Work/Life Balance for Executives and Entrepreneurs??

Over the last several years, we have been working with more executives, business owners, and entrepreneurs than probably any time in my last 43 years on the whole concept of work/life balance.

It’s not an easy subject to master!

Most executives, entrepreneurs, and business owners are type A personalities that love the grind, love the excitement of success, and love reaching higher levels of achievement on a daily basis!

And these types of approaches to business, these personality types, which I fall into this category 100%, rarely think about work/life balance until we start to feel signs of burnout.

The signs of burnout can include an inability to sleep deeply every night, there could be a potential increase in dependencies or addictions, irritability, anger, lack of self-care regarding diet and exercise… The signs go on and on and on.

But I want to give you an example of step one, where we are looking to try to monitor our work/life balance so that we have ourselves in a position for better health, better relationships, as well as a decrease in anxiety, burnout, and depression… It starts right here.

Step One: Work/Life Balance

We use the phrase, “remove 1st/add 2nd“ when we’re beginning to work with executives and entrepreneurs whose work/life balance is out of control, whose stress has increased, maybe whose conflict in relationships continues to rise, we may have gained weight over the last number of years simply because of the fact that our balance is so… off-balance!

So we want to look at our life and see what we need to remove.

Too much Television? Two little delegation? Too much delegation? A lack of social activities? Too much alcohol or food? Too little sleep?

In our philosophy, which we have taught to executives and entrepreneurs for the past 43 years, we know that if we remove the blocks to success, and add self-care and more, we will start to inch our way more toward work/life balance which is a crucial part of why we’re on earth!

We’re not here just to work work work work work… That used to be my philosophy and it did well for a while until I consistently hit year after year of burnout, and I knew I had to change my ways.

Let me give you a couple of examples of executives I’m working with right now:

Number One. A young entrepreneur from Europe facing extreme burnout as he’s in his third year of growing his business found out that his social media hours were off the charts, and his inability to delegate was holding the growth of his small company back.

So in our philosophy of remove 1st/add 2nd, we eventually got him to give up all social media on Saturdays and Sundays which was a huge effort on his part! The addiction had set in. He had convinced himself he needed to be online all the time, but the truth was that his time online was taking away from him the ability to take care of his health and his brand-new relationship.

The second thing that we added was greater delegation skills, which means we took away his inability to delegate.

Like many young entrepreneurs and even seasoned executives, we can fall into the trap that “we better do it ourselves because no one can do it as well as we do.“

This leads to burnout! This leads to a lack of confidence in our teammates! This leads to eventually eroding the company culture and losing the opportunity to see how successful we could really be.

His success is now on a pathway to becoming absolutely phenomenal.

Number Two. This was a totally different type of client, a very high-powered executive, with 30 years of running a major corporation who has lost joy in life. At the company that he began years ago, he used to love coming into the office early, and now he was dragging himself in by 9:30 or 10 every day, which also had a negative effect on the staff. Remember everything is top-down!

He had a goal of writing a book for 40 years, but he had never even started to create space for an outline.

So what we ended up doing is looking at his workday hours, and what tasks he could delegate out, what tasks should he be doing first thing in the morning to get them off his plate, so that he could create more space in order to do something outside of his business, that would have a positive effect on his business at the same time!

His book is all about helping young business executives and entrepreneurs learn the ropes of creating a successful business he had over the past 30 years, but the one thing he had missed was following his passions outside of his own company.

In the back of his mind, the fact that he had been talking about writing a book for so long but had never even put pen to paper was really hurting his self-confidence and self-esteem.

When coworkers or friends would ask him over and over again how the book was coming, he just shook his head look at the ground and say “I’m burned out I don’t have the time.“

So by removing tasks during the day that were not necessary for him to be handling, before we knew it we were finding two-hour periods three days a week that he could focus on beginning the outline of his book.

Within 30 days he had the outline completed, and the energy on the phone during our sessions was off the chart!

So if you’re facing burnout, if you’re facing workaholism, always remember “remove 1st/add 2nd.“ By doing that you’re freeing up time, to accomplish things that are crucially important to your mind body, and spirit.

Remember, we’re not here to just be workhorses, we’re here to actually have a life… And live it to the fullest!“

David Essel‘s work is highly endorsed by individuals like the late Wayne Dyer, and celebrity Jenny McCarthy says, “David Essel is the new leader of the positive thinking movement.“

His work as a counselor and minister has been verified, by organizations like Psychology Today, Therapy Tribe, Theravive, and marriage.com have verified David is one of the top counselors and relationship experts in the world.

To reach David and to work with him in his “Executive and Entrepreneur Whole work/life balance program“, simply visit DavidEssel.com.