Work-Life Balance is all about finding a way to successfully juggle the demands placed on busy professionals or small business owners at work and at home to find a rhythm or routine that works for them.
Are You Fighting Fires?
When you are in an unbalanced state, you are going to feel like you are immersed in a constant battle between work and home and you struggle to get everything done. This is particularly true during the first few years in a new position or in the early years of a new business.
There are just not enough hours in the day and what usually suffers is the individual’s personal life and the important relationships at home.
Work-Life Balance is about finding a way to satisfy the demands of both home and business or career without making unfair or impossible choices between the two. It may involve compromise; trade-offs may need to be negotiated between the two to make it work.
But unless small business owners or professionals address the issue of competing demands, they may find that they lose both.
Relationships can falter or fall away, and parents who are working to build a career or a business often miss out on seeing their kids grow up. They work long hours, sometimes seven days a week, and when they are at home, they are too tired to do justice to their family.
First steps, first word, the first time a child rides a bike without training wheels. These things only happen once, and if you are busy working 16 days, you will miss them!
If you find yourself in that situation, the combination of stress of hard work, financial concerns and discord at home, quite often means that you cannot perform as well as you should, and as well as the damage done to your personal relationships, the business or your career eventually suffers as well.
Coaching Can Help You to Create Work-Life Balance…
So what can you do?
Find a good coach. A trained coach can help small business owners or busy professionals to can work through a process to identify the work-life balance issues that they are facing. You will get to set priorities and all of the goals and action plans you need to achieve the results you want.
A coach can also help them to develop strategies for ‘handling the rest’.
How can a Coach Help?
It is about working out what is important to you and developing suitable boundaries. Boundaries between work and family so that you can give the best of yourself to both, without compromising either.
At work, that might mean learning how to delegate effectively, restructuring or re-focusing the business. You might look at introducing new technology, taking on more staff or simply working out how to do things at work more effectively and efficiently.
Maybe your solution could be learning how to let it go at knock-off time. It might even involve the family a bit more in the business!
At home (and I know it is a cliché, but) you need the time to spend quality time with the people who matter to you.
It is about priorities and working out what is important to the other people in your life.
Maybe they would prefer to spend less time together but with no interruptions, over more time with someone who is distracted and likely to stop interacting with them at the drop of a hat to deal with a business issue.
Business calls at school concerts, leaving a family picnic to deal with a cranky client, or missing a playdate with your kids because a meeting runs late are not going to earn you any brownie points at home. And if the thought of letting family and friends down is likely to add to an already stressful work situation, you are likely to end up doing a less-than-sterling job of it anyway.
A good coach will help the busy professional or small business owner to work out what their priorities currently are and what they should be. With his or her help, you will investigate potential solutions for the work-life conflicts they are experiencing and then select those that are most appropriate to their circumstances.
He or she will also be there as they implement their action plans to encourage and support them as they work towards their goals.