Advisors: Don’t Believe The False Idea of Work/Life Balance

Work/Life balance is almost always a terrible idea … and quite frankly, is used to sell worthless coaching to people that are wanting to improve.  This is, in my opinion, evil. While it sure sounds great and makes you feel warm and fuzzy, the concept of ‘balancing’ your life  is a bad idea if you approach it from a results based coaching perspective.

We can feel out of balance, but, that is the wrong term to describe the actual problem if you are a high achiever like my Financial Advisor / Financial Planner clients.  These men and women are leading teams, influencing 100’s of lives and managing lucrative businesses.  They often feel ‘out of balance’ because of the complexity of leading at work, home and in the community.

Implied within the concept of work/life balance is that everything is equal and that is just (to put it nicely) unmitigated crap when it comes to building a life worth living. Some things are far more important than other things…you know this and that is why you should not only ruthlessly eliminate this false concept from your life…you should seek to free others from this bad mindset as well.

Alignment is a much better way to start forming a mindset and life that will leave one with less regret at the end of it. One of the things that being on the planet a bit longer provides you is a wider and deeper perspective. I am not any more intelligent for being in my early 50’s (it could be argued that I have lost some top end cognition)…but, I do have a wider and deeper dataset to make decisions from (wisdom).

Just like you would if you were looking at ‘balancing’…write down the stuff that is important to you…and then rank them by importance.

Then write down the values that you hold most dear and rank them as well.

Now, using both lists, align your life using both lists to focus on assembling values and systems to live out those values based upon the overall goal of your life.  Alignment allows you to discern between what is excellent and what is good.  For most of you that will end up reading this…you suffer from an abundance of good in your life.  We need to be able to discern what is most important and make sure that we do that before anything that is just good.

Our coaching model, valuesbasedmindset, is based upon alignment. The work is hard and the results are lasting.

Interested in learning more? The first step is having a conversation about how you have grown your practice and how you wish to grow in the future. Here is a link to get a 15 minute call with me: 15 Minutes with Mike

Related: Why Hope Is a Terrible Strategy for Financial Advisors That Want Better Referrals