The RIGHT Way to Do Work - Life Balance
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you love this podcast, please give us a rating and review, however you listen to us. And the reason why is because it allows this show to grow. The more positive ratings and reviews that we get, the more that those platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify present this show to people who have never listened to it before, which allows us to grow and also allows us to impact more people's lives. So if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it.

appreciate it. Today we're going to be talking about work-life balance. One of the questions I get all of the time is how do I create more work-life balance? And the problem with that question is usually the perspective in the first place. And I'm going to go really deep into how to create really good work-life balance, how to change your perspective around and how to make sure that when you create a

a work environment or work for someone else that it lines up with the life that you want to create. So as far as the work-life balance goes, how do most people usually view work in life? Well, it's kind of like work is something that you do to survive because we all have to pay the bills unless, you know, you are a trust fund baby or something like that, or your dad's a billionaire, but most of us have to work in some sort of way. So we've got to do this thing to survive. Life is,

is usually a thing that we do when we're trying to escape work. You grind all week. You have, you know, Friday coming up. You get excited when Friday comes. You're sad when Monday comes. And then you try to cram all of your joy into the weekend. And then what do you do? Monday comes along and you rinse and repeat. Oh my God, I can't wait till it's Friday. I don't think that that's the way life should be lived. I think the...

The truth that most people miss is that work is not the opposite of life. Work is a part of life. Now, I don't mean that in hustle culture. I mean, there's no actual way to extract your work from your life. It's under the umbrella of life.

And if you're constantly trying to balance, quote unquote, balance your work against your life, that's the red flag. It means that you see work as something that steals you away from your life in some way. But what if you were able to design your life so that your work poured into you and your life instead of drained you in some way?

If this sounds kind of nuts to you, I completely understand. I've been in the exact same position as you. I've thought that work was something that I just had to white knuckle my life through until I got to the weekend. But you'll see what I mean as I go through today's episode. The big thing is there's a myth of work-life balance. So I want to set one thing straight.

Anything that you want to be great at, whether it's your business, whether it's your marriage, whether it's your kids, whether it's your mental health, whatever it is, is going to take a lot of work. And I mean a lot of work. And the more work that you put into it, the better that it will become. Most people want to start a business and then they go, well, how can I work as little as possible and then get as rich as possible?

That's like, imagine if you got married and then you said to your wife, listen, I want to have the best marriage that I possibly can. But honestly, I also want to spend as much time away from you as possible. Like, it ain't going to work. I'm sorry. But we think that for some reason we can have, you know, greatness in our business, in our achievements and work. But we can also work as little as possible so that we can also have life.

Because lots of people say, I want to be successful, but I want to work as little as possible. It's like saying, I want to have a great marriage, but I want to hang out with her as little as I possibly can. So if you want to be successful, but work as little as possible, it ain't going to work.

You know, if you want to start a thriving business, sometimes it's going to take really long nights, early mornings, working on the weekends sometimes, showing up when you're tired. But if you want like a really deep connected relationship with your spouse or your significant other, it means you're going to have to have really honest, tough conversations. You're going to have to show up for them when it's hard. And, you know, you're going to have to show up for your partner even on your days off when you're not feeling really good.

You want to be an amazing parent? Well, yeah, that's the giggles and the cuddles and the smiles and all of that stuff when your heart just explodes. But it's also the tantrums. It's exhaustion. It's self-doubt. It's I hope I'm not fucking my kid up, right? You want to grow in the best version of you?

It means that, yeah, you got to do a lot of work on yourself. You've got to do reading. You've got to do reflecting. You've got to face the really hard parts of yourself that are not really cute that you're running away from. And here's where most people really get tripped up. They expect all of these things to feel balanced day by day.

And so what's really important in success in anything is this idea that I like to talk about, which is front-loading the effort. The more effort that you put in in the beginning, the less that you'll have to put in later on down the road. Success usually requires that you front-load effort, meaning the harder that you work in the beginning, the less you'll need to work at the end, like I said. And so if you have a relationship that you're getting into,

The harder that you work in the relationship, let's say you get married, right? The harder that you work in the beginning of the marriage, and what I mean by that is opening up, learning to show parts of yourself you've never shown someone before, learning to let your walls down, learning to be vulnerable, learning to have hard conversations the right way,

going to couples therapy so that you can have someone, not because something's broken, but because you want to have someone that can maybe translate what you guys are saying to each other that's a third party. All of those things require work, but it sets the relationship up for long-term success. It turns into an easier relationship that requires less work in the long run.

