Work Life Balance & Quiet Quitting | Power Theory 004

Do you want work life balance? Let's talk about that. As employees, we feel as though we're subject to lots of constraints. There are rules and regulations and policies and procedures, even how much time you can take off. The fact is, is that you have personal agency over those parameters. Yes, you need to work. If you contract to work 40 hours a week, 40 hours a week is what you'll give. Sometimes you'll give 45. Sometimes you'll leave early because you have to. You have to run a personal errand. There's lots of variables in there. The fact is that you have power over those decisions. Hello. Welcome to power theory. My name is Russ Willett. I'm an executive coach. I focus on creating successful organizations, successful teams, successful cultures, and successful leaders. My purpose is to help more people find their own power, their own agency for success. I want to tell you a story about a young professional who struggles with work life balance. Sarah was extremely bright. She had worked her way up from administrative assistant to being the vice president of operations for this organization. Now Sarah was having a problem with her balance. She. She would take work home. She would get stressed out. She would never leave the office. She was always on call, and she took pride in that. That was a really important value of hers, to be of value to the company and the value to her peers and her boss. And so she dug in, and she got a lot of enjoyment from it until she didn't. When trying to work with her and figure out what was going on, we came to the conclusion that because she didn't have the proper credentials for that position, in fact, she didn't have a bachelor's degree, which was an internal challenge that she was having with herself. No one cared. No one even knew that she didn't have a bachelor's degree. But to her, it was. She needed to make up for that. So what she did is she worked crazy hours, and she was always available. Everybody loved Sarah until she started, like, dropping out. You started seeing emotional outbursts. You started seeing frustration about tasks not getting done. What we did is we worked with her to try to own her own personal power and her own confidence. With time, she did improve. Now, what happened was she would improve for about six months or eight months, and then eight months later, she would find herself under another pile of work that every relied on her to do and would even take on more responsibilities. Now, Sarah couldn't say no, and she could only say yes. To her, saying no was being uncooperative and something she couldn't do. Saying yes gave her a lot of fulfillment in that moment. And then she went back and made herself ill with too much work. The fact was, in this situation, her employer didn't want her to do that. They wanted her to be in balance. They wanted her to be in balance with her life. They wanted to be in balance at work. They wanted her to constrain her time. They wanted her to work more efficiently. Now, the other thing about Sarah is that Sarah didn't work efficiently. If she had to do some analysis, she would overanalyze everything. She couldn't deal with ambiguity. She couldn't deal with, even though she was extremely bright and she knew the information, she knew what she needed to do. She would pour over and over, prepare for everything. That overpreparation was part of the reason she didn't have balance. My point is that Sarah was doing this to herself. And there are thousands of stories like this. Work life balance is about you taking personal agency for your time, your commitment, and the things you do. It doesn't mean you do a shoddy job. It doesn't mean you don't work hard. It doesn't mean you don't put in the time that's required under the agreements that you made with those employers, but it does mean that you have some control over what those parameters are. So exactly what can you do? Some people divide balance up into, I spend so many hours sleeping. I spend so many hours eating, working out, going to work, spending time with the kids. And you can actually divide this out pretty specifically. I think that that's helpful to some people. That doesn't necessarily work for me. What works for me and what works for a lot of people is what I call integration. They integrate what they do in their life with, with their work. Our computer is always working in the background. And if I have to consciously study every single detail of every single problem all the time, I'm never going to get anything done. I'm never going to make a decision. Everything is going to be too complicated. We need to learn to integrate work into our regular time. Another example is integration of time with, like, socializing or networking. I had a friend who used to say networking to him was date night. He integrated his family into the networking activities, and I used to do that, too. I'd bring my wife to cocktail parties for the theater company or for the chamber of commerce or whatever activities were going on. My wife would accompany me. Sometimes I would bring my children to those things, and I would spend time with my daughter at the same time. I was at an award ceremony for best business of the year. This is not unachievable. And what I found is that those working relationships outside of work or inside of work actually became my friends and actually became people that I wanted to hang out with. During the pandemic, my wife said to me, you know what happened? We used to go out with our friends every Thursday night. Well, every Thursday night was a business networking commitment that I went to, or it was a, I would meet with board members or I'd go to cocktail parties with board members or whatever activities were going on. I integrated my, my work life and my personal life so that it was all one. And that was also fulfilling. That might not work for everybody, but that's an example. Also, what we do when we go to take a job is we negotiate a contract with an employer. Now, we don't, during the interview say, I'm only work so many hours, or, you know, I have boundaries and I have children to pick up. Of course, you don't say that. You go to those interviews and you say, I really want to learn something new. I really want to. I'm going to work hard. I'm going to be a good employee. You