LESSON: Work and life aren’t in opposition, creating space to find balance between them will make you more successful at both.
TREVONE IS THE CEO of a big hedge fund. He has always been a forceful, charismatic leader and driven himself and his employees hard. A few months ago, he had made an appearance in the financial news pages that shocked the City, and those who knew him well. It was announced that he had taken three months off work due to ‘stress’. As well as being under medical care, the Chairman of the Board wanted him to have a coach to help him transition back to work as he recovered.
I had expected him to be resistant to my appearance in his life, but it was quite the opposite. He had been even more shocked himself at what had happened and was happy to get the help he needed. As we spoke, though, I began to get the first glimmer of a concern that was to grow stronger as the weeks wore on. For Trevone, it was about getting better so he could go back to how things were. A real change wasn’t on his mind.
First, though, I had to get behind the label of ‘stress’. It turned out that Trevone had been suffering from exhaustion, some panic attacks and a bit of low-level clinical depression. It further transpired that he’d actually been suffering like this for several years and it was only at the insistence of his wife that he’d sought help, at which point the company’s insurance advisers had insisted he take time off and get properly treated.
Trevone’s problem was more high profile then most, and more pronounced, but it was all too common in a milder form. When faced with stress or overwork I like to try and get a picture of the coachee as a whole, using a tool called the Wheel of Life. You can easily apply it to yourself.
Draw a circle. Then fill it in, like a pie chart, with four aspects of your life – work, self, family and social, and spirituality – each one proportionately taking up the space it occupies in a typical month.
The Wheel of Life
It is amazing how much the modern executive’s life is consumed by work; family and social life almost always come next, with self and spirituality a distant joint third. In fact, some people I have this conversation with barely know what I mean by each.
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Trevone was typical. Work was around 80 per cent, his family 15 per cent, he barely saw his friends, other than the occasional golf game (which we agreed could go under ‘self’), and he had no spiritual aspect to his life at all.
If it seems relevant, I will sometimes ask my coachees to have a full health checkup too. Even if they are given the medical all clear the doctor will almost always recommend some changes in lifestyle. A great read on this subject is ‘The Making of the Corporate Athlete’ by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, which draws a parallel between athletes and executives, pointing out that we expect both to perform at their peak, but tend to ignore the physical body in the case of the executive. The authors make a strong case for addressing your physical health and wellbeing in order to fulfil your potential in a corporate environment.
Creating his wheel of life did shock Trevone a little. We moved to the next stage and I asked him to sketch out what he wanted the wheel to look like. It was very different, work had gone down to 60 per cent; family up to 20 per cent, with friends adding an extra 10 per cent to that, with 10 per cent left over for something a bit transcendental. He was talking about taking up mountaineering again, which he’d enjoyed in his twenties, but also confessed to wondering about going back to church. He’d been brought up a Roman Catholic and, to my surprise, told me he’d once considered going into the priesthood.
The week after we’d discussed all this, Trevone was clearly disgruntled as we began our session. ‘I’ve been thinking about last week,’ he began. ‘It’s all very well me saying I want to cut my work down from 80 per cent to 60 per cent, but how am I going to do that? We’ve got the merger, new regulation and Brexit to navigate.’ Hearing these words, my heart sank. Just like Yulia – but more profoundly I felt – Trevone seemed to be a leader who assumed that, in the end, he had to do everything himself. Even when, as in his case, he had hundreds of people working for him, some of them paid, literally, millions.
When I raised this, Trevone seemed to get it, but I felt there was something blocking him. I got an inkling of what that might be as we sketched out what a new style of leadership might look like. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud wrote about how jokes can give away our true, unconscious feelings. On one occasion Trevone muttered about how what we were talking about sounded like semi-retirement. I asked what he meant. ‘Well, it sounds like an easy life, doesn’t it?’ I tried to probe this but he brushed it off. I tried another way, asking him to draw the images that came to mind when he thought of going back to work full-time. He stepped up to the whiteboard and drew an old factory, then a treadwheel, then a storm – all black clouds and zig-zags of lightning.
As I explained earlier, sometimes my questions seem to come straight from the heart, and I found myself asking him, ‘Do you enjoy work?’
He looked at me, and harrumphed.
‘That’s a stupid question.’
‘What’s the answer?’ I persisted.
He slowly capped the dry marker and sat down. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’
‘Well, now’s your chance.’
