Mar 26, 2020
Cynthia Marquez:
"Sometimes to begin a new story, you have to let the old one go." Author unknown. I am Cynthia Marquez and I am a Tri-City influencer.
Paul Casey:
But really this is the core philosophy of what I teach in time management, and that is manage your time around your values and vision. This is your foundation for everything else in time management.
Speaker 3:
Raising the water level of leadership in the Tri-Cities of Eastern Washington, it's The Tri-Cities Influencer Podcast. Welcome to the TCI Podcast, where local leadership and self leadership expert Paul Casey interviews local CEOs, entrepreneurs and nonprofit executives, to hear how they lead themselves and their teams so we can all benefit from their wisdom and experience. Here's your host, Paul Casey of Growing Forward Services, coaching and equipping individuals and teams to spark breakthrough success.
Paul Casey:
Hey, thanks for joining me for today's episode. It's going to be a bonus episode. I'm going to do a little teaching today on work-life balance and hopefully it'll be beneficial to you if you struggle with having a hard time drawing that healthy line between your work and personal life. So we'll dive in after checking in with our Tri-City Influencer sponsors.
Speaker 4:
The C12 Group is a national organization focused on spiritual and professional development of Christian CEOs and business owners. Members participate in professionally facilitated monthly meetings during which 12 experienced Christian CEOs exchange ideas to solve business issues biblically. Additionally, members receive a 90-minute personal coaching session each month. Information is available from Tom Walther at 715-459-9611 or online at c12easternwa.com.
Paul Casey:
Thank you for your support of leadership development in the Tri-Cities. Nathan Margalit is a rabbi and Jewish scholar. In a recent blog he said, "Humans are unique. We can choose to ignore rhythm. We can and do keep our factories running day and night. We try to fool hens into laying more eggs by keeping the lights on 24 hours at a time. With every new pad, pod and phone, we push ourselves into 24/7 connectedness. We have created a culture that is built on the metaphor of a machine impervious to any rhythm other than the drone of production. In the name of progress, convenience and even freedom, but most of all profits, we have lost the music of life."
Paul Casey:
It's sort of a sad reflection that oftentimes we just keep pushing, pushing, pushing and we don't take the time to rest. We don't take the time for those other priorities in our life that we really need. So, instead of achieving balance in your life, which I sort of believe doesn't really exist. I mean, work-life balance is sort of this thing that if you really went after it, you probably would achieve it for five minutes and then you'd be out of balance again. I like the phrase work-life rhythm a lot better, or now one that's more in vogue is work-life integration.
Paul Casey:
So you can think to yourself, when do you feel like you are ever in a good rhythm? Can you just reflect on that for a moment? When do you feel like you're in a good rhythm? What's going on in your life? Maybe what's not going on in your life during that time? That would be a good place to connect with as we go into this podcast episode.
Paul Casey:
I went to a seminar years ago by a guy named Wayne Cordeiro and he was discussing a terrible time in his life where he was completely burned out. If you've ever been burned out before, you know it's a rotten time where you just barely can get out of bed, you have trouble with even remembering what your favorite color is. I mean, it's just sort of a dead time. He actually checked himself into a monastery and had to put away all of his technology, he couldn't check his cell phone or his laptop and it almost drove him insane. He said he only snuck out one night from the monastery, but it was a real healing time for him after this burnout time. And he said work-life balance is not a thing. That's where I've sort of gotten this from.
Paul Casey:
And so I have actually developed a tool for time management, my framework for time management as a result of this seminar by Wayne Cordeiro, because he drew a picture of a teeter totter, if you remember that playground implement, which now is probably considered illegal. It seems like all the things we grew up with on the playground are now considered unsafe, but the teeter totter, the classic thing where you put one person and one on the other side and you go up and down.
Paul Casey:
If you put work on one side and you put balance on the other side of that teeter totter and you're really working for that balance, you're probably not going to get to it or just for a little bit, you might get to it. But he said instead of thinking work and life and trying to balance those two instead, think of just the fulcrum part. Fulcrum is like that triangle that separates the two sides of the teeter totter. If you decide to shift the fulcrum left or right towards work or towards life, instead of thinking about balancing it, it's going to be a lot more fluid in your life. So sometimes based on the urgency or importance of what's going on in the arena, on your life, you have to move that fulcrum fluidly to direct your energy appropriately. Sometimes when you have to spend more time in your life area because you've had a parent who might have to go into assisted living or maybe your child has the flu and because of that you've got to spend more time at home dealing with the personal issues.