say those kinds of things, you get the job, and in that process, you're negotiating a contract. The contract is, I'm going to pay you so much money. And in exchange for that, we have a 40 hours work schedule or a 32 hours work schedule, whatever it is. And there might be times when we, you know, we have to put a little bit more work. And certainly we have PTO and some other vacation and other things. So we make that contract. Then as soon as we get into the job, we're overwhelmed with the amount of work, learning and work that has to be done. And we start devaluing our own agency in that. And we find ourselves working too much. The work life or this work burden kind of creeps into our life, and then before we know it, we're crazy busy and we're stressed out and we're having anxiety. You negotiated a contract. The contract has parameters. You can honor that contract. So if you work at a bank and your hours are nine to five, work nine to five. I don't want you to check out completely at 05:00 if you're working for me, I want you to still be thinking. You'll still be thinking about stuff in the background. You're going to go to your children's softball game and you're going to meet someone there that might be a customer for the bank. This stuff is always going to be working in the background. Agency is really about having personal power, and we should not look for personal power in other people. What gives us confidence is not what someone else gives us. If the boss wants me to work 12 hours a day, that's just not right. I mean, I work 12 hours once in a while when I need to, but I expect to have some relief on the other end. But for the most part, his thought of me is not what should be motivating me and giving me power. It's the thought of myself. There's this concept of, you know, finding your dreams and work your dreams into what you do for work. You know, that's a little bit of a fallacy. Not all of us can follow our dreams and do exactly, you know, in fact, one of the hardest things and coaching is actually helping people find that dream. If people don't know what they want to do and they don't really have any aspirations for that, how are they going to come up with a dream to follow? Yes, some of us have those dreams, and we follow those dreams. And sometime in your work life, you'll also find that that direction, and you'll follow it. But for the most part, you can find that comfort and that learning and that development and that confidence with certain organizations and the people you surround yourself with. You want to find people, places and cultures that you want to work in, not necessarily your domain. So, for example, if you're an engineer, you're a good engineer, you have that credential, you have that domain knowledge, but you might find that you like working with salespeople better. You might find that you enjoy working with customers more. So it doesn't matter. You can find those people and those activities within any company you work for. So let me just tell you. So back when I go back to the story about me having anxiety and being stressed out about working too much, after I journaled and I wrote down what I needed to do, I know that I needed to. I know I was going in a direction and I didn't know what that direction was. So I committed to myself that I was going to start leaning into some different directions that were interesting but not exactly right for me. I explored going into other departments. I looked at becoming an HR executive at one time. I wrote down all the things about what an HR executive does and decided that I didn't want to be an HR executive at one time. I thought about being a college president. I went actually to a conference, to future college presidents of America. And when I came back from that conference and realized there's no way that I want to be a college president. There are things that you have to explore to figure that out. I didn't quit my job while I did that. I just did it. What I also did at Raytheon is I went to my bosses and I said to them, look, I love working here. And I was starting to transition into organizational development. I'm thinking about going in this direction. And they said, you know what, Russ? That's great. We could use that. And they started, they started me on a self training program to learn organizational development. Now, at the time, it was kind of a new thing for the company, but I just immersed myself in it and just loved it. And everything that I learned, I just, I was attracted to and continued to follow. While I was making that transition, I got a call from an old boss who was in finance and who I had left a few years earlier, and he called me back and he said, russ, we have an opportunity for an executive manager in finance, and we'd like to consider you for it. Are you interested in that? And I said, well, thank you, Jim. I really appreciate it. I'd love to take that job. But listen, I have some parameters. I'm not going to be able to work 12 hours a day anymore. I want you to know that upfront. I'm certainly, you know, will do whatever I need to do, and I'll organize myself in a certain way, but I'm not going to be able to, and I think that might be your expectation, and I want you to know that I'm not going to be able to do that. And he said, no, I understand. No problem. No problem. We hung up the phone. I never heard from him again. That was a good decision, but I was negotiating my contract with him from up front. If I had pretended that I would do that, I would have got there, found that it was required for me to work 12 hours a week, and I would have been burnt out and having anxiety again. It's up to us to take personal power. It's up to us to take what we want. And back to the quiet quitting. My point about that was quiet quitting is giving up. Quiet quitting is if me staying at Raytheon and having anxiety. I just dropped out, started leaving, didn't talk to anybody and didn't get what I wanted and went in no direction. I was directionless. It would have been horrible. Instead, like Sarah and like myself and like lots of other people, you decide what you want to do. You take control of what you want to be. You go in that direction and become CEO of yourself through personal agency. If you like this content, hit the subscribe button and I look forward to seeing at the next video.See all