We then spoke for an hour about the fact that he’d never really enjoyed work. We went all through his employment history and I got him to do just the ‘work success and fulfilment’ parts of the Lifeline exercise that you may remember from Yulia’s story. While his success line was very high, his fulfilment line was pretty flat.
We had discovered Trevone’s pathogenic core belief: work was supposed to feel like shit. It wasn’t really clear where, in Trevone’s upbringing or early life, this notion had taken hold or why. That mattered less than his attitude to it today. As soon as he’d articulated it he saw how absurd it was and expressed a desire to change.
As we worked on this we saw how this central, if hidden, motif had influenced his hard-driving management style (everyone else should be as miserable as he was) and even his health (why not look and feel like shit as well). Oprah Winfrey has a fantastically simple but profound saying that she uses when someone is talking about how awful their husband or wife is to them. ‘Honey,’ she will drawl, reaching out to place a comforting hand on their shoulder or knee, ‘love ain’t supposed to feel bad.’ This isn’t quite true of work. Good, fulfilling, challenging work will feel hard sometimes, but not all the time. Often, most of the time even, it should feel good. Once Trevone had realised this, it affected him on a deep level.
We pulled out the glimmers of enjoyment from his Lifeline and brainstormed how he could reinforce and expand these; we explored his sense of purpose, like I had done with Oscar; and we worked on the idea of him building in time during his working week for praise (of others and himself) and celebration.
Slowly but surely over the next year Trevone began to fundamentally change who he was as a leader and how he related to work. A few months after the coaching had finished I bumped into him at a City Awards dinner. He ran over, looking fitter than I’d ever seen him. After we had chatted for a bit he sighed and said he had to get back to his table, motioning over to a group of middle-aged guys in suits, all looking a bit worse for wear. He leaned in to whisper something: ‘Some bits of work are still shit, eh?’ before bounding back to his seat, slapping people on the back as he did so.
‘Better learn balance. Balance is key.’
Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid
Trevone’s belief, that work should be hard, long and feel like shit, is a particularly insidious cultural narrative, embedded deeply into our society. Perhaps that’s why, in his coaching, we couldn’t pinpoint where it had come from; it’s such a given for so many people that it’s hard to identify a specific starting point. One of my close relatives labels the Monday–Friday alarm on his iPhone ‘Bastard Work Again’. It’s the first thing he sees when he wakes up.
We wear our near-exhaustion as a badge of honour, taking pride in how busy we are. We’re running on caffeine and quick fixes and very much live in an all-or-nothing, crash-and-burn society. Burnout is a near constant spectre, especially for those of us in leadership positions. The idea of an unstressed leader might reassure us on one level – after all, no one wants a headless chicken leading the way – but it also stirs up some subtle discomfort, too. How come they aren’t stressed out when the rest of us are? Why do they get to work normal hours when everyone else is stretched to the limit? How come they’re not answering their calls or emails immediately when we are expected to be available at everyone’s beck and call? We’re all caught up in a giant game of call my bluff, constantly teaching ourselves and each other how to treat one another.
Although Trevone’s situation was serious – secret panic attacks, exhaustion and low level clinical depression – it was also, in a sense, unremarkable. I explained in an earlier chapter that evolution cannot keep pace with the rate of progress in our society, and the simple truth is that we are simply not designed to do life at such an intense, relentless pace. With burnout on the rise (it’s estimated to cost around £255bn per year in the UK alone), it is for you to decide what balance means to you, using tools like the wheel of life to help you explore where you are and where you might want to be. ‘A Type’ personalities like Trevone typically feel allergic to the idea of slowing down – much of their identity and sense of self-worth comes from their achievements, and the treadmill of achieving needs constant updates. I introduced Trevone to the idea of being a corporate athlete, which will appeal to many people with that same A type leaning. The foundational principle of the corporate athlete mindset is that high performance in the business world has to address the whole person, as athletes do. If all we do is deal with the neck up, we’re missing some vital aspects of what it means to be at your peak.
Achieving what Loehr and Schwartz call the Ideal Performance State (IPS) requires shifting back and forth between energy output and energy renewal – and this is where we often get it wrong. The whole premise of this book is that we are the first generation in a thousand that needs to create space rather than fill it. Athletes that do not create the space to recover do not reach their potential, and this applies equally to executives. Sooner or later, the well runs dry. Stress in and of itself isn’t the issue – stress is actually what makes muscles grow stronger – but stress without disciplined, intentional recovery depletes us at best and is disastrous at worst.