Paul Casey:
Other times you have to spend more time in the work area of your life. You've got a deadline for a key client or that your ramped up season of the year and you've got to work some overtime. Now, you just push that fulcrum left or right and that's going to help you more with that work-life rhythm, that work-life integration instead of balance. Now, if you spend too much time of course on that one area of your life for too long, then of course you know what's going to happen. It's going to dry up the other area of your life. That's going to get empty and decay would set in. If your spouse is forgotten for too long and a rift becomes evident, you're not putting enough time there, or maybe you're not putting enough time in at work, you're not following up with your customers and they start to slip away as a consequence.
Paul Casey:
Basically, you can't stay in overdrive mode for too long or you will burn out. So what is one of the main practical solutions to achieve work-life balance or work-life rhythm? I think one where I'd like to talk about today is the word boundaries. Boundaries allow you to move the fulcrum where you determine what needs to be moved right now, to have a hard stop at the end of a quality and a productive workday so that you can be fully present at home. So that you can give 100% at work knowing that your tank and your family's tank, your energy tank has been filled up at home. To be able to embrace this time block or this season of life that you're in without longing for the other time block or the other season of life. I want to give you some tips today on how to set up boundaries so you can move the fulcrum intentionally.
Paul Casey:
The first one is to figure out what's most important to you. Figure out what's most important to you. So you've got to reconnect with who you are and who you're not of course. What you have to offer and what you really want. That's the key coaching question, is, what do you want? So that you're crystal clear and you can live that out day after day. I recommend you do a personal retreat to get to solitude and reflection in order to really wrestle with this. You're like, "Well, I know who I am." Yeah, but really do you? Have you lost touch with that over time? Have you changed over time and it's like, "Now I've got to get back to grounded-ness. Who am I really? What do I really stand for?" What you could do is this time of solitude, whether it's a couple hours or a half day, or maybe go off to the mountains or the beach so you've got a whole day or two to think about this, is you can try to come up with a personal mission statement.
Paul Casey:
I have a personal mission statement and it's to add value to people through equipping, encouraging words, servant leader actions and a contagious passion to honor God with my life. So I've said that enough times that it's memorized and I use it as a filter for my life and how I came up with that mission statement. It's sort of a combination of some exercises that I went through. Can't remember if they were with a coach or just, I did these on my own, sort of self-life coaching here. It's a combination of the values and by the way, I can send a sheet of values to you if you'd like to go through some of these exercises, just email me at growingforward@paulcasey.org and I'd be happy to send you that value sheet.
Paul Casey:
What you do is you go through this whole activity where you narrow it down to the things that are totally you and then you get down to the top 10 and then you get down to the top five that you'd practically die for those. I mean, they are so important to you and everybody around you would know it from watching your life that those five things, it could be family, it could be your faith, it could be growth, it could be happiness or trust. Some people have written in other words on the chart like accountability, love and affection. These are your DNA and you must live in congruence with those values in order to be successful in life. So that's a worthwhile exercise even if you're not doing a personal mission statement. A second exercise you could do is some type of strengths assessment.
Paul Casey:
I recommend StrengthsFinder, which I think is now called CliftonStrengths and you can either buy the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 and there's a link in the book, a code that you put in online to take the online assessment or you can just go to the CliftonStrengths website and you can take the 20 minute strengths assessment. I think it costs about 20 bucks and it's worth doing that because it's going to spit out your top five strengths and you're just going to go, "Whoa, that's like someone's reading my mail." I mean they're usually totally you because there's 34 of them and it's not just like four. There's 34 and when they narrow it down to your top five, it usually hits right on. You don't have to spend the money on that. You could just simply think about as you go through your day.
Paul Casey:
Marcus Buckingham, who's sort of the father of the strengths' movement, he uses the acronym sign SIGN. S is success, what do you feel effective at most of the time? And other people around you validate that they're saying, "You're so good at that." You've probably been told that for many, many years and that would meet the first criteria of a strength. The I stands for instinct. There's just something inside of you that naturally leans toward it and you look forward to it. So, I might be good at math, so I might say I'm pretty good at math, but I don't like math. So that's not something I actually look forward to. So in this criterion it would be ruled out. So, success, then instinct is the I, G is growth. Growth means time speeds by while you're doing it. Like you're doing it for a while and you start getting engrossed in and you get in that state called flow and you look up two hours later and like, Oh my goodness, the day just slipped away from me cause I like it so much.
