“I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage and tangled Christmas lights.”

—Maya Angelou

 

I must confess that as I write this chapter I myself am feeling a little frazzled. Yesterday I sat on the phone for 45 minutes listening to old music and found myself going ever so slightly insane. Something tells me I wouldn’t cope too well with lost luggage or tangled Christmas lights right now either: The question is, “Why?” Most of us want to ‘have it all’ but the reality is that something has to give. If we fail to prioritise life balance and boundaries it can quickly lead to burnout.

What happens next is an all-too-familiar story: that our health, our relationships and our business all start to suffer. As I mentioned earlier, I learned all this the hard way, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone. When I started out in business I was so passionate about my vision that I wanted to work in my business 24/7, 365 days a year. The danger was that it did not feel like a chore: in fact I loved it. I thrived on adrenalin and didn’t feel the need to give balance or boundaries any thought at all. I loved working. Going slow was for wimps. Sleep when you’re dead, right? Wrong. While to begin with I encouraged my clients to call me any time of the day or night and felt important that they needed me so much seven days a week, this initial euphoria was doomed to run thin in the long term. Family and friends would tell me I needed to take time out but I didn’t listen. Time out to do what? I absolutely loved what I was doing and my business was expanding rapidly – but that was exactly the problem.

Before I knew it, the business started to take over. I wasn’t getting any downtime and the phone was ringing off the hook every day. I was spending on average 3-4 hours a day on the phone alone and would literally start to shake every time the phone rang. I was working from 6am until 10pm daily. I was tired all the time and needed to crash out and take naps every afternoon just to get me through the evening shift. I was unbalanced because I allowed clients access to me 24/7 without enforcing any boundaries. I was completely and utterly exhausted; I was unproductive; I was miserable…and I was drowning because I discovered that it was surprisingly difficult to get myself out of this rut. I didn’t realise it at the time, but my reserves were utterly depleted; I was mentally and emotionally exhausted. I couldn’t figure out why I was so tired all the time. I didn’t feel physically tired and I was still getting a reasonable amount of sleep but what I realised was that I was tired of being available to everybody all the time. I never switched off unless I was asleep.

Choosing to create a balanced work life I finally realised that I had to make some big changes - and fast. I couldn’t sustain going on at this pace because the edges were really starting to fray and it wasn’t how I wanted to live. I have always agreed with the ideal to “make your vocation your vacation” and that we should work to live and not the other way around. So at the 18-month mark when it suddenly wasn’t fun anymore and work had become a chore I made some critical changes:

1. I started seeing a life and business coach;

 

2. I started seeing a recommended naturopath on a regular basis;

 

3. I engaged a personal trainer.

Not one to do anything by halves, I quickly immersed myself in seeking advice from experts in their field in order to balance out my life and enable me to continue to operate as an expert in mine. I implemented structures into my life around balance and set boundaries that I stuck to. I checked in with myself to uncover what was going on for me and what I needed to do to change things for the better. With the help of these professionals I began to identify areas that needed to change in my business and the ‘better choices’ I needed to make:

I put boundaries in place around my work hours and started limiting the times when I was available to clients.

I learned to discipline myself into switching my mobile off at 7pm sharp and turning it back on again until 8.30am.

I started taking at least one full day off every week (gradually increasing this to two days) with my phone calls diverted to voicemail.

Most importantly of all I started booking regular holidays. Four weeks off a year to start with and then gradually increasing it to three months.

You know by now that you have to take a step backwards first in order to move forwards. Just accept that you will be able to deal with a day or two’s lost profit or the odd unhappy client in order to benefit more thoroughly by reflecting and reviewing where you’re at and what you need to do. In the end, this approach will generate ten times the cost of taking the time off, trust me.

To increase productivity in your business you must first ensure you maintain work / life balance. Some of the ways you can do this are to:

1. Build Your Emotional Resilience

2. Draw On Your Inner Strength

3. Learn How To Nurture Yourself

4. Change Something

5. Remember To Have Fun

1. How to spot the emotionally resilient people. They are typically:

# highly emotionally aware (they know how they feel and why);

# known to persevere against all odds (trusting the process to unfold just as it should and never, never, never giving up);

# in possession of sound internal control (they understand that it is they who control their life and tend to go within (not without) for wisdom and answers;

# optimistic (always living in the positivity of any given situation);

# very supportive (they understand the need for a strong support network in the form of close family and friends);

# in possession of a healthy perspective (they learn from their mistakes and see these not as failures but as a valuable part of the learning process).