The case for adopting the mindset of being a corporate athlete is pretty compelling. According to Loehr and Schwartz:
The demands on executives to sustain high performance day in and day out, year in and year out, dwarf the challenges faced by any athlete we have ever trained. The average professional athlete, for example, spends most of his time practicing and only a small percentage – several hours a day, at most – actually competing. The typical executive, by contrast, devotes almost no time to training and must perform on demand ten, 12, 14 hours a day or more. Athletes enjoy several months of off-season, while most executives are fortunate to get three or four weeks of vacation a year. The career of the average professional athlete spans seven years; the average executive can expect to work 40 to 50 years.
When we think of it that way, it makes complete sense to build in the space and strategies to support ourselves in order to keep going, especially in such a competitive environment. Nearly twenty years ago I attended an intense residential workshop called the Hoffman Process, which I sometimes recommend to clients who are in need of some deeper personal work beyond the remit of coaching (I believe a week on the Hoffman is equivalent to a year’s very good therapy). The process incorporates many valuable ideas but at its heart is the notion that we are all ‘quadrinities’, that our self is made up of four parts – the intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual, or the mind, the heart, the body and the ‘source’. Parts 1 and 2 of this book focus on the first two parts of the quadrinity – the intellectual and emotional self, and how we can create the space for each of these to be expressed best – the space to think and connect.
By looking at balance and the idea of the corporate athlete we have explored the third part of the quadrinity, the physical self. It is worth noting how the physical often gets neglected when working in an office, thanks to many corporate cultures which assume that we’ll come in, sit down at our desks and – aside from making a quick cup of coffee – hardly move about at all. Since knowledge and information work – even creative work – basically involves our brains, eyes, mouths and hands, the rest of the body is sort of just there, a tool to be used but not something that warrants paying much attention to. Many workplaces are addressing this, offering gym membership and the opportunity to get involved in sport, but with the UK’s obesity rate rising faster than in the USA, and research showing that half of adults walk less than a mile a day, it’s clear that we are not taking brilliant care of our bodies.
One of the most unaddressed aspects of our physical selves involves how much rest and sleep we get. There’s a lot of material out there about how successful leaders sleep less (they’re sometimes called the ‘sleepless elite’), and that doing so will make you a better leader too. However, there is even more information available about how many people are already feeling sleep deprived, and that their energy levels and the quality of their decision making suffer as a result. For this reason I often carry out a sleep audit with clients. I’ll return to this later.
Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist and author of Why We Sleep, tackles the prevailing cultural attitude where sleep machismo is prized. There’s a narcissism of busyness in our lives today that precludes true balance, where a balanced life would include lots of downtime, screen-free time, unscheduled white space. We equate busyness with importance, and use how little sleep we get as evidence of how important we are. ‘Sleep,’ as Walker puts it pithily in an interview, ‘has an image problem.’ Our society has created an unhelpful and inaccurate yet fairly stubborn association between sleep and laziness. Eight hours of sleep seems slothful. ‘Every disease that is killing us in the developed world has significant and many causal links to insufficient sleep,’ Walker states. Studies have found a 40 per cent increase in the risk of cancer in people who sleep less than six hours a night. Poor sleep is associated with Alzheimer’s, and research shows that treating sleep disorders in adults can delay the onset of the disease by years. Poor sleep is connected to obesity, diabetes and weight gain. One study restricted the sleep of healthy adults to four hours a night, and in just one week their blood sugar had reached levels that were pre-diabetic. A study of half a million people found a 45 per cent increased risk in developing heart disease due to inadequate sleep. In our black-and-white culture, we often prefer to do extreme things – such as attend a boot camp or do a seven-day juice cleanse – rather than simply pay attention to the quality and length of our time asleep, despite the science showing that even a small adjustment to our sleep routine can be really beneficial.
Finally, there is the fourth aspect of our ‘quadrinity’: the neglected, and often disavowed, spiritual self. I recognise this is going to be a controversial part of the book, so let me lay my cards on the table. I went through a spiritual awakening when I was around thirty years old. This involved yoga, Reiki, and a flirtation with Buddhism before I eventually found a spiritual home in the High Anglican tradition of the Church of England – a tradition replete with ritual and ceremony, but also liberal and mystical.