Paul Casey:
And then the N in sign is needs. That means you're tired when you're done with it but you're not drained. For instance, when I do speaking or coaching, I'm tired at the end of the day because I've given it all that I have, but I'm not drained because I love doing this. I feel like I'm put on this planet to fulfill that role. And hopefully you do too with your job. So really be mindful of what you love doing and since Buckingham, as a Brit, he says what you loathe doing. So, the things that make you feel strong throughout the day, the things that make you feel weak or drained or bored, you can just track these things. Just have a piece of paper by your desk and then you'll have a list after a couple of weeks of writing these specific things down and I encourage you to tell that, debrief that with somebody else.
Paul Casey:
The third thing that would go into your personal mission statement would be your vision for your life and it can be the ultimate vision for your life or it could be just like the one year vision out, like how do you want to be different than one year from now? It could be your big dream that you've always had and it just, you try to shake it off but it still sticks to you and it's like you find yourself talking about it when you're out for coffee with friends or when somebody says, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" You just keep uttering the same dream. It's something you're really passionate about and a passion actually as part of the root word of passion is you would suffer for it. So, maybe there's a degree that you would suffer for that cause if you were to pursue it.
Paul Casey:
So you've got, in order to put a mission statement together, you've got values, your strengths and your vision for your life. Another thing to think about when you're in solitude, maybe on a personal retreat, is the amount of margin you have to have to function optimally. We don't want you to burn out, right? That's what this whole work-life rhythm is about. And so we have to have enough margin or cushion of time in our life to keep our energy level up. So, margin is a concept that was developed by a guy named Richard Swenson. He was a doctor and he defines margin as your load minus your limits. So all the things that are on your plate versus the amount of energy and time that you have. And some of us have actually more load than limits. And so we can actually be a negative margin and that's when we really get irritated and we get close to burnout. We can have like zero sum margin where they're equal. But hopefully we have enough margin where there's some cushion time to absorb the unexpected in our life.
Paul Casey:
Part of boundaries is acknowledging that you have limited time, that you have limited energy and you have to determine how accessible you want to and how you actually can be. So we have to say yes, we have to say no on a daily basis to all the things that are clamoring for our time. Choose carefully who not if you will disappoint on an average day. I'll say that again. Choose carefully who, not if, you will disappoint on a given day because you're always going to disappoint someone when you're saying no, but oftentimes that no is worth it because of the other priorities you're going to be able to give time to.
Paul Casey:
One more thing you could do on that personal retreat is to really get clear with your priorities. Stephen Covey calls those your big rocks, those big things that you put in your schedule first. Not just what you are conditioned to do, not just what's urgent and yelling at you to do, but those things that are so core to you, so important to you and they're often not urgent, but you know that if you don't give them attention, it's going to bite you later. And you know if you do do those things, you're going to move the needle on those relationships or on those projects. So you're sort of setting what normal is for you because when you're on the verge of burnout, you've lost touch with what that is. Hey, before we head into more teaching on work-life balance, let's shout out to our sponsors.
Speaker 4:
If you could trade one day each month for targeted application of biblical business practices, purposeful accountability and godly pure counsel, would you consider it a wise investment? The C12 group is a national organization focused on spiritual and professional development of Christian CEOs and business owners. Members participate in professionally facilitated monthly meetings where 12 experienced Christian CEOs exchange ideas to solve business issues biblically. Information is available from Tom Walther at 715-459-9611 or online at c12easternwa.com.
Paul Casey:
A second tip for you in work-life balance is to watch your gauges. Watch your gauges, so, your dashboard of your car has gauges or an airplane has gauges. Gauges are really important to see if we are in trouble, if anything is running a little bit hot or needs attention. Henry Cloud and John Townsend said in their boundaries book, "God wants us to take care of ourselves so that we can help others without moving into crisis ourselves." One speaker says, "Take care of your body like you're on a space shuttle headed on a long journey."