You see what I'm saying here? More work in the beginning will cause less work in the long term. If you want to start a business, it will take a lot of effort in the very beginning if you want to be successful. Like when I started my business, this is now my fourth business and this is the one that finally succeeded. But when I started this business,

I worked way harder. I mean, way, way harder than I do now. I worked long hours, sometimes until 8:00 PM, 10:00 PM, sometimes on the weekends when I had to. And when you look at that, it's like, did I have to take some time away from some non-work stuff in my life? Yeah, absolutely. Did I have to say no to some things? Yeah, absolutely. But now that I have a family, my whole thought

thought process behind it was I'm going to work as hard as I possibly can so that when I have a family, I don't need to work as much and I can spend more time with my family. So I was like, I'm going to front load the effort. Now that I have a family, I can spend way more time with my family than I do working. And so like, for instance, we're going to Italy for three weeks and I'm not going to be working at all while we're over there. And so I would have never had that opportunity if I didn't put a ton of work in the beginning, front loading it,

to then, you know, later on down the road, have more quote unquote balance in the opposite direction later on. Really what it comes down to is most people when they're talking about work-life balance, they're looking through the wrong lens or seeing the wrong perspective. The perspective is from a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. How can I have work-life balance today? Or how can I have work-life balance this week? And with some things, I think that they're thinking too short term.

And so here's where I think most people get it wrong. They see it as, like I said, day to day, week to week. But I see it as work-life balance in years and in decades. You know, if you look at the work-life balance from, you know, the first couple of years that I put into my business to the last couple of years I've had in my business, it was a whole lot of work in the very beginning, much less work now. Balance is not measured in days. It's measured in seasons of your life.

So I worked really hard and really extremely hard for years so that I could work a lot less for the rest of my life. My relationship with my wife, we've worked really hard on our relationship for years so that it's really a whole, like the best it's ever been and much easier now. And so I know this can seem foreign to a lot of you because it seems foreign to me when I was younger, but

This is going to be something that kind of strikes a chord with some people, and it might change the way that you fully look at work in general. And we will be right back. As a business owner, you have to wear many hats. For me, I've worn pretty much every hat you could possibly wear in my business. Ever feel overwhelmed by trying to manage web hosting while juggling a million other tasks?

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Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash dial. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash dial netsuite.com slash dial. And now back to the show. Work can be something that you love. You might have not found yet the thing that you love doing, but there is something that you love doing out there.

For me, if I did not have my quote unquote work in my life anymore, creating this podcast, I also have, you know, part of my company is called Mindset University, which is every week I run mindset coaching and group coaching format. Another side of my company is a business where I train coaches on how to grow online coaching businesses.

If I didn't have those things, coaching other people and also running this podcast, my life would feel way more empty than it does right now. So if you look at work, like if you take work out of your life and you're like, oh my God, it'd be so great if I didn't have to work, then that's probably the problem is you actually don't enjoy what you do.

And you can find something that you enjoy. You can find something, you can build yourself into a person that can do something that you enjoy. If I didn't have work in my life, I would honestly be sad. Not because I'm a workaholic, but because of the fact that I actually truly love what I do. And I honestly feel like it adds so much to my life. So I know it's foreign to a lot of people listening, but work doesn't have to be something that you hate. And I think this is where a lot of people really do mess it up. They think work is something that you do just to make money.

And life is something that you do when you're trying to escape work. Work is just a part of life. They're not two opposing forces. In order to balance something, so in order to have like, if you think of like the old judicial scales, you know, it's like they would show whatever it was. I can't remember what the type of scales they are. But when you're balancing something, it requires two opposing forces. One has to be on one side. The other has to be on the other side. It's two opposing forces.

You cannot make work one opposing force and another opposing force be your life because work is something that you do in your life no matter what. And so you've got to figure out how to integrate work into your life in a way that is aligned.

So you don't have to choose business or family. Like one of the things that I see that holds a lot of people back that are business owners, because I've coached thousands of business owners over the years, is that they have this mindset in their head that I can either be a great parent or I can build a successful business. And that's completely false. That's a scarcity mindset more than anything else.