 

2. Drawing on your inner strength

I have learned to strengthen my resilience through a number of useful techniques including:

• cultivating the right attitude;

• viewing life’s difficulties as opportunities to rise to the challenges;

• resisting the temptation to fear obstacles or label them as “negative”;

• employing regular positive self talk;

• becoming emotionally self-aware and optimistic;

• understanding that I am in total control of my life and (as Henry Ford said) whether I believe I can or I believe I can’t, I am right;

• not being too proud to draw on my support network on the understanding that sometimes even just talking through an issue can take the weight off my shoulders.

 

Learn How To Nurture Yourself.

If you’re anything like me, you may well need to put some automatic structure and procedures in place around nurturing yourself or else you’ll get carried away with ‘busy-ness’ and it just won’t happen. My solution was to actually create ‘nurturing appointments’ with myself and embed them into my own schedule. I would schedule myself in for a full-body massage every fortnight for months in advance and diarise it just as if it were an important client meeting that I could not miss no matter what. I would also book in other nurturing appointments with the same high level of commitment, for example:

• sessions with my personal trainer.

• catching up with a positive, supportive friend;

• a night in, watching a favourite movie.

 

4. Change something

If it feels too late and you feel like you are drowning in activity already then change something. This can be anything that works for you but here are some of my favourite techniques:

• jumping online to outsource some of the day-to-day paperwork;

• talking to your colleagues to find out what is working for them;

• taking a day off to clear your head;

• cleaning out your office and brightening it up.

 

5. Remember to have fun

Anyone in business for themselves knows that there are always tasks that are essential but not necessarily enjoyable. So why not look at creative ways to turn the mundane into something interesting? For example, I used to hate writing advertisements. I can’t put my finger on why but there was just something about having to write ads every Thursday that I resisted and really didn’t like. I decided to start doing them in a coffee shop over breakfast every week instead. By changing my environment and combining the unpleasant task with something I enjoyed, I managed to make it feel a lot more fun. I got to be out and about surrounded by people’s fresh morning energy and work while enjying a nice hot drink.

 

Richard Branson always remembers to have FUN. Branson is someone I truly admire. Not only has he managed to have huge success by following his instinct and doing things his way but he is a wonderful employer and philanthropist as well. As a thought leader, Richard Branson has never tried to fit into the mould that other people expected him to. Instead he chooses to truly create the life that he wants to live. When you think of Richard Branson and his brand, VIRGIN, what do think of? Chances are you think of fun, adventure and a man living life to the fullest not only for himself but with his loved ones as well. Fun has made Branson a billionaire. In the mid-1980s the Branson company was floated on the Stock Exchange - but the ‘Branson Way’ didn’t fit the way City institutions expected public companies to behave. So rather than see everything he had worked for be compromised, Branson bought the company back from the shareholders and has gone on to achieve even greater phenomenal success.

I Love the way that Richard Branson combines fun with sound business judgement. He has an uncanny ability not to compartmentalise his life like a lot of people do: VIRGIN and the Richard Branson brand is who and what he is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Author of autobiographical books such as, “Screw It, Let’s Do It” and with a brand name like VIRGIN, his cheeky and playful personality is his brand, his signature style and the key to his phenomenal fortune. Richard Branson epitomizes one of my favourite statements: ‘Make Your Vocation Your Vacation.”

Live your WHOLE life

I recently heard co-founder of Gloria Jeans Coffee Peter Irvine say in an interview that when working with their franchisees he and his partner “are in the business of building better lives.” He went on to say that if franchise owners have personal issues or relationship dramas it adversely affects everyone’s business, so he makes it his business to help them in a holistic way. It’s not just about business.

 

“When the grass looks

greener on the other

side of the fence, it may

be that they are taking

better care of it!”

—Cecil Selig

 

Likewise I believe that we all benefit from understanding that we are whole people – not just fragments. As such we possess many different needs and values in our lives: family, friends, career, wealth, learning, teaching, sharing, growing and so on. Wealth means very little without people to share it with. What I have learned from this is that it is so important to maintain balance in all areas of our life.

 

Kirsty Spraggon - speaker, coach and author, is known for her expertise in building relationships that assist you to increase, your sales, networks and connections for life & business success. With 15 years experience in every facet of the sales industry, her career saw her ranked in the top 1% of individuals in RE/MAX’s global network of 121,000 sales agents worldwide.