Paul Casey:
So, a gauge is something that runs a little bit hot, that's not you. Like you think when you do this thing you say, "Boy, that's not even me. Why did I do that?" It's things that get triggered in your life. Like for me, a trigger for me if I'm on the edge of burnout is when I start losing creativity. I've got ideas all the time. As an entrepreneur, I just love creating, coming up with new ideas and if I slowly, slowly go dark in my brain, have no ideas, I'm thinking, Uh-oh, something's wrong. That's a gauge for me when I don't have any ideas. That means, wow, I must be fried. Or another one of my triggers is balls getting dropped. Like someone's in a coffee shop and they texted me and go like, "Hey, so Paul, are you coming? I thought we were meeting over there at Barracuda's." I'm like, "Oh no. I didn't even get that into my calendar cause I was running so fast." So that tells me that I'm on the edge of burnout.
Paul Casey:
Maybe for you, you have consistently high energy and all of a sudden you're in this consistently low energy weather pattern in your life. Maybe you typically are a peaceful person and now you seem to be freaking out and having panic attacks or just anxiety way more often than you used to. That could be a signal that your gauge is running hot. Maybe you're typically a peaceful person and you can roll with the punches, but you've gotten angry and irritable more often than usual. Like, how quick is your trigger versus how much grace that you give or how much laughs that you share with people? Stress is informational. So when you're experiencing these things, it's your body and your spirit telling you that, Whoa, you've got to check those gauges.
Paul Casey:
You've got to get back and move that fulcrum over into the life side and pour back into yourself. So think about what is your gauge. You want to be able to be response-able, sort of like that word responsible, but put a hyphen between a response and able. We need to be able to respond to things without freaking out or without just going into the tank and going dark. So if you're redlining, redlining's a term that my trainer taught me many years ago, that's when I can barely breathe. For the next exercise she said, "You're redlining, go get some air outside." So if you're red lining in life, get back into a self care program, move that fulcrum urgently over to the life side or you will burn out and then you'll be no good for anyone because then you're just going to bleed all over everybody. And that's not going to help, especially if you're in leadership because leaders, they just don't have that privilege to be able to come into work and wreck everybody else's day.
Paul Casey:
Prolonged stress can become chronic unless steps are taken to eliminate the source or effectively manage that stress. Let me give you two more points. The third one is to filter each request for your time and every interaction through the boundary lens. Filter each request for your time and interaction through the boundary lens.
Paul Casey:
In other words, if you're strong and you're feeling strong in your life, you can offer it, but if you're depleted, you don't because then it might put you over the edge and like I said, then you'll bleed all over everybody. So you think about like is this a strong place that I can say yes to it, but if I'm feeling like I haven't taken care of myself for a while, then I would say no. One way you can do that is to truly say that you will think about it. So somebody says, 'Hey, Hey Paul, can you do this for me?' And everything inside me wants to yell out "Yes!" because I'm an opportunity person and I like to say yes to things, but I have to teach myself to insert the pause.
Paul Casey:
So there's stimulus instead of response. You go stimulus, you insert the pause and then you respond with, "Hey, can I think about that for a while?" Or maybe you ask a little bit more about their commitment level before I say yes and if safe, you know somebody might go like, "Well why? Why do you have to think about that?" Then you're going to say, "Because I need to run that through my filter. I need to see if I have enough margin." Most decisions are not urgent so if that person won't allow me to think about, then it's definitely a no. And I've had people call like, "Oh, hey okay. Well then you just think about it for a while."
Paul Casey:
So separate yourself a bit. Buy yourself some space and during this break, stop, look and listen. Here's the three parts of stop, look and listen. So stop and think, do I want to do this or am I trying to please somebody else? Because pleasers, we struggle with that. What will I receive from my participation in this? Am I going to get, is this going to build my confidence level if I do that? If I agree to do this, will it continue to be rewarding or do I think over time it's going to become oppressive and then I'm going to start getting resentful? So the stop part is to stop and think.
Paul Casey:
The look part is to look at your commitments, all the other things that are on your plate and count the cost for this commitment. This one that's staring you in the face right now. Ask for clarification, like what really is the time commitment to this? Ask for more information so you can answer these other questions. So you stop and think, look at your commitments and count the cost and the listen part is to listen to your feelings. So oftentimes we're running so fast that we skip this step and if you're not a big feelings person, you're like, yeah, you sort of laugh this one off. But do you find yourself hesitating or hedging when you're thinking about saying yes to this? That could be your body saying like, Nope, don't go there.