I recognise that overt spiritual practice and, in particular, organised religion are not for everyone. Many people see their spiritual self as being expressed through their relationships, good deeds or their connection with nature. For Loehr and Schwartz, our spiritual aspect is ‘the energy that is unleashed by tapping into one’s deepest values and defining a strong sense of purpose.’ For people in recovery from a multitude of addictions in twelve-step fellowships, it is the ‘all things to all people’ higher power.
Others believe that the word spirituality implies something more transcendent, mystical or even supernatural. Pia Mellody, one of the great recovery therapists defines it like this: ‘Spirituality is the experience of being in a relationship with a power external to you and greater than self that provides acceptance, guidance, solace and serenity.’ An allusion, I guess, to God, arguably the most mysterious space of all. My work with hundreds of people over the years leads me to strongly believe that having some sort of spiritual belief and practice – however you choose to define it – is an important part of staying grounded and balanced.
Taking an audit of your own quadrinity, seeing how you fare on the intellectual, the emotional, the physical and the spiritual, will help you gain and retain a good balance. Creating space for the parts of your quadrinity that are currently underserved won’t take away from what you achieve at work. On the contrary, as Trevone found, it will provide the foundation for a richer, deeper and more sustainable form of success.
The 2016 Health Survey for England found that our desk-bound work culture is contributing to more than eight out of ten middle-aged adults being dangerously unhealthy. How are you doing? Have you drunk the recommended two litres of water a day over the last few days? Do you get your five-a-day fruit and veg? Are you moving every couple of hours? How often do you get your heart rate up through exercise? How is your sleep? These things sound obvious and they are, and my intention isn’t to patronise. I know how easy it is to grab a coffee and croissant for breakfast, power through till lunch, take a quick afternoon break for cake to celebrate a colleague’s birthday, and round it all off with a takeaway, supermarket pizza or eating out for dinner, hydrating mostly through caffeine and alcohol while spending eight hours a day staring at a screen. Going against the grain and really taking care of ourselves requires effort and a bit of planning, and until it becomes a habit – which the evidence tells us is likely after about thirty days – it can be really hard. But, as the advert says, you’re worth it!
In addition to taking care of the physical, here are three more psychological suggestions for how to create space to inspire a more balanced life:
The search for balance should be about progress not perfection. And it should be personal. Hannah Massarella, the Founder of Bird, a consultancy that focuses on resilience, has a simple method for keeping track of her self-care practices. In the back of her notebook she writes out her ‘daily six’, a list of six small but significant well-being habits. These change depending on what she wants to focus on. When I last spoke to her, they were: go for a run, drink a smoothie, gratitude, meditate, yoga and no booze. Interestingly, her goal isn’t to do them all: ‘It’s fine, absolutely fine, not to tick all of them off,’ she says. ‘It’s far worse to do five things and then beat yourself up for the one that you missed than it is to do four and feel good about those four things. Plus, I usually get something additional done each day that isn’t on my list, such as a walk, a nap or laughter.’ By aiming to do a few small things consistently, there’s much more chance that these habits will become ingrained and part of your daily life.
ASK YOURSELF: What would be on my ‘daily six’ list? How many of them are already part of my life? Which could I focus on over the next few days?
As well as taking an audit of your ‘space for balance’ using the wheel of life, you could also explore a simple framework created by entrepreneur, author and podcaster Jonathan Fields, called ‘the three buckets’. The three buckets are for Vitality, Connection and Contribution.
If a bucket is full, life will feel wonderful. If a bucket is empty or nearly empty, there will be pain – and if two buckets are running low, pay attention to the red flashing warning sign. The Vitality bucket looks at the state of your mind and body, and Jonathan lists mindfulness, sleep, exercise, diet, gratitude, getting comfortable with the unknown, nature, slowing down, authenticity and a growth mindset as the main levers of this bucket.
To fill your Connection bucket, Fields suggests the following: figuring out your social orientation (are you more introverted, extra-verted or an ambivert – a mix of the two?); finding ‘your people’ – people who speak the same ‘language’ about life as you and with whom you can deeply connect; having clear boundaries; knowing who and what fills you up and makes you come alive; doing a digital detox; and looking at the different ways that love and connection are present in your life. You could also try using some of the tools from Part 2 of this book.
