Hi, I’m John Drury. I help professional business leaders achieved what’s important without losing what’s essential.
How do you go with work/life balance? To me, it’s a really unhelpful term especially in the 21st century.
For passionate people who want to make a mark in their business or their career, you love what you do, then the idea that there’s a time when you’re working and then you go home from work and don’t think about it at all and have this balance in your world is ridiculous.
When you’re passionate, it destroys balance. You can be watching a movie and get a great business idea or you can be waking up in the middle of the night with a solution to a problem that you’ve been agonizing over for a week or two.
To me a far better word is integrated. You know what’s important in your world, the people and the things that are important to you and then integrate that with the work that you love and that you’re wanting to do
Now the key to this is to take a whole of life approach. The danger is that the things that undermine our business success tend to come from the neglected areas of our personal life. Work will dominate our life if we’re not careful.
So to me to take a whole of life approach and be deliberate in marking out and setting boundaries around what’s important in your world and then setting goals and scheduling plans for each area, each key area of your life, so you’re able to focus.
We move towards what we focus on. So you don’t want to just focus on your work, we need to have a way, a planning process in place, that helps us to focus on all that’s important and then put it together and find ways to integrate.
Integrate requires flexibility. It’s not just saying “well, I’m gonna work and work can invade my personal life and I might be working till 11 o’clock at night but then I have to be at work at 7:00 a.m. as well,” there’s got to be some give-and-take, some flexibility and I’m challenging workplaces to learn how to be flexible and set employee remuneration and job descriptions around outcomes, not just about being at the desk for certain numbers of hours in a day or a week, it’s so important. So this has to be a two-way thing.
I wrote a book called “Integrate” which you can get on Amazon or you can get from our website. But I’d love to know what are these that you wrestle with? What are the challenges that you face in integrating your work with all that’s important in your world?
If you comment in the comment section below, I’d love to hear your feedback and understand what the issues are for you and see if there’s ways that we can help each other.
Thank you for listening.