And so the way I like to describe scarcity, just to make it very easy, is scarcity is when you say or, abundance is when you say and. And so scarcity is, well, I can either be a great parent or I can run a million dollar business. That's scarcity, great parent or million dollar business.

Abundance is I'm going to be a great parent and I'm going to run a million dollar business. There's no law written into the edges of the universe that say, well, you cannot be a great parent if you're a great business owner and you cannot be a great business owner if you're a great parent. It's just somewhere in your

and this is something that happened for me when I was younger, somewhere in your programming as you learned it was an either or thing. And you probably saw like a friend who resented his dad because his dad was never there. And you're like, well, I never want to be that. Oh my God, they're so rich, but he hates his dad. So you might've picked that up along the way in your programming. You being fulfilled at work can be one of the greatest gifts that you can give your kids. Why? Because your children will probably work as well. They're probably going to have to get a job one day.

And if they see you hating your job, then they just think that's the way that the world is. Oh, dad hates his job. So I guess I have to get a job that I hate and I just have to white knuckle my way through life. Oh my God, every time he gets home from work, he's so stressed out. He's so pissed off. He's so on edge. I guess that's just the way that my life has to be. They see what you're doing and then they think, well, that's what I have to do too.

So if they see you coming home from work or being excited to go to work and loving what you do and they can see what passion towards something looks like, they can see that you are building something that feels meaningful and has purpose to you. And they can learn that purpose and parenting don't have to cancel each other out. They can strengthen each other. Then they look at you and they go, oh, well, yeah, if that's what dad did, then I guess that's just what we do, right?

That you can be at home and you can take Zoom calls and then you can go and you can drive them over and cheer them on on soccer. That you can lead a team in your company and still be able to read them bedtime stories or be present for dinner every single night. That you can be there for pancakes every single morning, drive them to school, and then on the way to school you drop them off and then you, you know,

go off and go to work that's purposeful and meaningful to you, and then you can decide that you want to leave work early and pick them up, and you can have deep conversations about life as they grow up. You don't have to choose. It's all part of life. You get it? I'm saying that there's no difference between the two. It's all of them are just a part of life. You just have to learn that your life might not have been designed with as much intention as you now want it to be. Now that you're older and wiser, you want to put more intention into your life.

And so what I would like to focus on is not having a balanced life, but having a crafted life. You know, what if instead of having this random vague idea of what a balanced life looks like, we just have a crafted life? What's the difference? A balanced life is, am I giving everything equal time today? A crafted life is, am I building something that I'm proud of and will be proud of over time? In a crafted life, your work is,

is basically an extension of your values. Your family isn't something that you just make time for. They're woven into all of your decisions with work, with life, with business, with travel, with everything. Your calendar is

doesn't just show that you're full with work. Your calendar reflects what matters most to you, not just the things that are urgent. So work doesn't have to be like the villain in the story like most people make it out to be. And so that's what I want you to understand is that if you're thinking to yourself that, hey, I need work-life balance, like it's way too out of balance. First off,

Number one, you might be working too much. It's something that you don't enjoy. And number two, there might be something out there that actually you would be more passionate about. And I'm not saying that you and I have to be very careful whenever I say this because I've had people send me emails and they're like, hey, I quit my job because of you. And I'm like, well, I did not say that. What I'm saying to you is there's probably something if you hate your job, if you don't enjoy your job, if you don't see yourself there in 10 years, there's probably something out there could be a little bit more inspiring to if you don't enjoy it, if you don't have fun doing it.

What could be fun for you? Maybe you don't know at this moment. So why don't you start ask yourself those questions? Start looking to see what things you do enjoy. Start building some form of a skill set and then give yourself some sort of transition plan over the next couple years.

Because everything in this equation is life. So let's stop trying to separate everything into all of these neat little boxes. Your parenting isn't separate from your purpose. Your work doesn't have to be separate from your joy. Your business doesn't have to be separate from the rest of everything that you do.

It's all your life. And if you craft it really well, if you craft it with intention, with love, with alignment, then your work becomes something that adds to your life, not something that takes away from your life. And so here's the question that I want to leave you with. Are you building a life that you have to escape from or are you building one that aligns fully with you and your purpose in life? If you're just...

going to work because you feel like you need to, well, maybe you could find something that aligns a little bit better for you. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor. Share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in it. Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And with that, I'm gonna leave it the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.