Good morning everyone,
I trust you are starting your Saturday on a good note, feeling rested from not having to punch the clock at 5 a.m. and relaxing with some reflection of what went well, what didn’t go so well, and how you can make this next week even better.
Last week I talked about work / life balance. I have seen many discussions on this and am curious to what your experiences have been while trying to manage these areas of your life. Do you tend to focus on work so much that your family just believes you are that guy that lives in the basement. Are you that person that used to be known as father, husband, wife, mother, but now are the CEO constantly on the go checking emails?
I wanted to talk about a small win I had in the past few weeks where I took a trip to Florida with my wife to see our son. We flew into Clearwater late on a Thursday night and decided that we would stay close to the beach instead of being close to outlet malls. If you live in Ohio, you understand that there are no outlet malls so you must make use of vacations if you want to visit one.
Anyways, we decided to stay at a hotel near the beach. I mean Clearwater beach, you mine as well stay there unless you hate the beach, to which point I wonder why you are going there in the first place. We flew down and checked our luggage and decided to leave laptops at home. All we had were our phones. I literally walked onto the plane with nothing in my hands. No laptop messenger bag, nothing. It was weird feeling. I felt like I had left my security blanket and was wondering if I could function.
I woke up early like I normally do and hit the gym for my daily workout and then went to see if my wife was ready to go for a walk to get something to eat and meander around the area. I left my work phone in the hotel and just had my personal phone with me. We walked around, got her some coffee from “five bucks” and had time just talking and joking with each other.
It was rather windy so laying on the beach was not something we wanted to do. Besides that when we did take a walk near the water I almost stepped on the largest fishing lure I have ever seen that had a treble hook that had I stepped on while I was barefoot would have come through the top of my foot easily. I can only imagine what someone would be trying to catch flashing back to the old “Jaws” movies thinking I would need a bigger boat…
It was nice just walking and talking and at a certain point there was no worry about whether work was falling apart and in need of me rescuing anything. I was at peace and happy. Something that during the wait at the airport the night before I was wondering how I was going to manage. It was peaceful, bright, warm, and enjoyable to spend time with my wife.
After a while we decided to go grab lunch at a great spot that had Cubans. I love food which is why I work out so much. We were able to sit by the water and eat lunch and talk some more. Afterwards we checked out and walked through some shops and then got ready to go pick our son up from school. The funny part is that the world did not end, no fires to take down that could not wait until Monday, and I was able to enjoy a Friday off.
We spent the weekend having fun eating whatever and watching the latest Avengers movie. I have to stop and say that I never read comic books, but these movies are really well done and help me to understand what my son tells me about in the comics.
The weekend was great and I noticed that I did check emails every now and then before dinner and that my posture was more relaxed. When we returned home from the weekend away I was relaxed and calm still walking off the plane with nothing in my hand, or on my shoulder. That was still a little weird, but definitely worth it!
I have to say that making time for life is definitely a need that most of us take for granted, or say that we will do that later once we finish this next “Thing”. My mother has shared some wisdom that they have friends that said they would wait until they retire to travel the world and do the fun things only to have one of them die six months after retirement.
For this post I want to challenge you and myself to make sure that we take a temperature check at least once a quarter to see how we are doing in the work / life balance. I am not saying that we should always be running to do fun things, but I am also not saying that life needs to be all work until we reach some finish line. I hope that I can keep working well into my 80’s, but am able to enjoy life moments at the same time.
Take time to inventory some of your dreams that you’d like to do and make sure that some of them are put on priority. You work hard and should take little breaks to celebrate wins. All work and no play will make you profitable, but dull and burned out. So push hard, but celebrate a little with the family and thank them for being there for you no matter what.
As always if you have questions, want to dig deeper, or if you would like to ask about other topics feel free to reach out to me at info@kevinsidebottom.com. Also, you can comment to the blog to keep the conversation going with other readers. I have recently noticed that I had comments turned off and have since fixed…I hope J
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
Sales and Leadership Enterprises