Work naturally fits into the Contribution bucket – since this bucket is all about what you add or contribute to the world – but so do such things as volunteering, looking at your strengths, figuring out your values, mentoring someone, and doing acts of kindness for others.
The simple premise is that the fuller our buckets, the better our lives – and it is up to us to keep them filled, plug any leaks and, above all, keep the idea of a well-balanced life simple.
ASK YOURSELF: What does my wheel of life tell me about my balance? What might I want to change? How are my three buckets? What can I do to fill the one(s) that need filling?
Finally, I want to return to the issue of sleep. I have found, again and again, that it is an underlying factor in all sorts of performance issues. Without adequate rest, and a feeling of being refreshed, you won’t be able to make use of any space that you create to think, do or connect because you will not have the energy or presence to do so. If you are wired, and pushing on through exhaustion you will think poorly, not deliver to your best and neglect and let people down.
I worked once with a high-flying executive called Philippe who felt that one thing holding him back was that other people were able to get into the office before him, so were more visible and able to deliver more. He had tried getting up really early, but after a few weeks had felt shattered and had gone back to his usual sleeping habits.
First I outlined to him the consensus research on sleep – most people need a good eight hours sleep but some need a little more and others less. Some very rare people need a lot less. The former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for example, famously slept only four hours a night, and it didn’t seem to dim her focus or productivity. However, most of us aren’t like Maggie and, in the long run, having less than your own, individually required quota of sleep is unsustainable. It isn’t about ‘will power’ or tricks and techniques, it’s about what your body needs.
Philippe said that he felt he needed to sleep until 7.30 am at the latest. He said he went to bed ‘around 11 pm’. I asked him to keep a detailed sleep diary. I also asked him to let himself sleep in at the weekend and wake up naturally. (His wife wasn’t so pleased about this but she agreed to help in the end, for the purposes of research.)
Overall, he said he felt OK, but was a bit tired by Friday, and actually quite refreshed by the end of the weekend. So as not to draw conclusions based on just one example, I had him repeat the experiment for the next three weeks. The results were basically the same.
I suggested that the diary indicated that he needed about 8½ hours of sleep. This was how long he slept at the weekend if he didn’t set his alarm. If we added up his sleeping time during the working week he was getting about 15 per cent less sleep than he needed. Some experts say that sleep is as important as breathing to our metabolism. Imagine if you were getting 15 per cent less oxygen than you need. If you’ve ever climbed up a really high mountain you’ll know the effects of altitude sickness – symptoms akin to flu, carbon monoxide poisoning, or a bad hangover.
We talked a bit about how he spent his time before going to sleep, and he recognised that it was less about what he needed to do, or even enjoyed doing, and more about what he was used to doing. His night-time routine was not a choice he had consciously made; it was just a habit.
This exercise provided the space Philippe needed to become aware of what he was doing and to rethink things. He set out to create a new habit. First he needed a clear goal. He decided he wanted to get up a full hour earlier so he could extend his working day. He also accepted his need to have 8½ hours sleep a night. Seemingly impossibly conflicting goals? Not really. He committed to switching everything off and going to sleep at 11 pm every night. This meant that he still had two hours after the kids were settled down to do some tidying, look at Facebook and watch a TV show, or even a movie. It took about a month for him to get used to this new routine but with perseverance and discipline he did it.
Some other strategies are: establish a regular bedtime and routine, and try to go to bed and wake up at a similar time each day; lower the temperature of your room by a couple of degrees (the ideal room temperature is thought to be 20º Celsius); acknowledge that caffeine interferes with REM sleep so monitor the effect that it has on you (lots of people find it messes with their sleep if drunk after 3 pm, but figure out what works for you); finally, consider turning screens off an hour before bed – not only is this good for your mind (giving it time to wind down so you won’t go to bed so wired), but you also lessen exposure to the blue light from the screens which inhibits the release of sleep-inducing hormones. If you must look at a laptop screen in the evenings, install a red light removal app, such as f.lux.
When I spoke to Philippe a few months later he said his new routine now came completely naturally and he felt more refreshed and energised at work. He could even go out late one night in the week and still get up at his usual time without feeling too bad. Just by becoming aware of his patterns and habits, and committing to a quite small change in behaviour, he had literally created significantly more space in his life.
ASK YOURSELF: Did I sleep well last night? Deep down, in my bones, how tired am I right now? What is my night-time regime – and why? What would I like my sleep goals to be? How am I going to make that happen?