Paul Casey:
Do you feel cornered or trapped into making a decision? That's probably another thing that you need to say no to. Do I feel a tightness somewhere in my body because often stress, there's biofeedback in your body that you feel a tightness in your shoulders or that sick feeling in your stomach or do you feel at your temples? That's probably a sign to say no. Do you feel a nervous reaction? Like you start tapping your pencil or you got your legs crossed and it's just going a mile a minute? That could be a warning signal that's coming from inside you that says you might need to rethink this decision.
Paul Casey:
Remember that you must take full responsibility for the choice once you make it. So you can't play the blame game once you say yes, because as it's been said, blame is to be lame. Put a hyphen between the B and the L. so to blame is to b-lame and nobody wants to be lame and there's a shortage of people who own their own issues, you've probably noticed that. So the quote for you to remember on this one is "Don't let your mouth overload your back." In other words, by saying yes too much, don't let it overload your capacity that you have available to you. So once you've done that, then you can make the decision without regrets. See, you've run it through all these filters that you have and then you can say yes or no. Mahatma Gandhi says, "A no uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a yes merely uttered to please or what is worse just to avoid trouble."
Paul Casey:
One more step. The fourth step of achieving work-life balance or rhythm is to have accountability partners who keep you true to yourself and your stated work-life balance. Have accountability partners. We need to draw on a power higher than ourselves to maintain good boundaries because if we just try to have that willpower, it's usually going to become won't power after a while. So we really need accountability partners. Have them ask you specific questions, where are you are the weakest and sometimes we want to avoid those questions because it's like, Oh, I don't want to answer that, but usually that's a really great question for us to rebuild that resolve to have boundaries. Check in regularly with that person or those people, rejoice together when you succeed and fail forward when you screw up. In other words, we're going to fail but we're going to fail in the right direction by saying, 'All right, I screwed up this time but I am not going to say yes to that next time."
Paul Casey:
So, good points here. Remembering to figure out what's most important to you, to watch your gauges, to filter each request through the boundary lens, and to have accountability partners who keep you true to yourself. What do you get as a result of this? Hey, there's some really good work-life payoffs and benefits. One is you're going to live with joy and not anxiety and who doesn't want more joy? Second is being good stewards of your time and your money. Third is working with excellence, not sideways energy. Fourth is to experience true community with people you care about and you're not just giving them the leftovers.
Paul Casey:
And fifth is you get to model this work-life balance for your children, for your friends and for your followers. Whether that's on social media or people that are following you at work and I'd be happy to email you these slides or my speaker notes, if you want to reach out to me at growingforward@paulcasey.org. But, I really hope that you will, we'll wrestle this down because, work-life rhythm is huge. Don't try to achieve balance, really try to move that fulcrum back or forth into seasons where it makes the most sense.
Paul Casey:
Let me wrap up our podcast today with a resource I'd like to offer you. And it is a goal setting tool. It's a pad of paper that has got 25 sheets and on the front it has you setting one very important goal for yourself and really making that both smart goal and a hard goal, which it says what those mean on there. You could even sketch the goal out on that front page. On the back page of each sheet is a storyboard tool, which breaks that big goal into six small steps. And you can put a deadline by that. You could put the resources needed by each one and it's amazing how by doing that storyboard, you're not going to get stuck along the way because you're going to know what the next step is and it's going to be in a bite size for you to tackle it and get more goals done this year than you ever had before.
Paul Casey:
So that goal setting tool is on my website, paulcasey.org or again, you can reach out to me through email. Again, this is Paul Casey and I have been happy to share with you about work-life rhythm today and we want to thank our TCI sponsors and invite you to support them. We appreciate you making this possible so we can collaborate to help inspire leaders in our community. Finally, one more tidbit for the road to help you make a difference in your circle of influence and it is a quote by Dorothea Brande and she says, "Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion." Until next time, KGF, keep growing forward.
Speaker 3:
Thank you to our listeners for tuning in to today's show. Paul Casey is on a mission to add value to leaders by providing practical tools and strategies that reduce stress in their lives and on their teams so that they can enjoy life and leadership and experience their key desired results. If you'd like more help from Paul in your leadership development, connect with him at growingforward@paulcasey.org for consultation that can help you move past your current challenges and create a strategy for growing your life or your team forward. Paul would also like to help you restore sanity to your crazy schedule and get your priorities done every day by offering you his free control my calendar checklist. Go to www.takebackmycalendar.com for that productivity tool or open a text message to seven two zero zero zero and type the word growing.
Speaker 4:
The Tri-Cities influencer podcast was recorded at Fuse SPC by Bill Wagner of Safe Strategies.