Posts Tagged ‘work-life balance’
The Week in Tweets April 20 2012 no responses
Every week, I share a recap of some of the best things I’ve seen on Twitter. This week, I’m highlighting tweets and links on our stressful relationship with our smartphones, whether CEOs deserve privacy, the importance of listening, developing your leadership skills and a story of a great comeback.
Why I Don’t Believe in Work/Life Balance March 27 2012 23 responses
We hear a lot these days about achieving work/life balance. I’m here to tell you that in an age of doing more with less – or in some cases, less with less – work/life balance is a myth. If you’re a leader in a demanding job, you’re about as likely to find it as you are a purple unicorn. And I don’t believe in purple unicorns.
When people talk about work/life balance, I think of the Flying Wallendas, whose members tempt fate by walking a tightrope suspended across Niagara Falls or between buildings high above the earth. They have balance, hopefully, for a few brief moments in time. When they make it to the other side, that experience of balance ends.
The quest for work/life balance is a little bit like that. You might experience it ever so briefly and then it ends. Like the Flying Wallendas, it might be months or years before you experience that feeling of balance again.
So, that’s the reality I’m offering. Is there any hope? I think there is.
3 Tips for Pacing Your Work for Lasting Success February 14 2012 2 responses
There was a vastly underrated road trip movie last year starring Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr. called “Due Date.” Downey plays an uptight businessman and Galifianakis plays a goofy but lovable stoner. They take a cross-country trip together. Hilarity ensues.
Whenever Downey’s character would explode in rage, Galifianakis’ character would say, “Hey, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.” It’s one of my favorite catchphrases ever. Not sure why I love it so much. Part of it was Galifianakis’ delivery, I guess. Part of it is the rhyme. The biggest reason it sticks with me is because I think it’s a great mantra for most leaders today.
Here’s my evidence for that. For the last seven years, I’ve run 360-degree surveys and self-assessments based on the leadership model in “The Next Level” with thousands of executives and managers. The lowest-rated item across that group for the past seven years has been: “Pace(s) myself/himself/herself by building in regular breaks from work.”
In the 360 surveys, the colleagues usually rate the leaders low on that behavior, and the leaders’ self-assessments are even lower than those of their colleagues. By the way, the scores have gotten lower every year.
What’s going on? Here’s what I see.
3 Things Injured Yogis and Injured Leaders Might Have in Common January 13 2012 7 responses
For the last two weeks, an article called How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body has been one of the top 10 most e-mailed articles on the New York Times website. When I checked this morning there were 734 comments on the article on the Times’ website. With approximately 20 million yogis in the U.S., the article has definitely struck a nerve (pun somewhat intended).
As many of the commenters point out, there are flaws in the way the article was reported. At the same time, as the article illustrates, you can get injured doing yoga. (This just in, you can also get injured running, lifting weights, doing Jazzercise or just about any other form of exercise.)
As I’ve written here before, I’ve been a regular yoga student for a little over a year now. Happy to report that I haven’t injured myself. To the contrary, I feel a lot better than I did before I started. Still, I can see how you could injure yourself doing yoga. Interestingly enough, some of the root causes of yoga injuries are the same ways you can injure yourself “doing leadership.”
Here are three things that can get you into trouble both on the yoga mat and in your leadership role:
3 Questions to Guide Your Year January 3 2012 one response
I was away for a few weeks over the holidays. It was a nice break and it’s good to be back. One of the good things about being back is reconnecting with friends I haven’t seen in awhile. One of those is a friend from yoga. We gave each other a hug hello at class the other night and she said, “Well, here we are.” My response was, “Yeah, 2012, it’s the only year we’ve got.” (Unless, of course, the physicists at CERN figure out time travel this year.)
So, for now, this is the only year you’ve got. What do you want to do with it? I don’t have any idea what your answer is or should be. Only you do.
What I can offer is three questions to guide you this year that have worked for me, my family, friends and clients over the past 15 years. They make up the core of a personal planning model that my wife, Diane, and I developed for ourselves called the Life GPS®. Each of us complete a new Life GPS® every year around this time. Like the GPS app on your smart phone or the GPS system in your car, the Life GPS® is a great tool for setting a destination and making the adjustments along the way that you’ll need to get there.
Using the Life GPS® will be the subject of a book I’m writing this year. You can also read more about it in the chapter on Picking Up Regular Renewal of Your Energy and Perspective and Letting Go of Running Flat Out Until You Crash from my first book, The Next Level
For now, though, here are the three questions that comprise the core of the Life GPS®. Before things get absolutely bananas for you this year, I encourage you to take a little time to consider these questions and write down your answers on a single sheet of paper. If you refer to that sheet on a regular basis this year, I think you’ll like the results you get.
Here are the questions:
Being Busy Makes You Stupid September 19 2011 6 responses
Being busy makes you stupid. And when I say, “you”, I mean me. Heck, I’ll just say it out loud. Being busy makes me stupid.
I realized this in a conversation with my wife on Friday night. We were out for a long, relaxed “just the two of us” dinner. Of course, we had scheduled that months in advance because of our calendars. Anyway, there we were, relaxed and focused on the conversation. She’s starting a new business and was telling me about her plans and what she has already accomplished. I was blown away. One reason for that was because she’s got a totally awesome plan and is executing it with precision. The other reason is because, until that moment, I wasn’t aware of about 80% of what she’d been up to in the past month.
I know that makes me sound like a jerk. Maybe I am.
The Lost Art of Killing Time August 16 2011 4 responses
This past weekend, I had the great opportunity to spend a couple of days with the crew of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Venturous on patrol in the Florida Straits. I’m organizing my thoughts, pictures and videos from the trip and will have more to share on that in the days and weeks to come.
Today, I’m writing about the end of the trip. For operational reasons, the Captain needed to drop me off in Key West early Sunday morning about 10 hours earlier than the original plan of late afternoon. I stowed my bags at the Coast Guard station and set out for the day with my wallet, my cell phone and absolutely no plan whatsoever.
By the end of the day, I had:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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