James Laughlin 00:00
Welcome to lead on purpose. I'm James Laughlin, a former seven-time world champion musician and now an executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week, I'll publish a solocast, where I'll share my top high-performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.
James Laughlin 00:48
Welcome back, I want to share with you two of the most requested topics I get asked about whether that's for a keynote, whether that's for training with a business, or a team. But these two things keep coming up. And even individually when people come up to me one is, hey, James, what do high performers do in terms of habits? So, I call that high-performance habits, right? And the second question is, I really want to manage my time better, can you help me with time management? Is that you? Have you ever found yourself wanting to have better habits or be able to manage your time better? Well look, work-life balance is a term I've heard a lot; I've even used a lot. But I'm going to tell you something, I do not believe that high performers can achieve equilibrium with a work-life balance. It's simply not possible. People who want to perform above the standard norms, have to direct their focus in an unreasonable manner, in one specific area of their life. For us, a set time could be a week, two weeks, a month, or some longer. But achieving balance, to me means eight hours of sleeping, eight hours performing, and eight hours of eating as we do, we just can't do this equally. So, balance for all of us is very subjective, we need to decide what balance looks like. So I'm going, before I give you some really powerful strategies and a model before I do that, I'm going to challenge you to do something, stop trying to achieve perfect balance, stop striving for the work-life balance, I'm going to give you something more practical, more powerful and pragmatic. But the very first thing I'm going to challenge you to do is please stop trying to achieve work-life balance. But the goal here is to have a life of fulfillment, a life of a connection of contribution, right? I don't think you want to get to the end of your life and go, yeah, it was all about me. I never spent time with people. I never contributed to society, community work, or family, I know that you, like many of us want to get to the end. And know that you made a difference. Know that you added value and that you are significant in other people's lives, in your workplace, like we want to be industrious. And we talk about retirement and let's face it, many of you who listen, and I bet you're probably one of them. Retirement might not be something you're excited about it. Because when you're 65, or 67, whatever the age may be, when you retire, you know what, maybe you want to keep giving back. It's not about stopping work. It's about you know, continuing that contribution to society. So, getting clear on balance and work-life balance right now, whatever stage you're at, you could be in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s, it doesn't matter where you are, I want you to get clear on what that means. And just if you've got pen and paper, please write this down. Your perception shapes your reality. I was lucky enough to have Steve Hansen on the show and at one of my high-performance leadership events last year. And he shared that, you know, don't try and change people's perception because that is their reality, the only thing you can change is you. So in today's episode, I want to challenge your perception of what balance actually is, how it's going to be moving forward, and how you can achieve that. So, here's where we're going to get started. I'm going to have four very powerful action points for you. Please write these down, please and share them with someone that also talks about balancing their unbalanced, please share these strategies with them. They know it will serve them and help them. And hey, before I share these, please if you haven't already, I would greatly appreciate it if you could leave me a rating and a review and subscribe to the podcast. All of those things will cost you nothing. But they will help me hugely to reach more incredible people like you, people who want to grow people who want to make their lives and their communities better. So, if you can please take a minute and 30 seconds to do that, I would hugely appreciate it. So, number one, the number one thing I want you to do is to heighten your awareness. Okay, if you heighten your awareness, you will give yourself more opportunities, more choices, and therefore better outcomes. How do you heighten your awareness? Eyes up. That's right. Get your eyes up and look around. Check it out, check out what's going on around you don't get stuck in the weeds. So many leaders at all levels, including parents, CEOs, and coaches, talk about being stuck in the weeds. Yeah, that's the day-to-day nitty gritty things that just got to get done. Not nearly enough time working on the vision, working on strategy, working on the big picture, too much time working in the day-to-day to check in all the emails, catching up with texts, and receiving phone calls. Heighten your awareness, number one. Eyes up, look around schedule time