nutrition as we said, just to give you a couple of easy ones. What adds to that tank, what takes out of that tank? And the more you can start to come up with that, the more you’re going to have an integrated system that is going to be something you can manage and adapt and continue to grow and expand as you go along.

Speaker 2 (36:20):

Yeah, I love that. And it’s going to help you not chase the fantasy that is work-life balance, but it’s going to help you chase and live the attainable, which is finding the balance within you and just living a fulfilling life, which include being the businessman, being the family man, being the husband, being the partner, being the guy who has hobbies. It’s finding that balance and living that your definition of success, not other people’s expectation of what success looks like for them or on social media. So what a great episode and we might leave it there. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, rip in and get those action steps done and hopefully today has helped you, inspired you to be able to find the balance and order within yourself.