each week to actually go okay, I need to focus on the one-year, two-year, three-year, and five-year long-term goals. So crucially important. Number two, define your priorities. I don't believe in busyness. How are you? I'm so busy. When people say that, to me. My automatic thought reaction is you're not busy. You just lack priorities. When you know what your priorities are, you're not busy being busy, you're busy being productive. So, once you've heightened your awareness, you get a bigger picture of what truly matters. The next stage is to define your priorities. That's simple. You go okay, what do I value? What's most important to me? What's my MVP? My most valued priority. In my HPL, a high-performance leadership program that I run through once a year in public, but I run throughout the year for corporates and teams. There's one specific section in the high-performance pillars where we look at priorities and how to prioritize your priorities. Talk about MVP don't get out of bed any day of the week until you know what your MVP is for that day. So, if your priority is to win, if your priority is to meet that target, if your priority is to be a present person in someone's life that you love, that's your priority, nothing else. But you've got to define them. Number three, embrace counterbalance. Yeah, that's right. Not like work-life balance. Embrace, counterbalance. How do we do that? Well look, high performers will get focused obsessively on something, lots of work on a project, a competition, financial metric, securing staff, growing revenue, whatever it might be, they get really obsessively focused on something. The key is to be aware of that define what your new priority is, and then embrace counterbalance and go, wow, I haven't worked out in the last 10 days. Wow, I haven't been in nature in two days. Wow, I haven't sat down and had a family meal, properly undistracted in three days. Wow, I haven't had a night away with my partner or my friends and forever. Great. Embrace counterbalance. Take your energy and shift it and focus on what you need to. I have a rammed report that I have all of my high ends one to one clients do and I take every one of the HPL programs through it as well. And that's where we look at the 12 habits of thriving high performers. These are 12 different habits that the majority of high performers embrace in their lives. So, go and look at that and go okay, do I need a little bit more nature time a little bit more exploration time? Do I need more sensuality more spirituality? Do I need a massage? Do I need to walk with somebody I love? Do I need to seek mentorship? But counterbalances about eyes, up looking around redefining those priorities and going okay, I need to take all of this obsessive focus I've had over here, acknowledge it, appreciate it, and then shift it over to here and go okay, now I need to rebalance things counterbalance is the key to being successful over the long term. Striving for a perfect work-life balance will drive you nuts. Please I'm urging you don't ever strive for the perfect work-life balance you will be trying endlessly to reach that destination. Instead, embrace counterbalance. So, the first three heighten awareness, define your priorities, and embrace counterbalance. Now, last but not least, you know that I believe what gets scheduled gets done right. So, schedule intentionally that's number four. Schedule intentionally. So, if you want better balance, then you've got to be really intentional with your scheduling. Yes, that means you have to be the person who sits down on a Sunday takes 30 minutes to 45 minutes, and plans out the week based on your priorities based on what means the most to them. And based on what moves the needle towards the longer-term objectives, that's what you've got to do If you want better balance.
James Laughlin 10:27
You've got to block out the time to do the deep work. You've got to block out the time to meditate if that's your thing. You got to block out the time to have dinner, block out the time to go for a run. These are critical decisions that can only be made from a place of intention. So, I hope at the end of this episode now, you know that work-life balance and trying to strive for that is almost impossible. I actually believe it is impossible, unachievable. Please strive for counterbalance, strive for that feeling of flow. And if you go deep on something and are obsessed, that's okay. That's what high performers do. But bring your eyes up, take a look around, refocus counterbalance, and that's going to give you more of that intention, more of those feelings of greatness, of joy, of happiness. So, I hope today's episode has served you and if there's anything that you'd like me to go deep on, and do any of these coaching sessions on, please reach out to the team, drop me a line on LinkedIn, get in touch via Instagram, whatever your method of connecting is, but I just want to challenge you to do one thing. Please get out there and lead your life on purpose.
James Laughlin
Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button. And I'd love it if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks. And leaders. It's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.