Modern Wisdom - #194 - Gail Golden - Ending The Struggle For Work-Life Balance

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Gail Golden is a management psychologist and an author. A balanced life is a happy life, and yet many people are overworked, underslept and have little time left over for relaxation. Obviously something isn't working here. Expect to learn how to decide what's important, why embracing mediocrity can be a tool rather than a weakness, when to say no, how to curate your workplace and much more... Sponsor: Shop Tailored Athlete’s full range at https://link.tailoredathlete.co.uk/modernwisdom (FREE shipping automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Buy Curating Your Life - https://amzn.to/2NZw6eI  Check out Gail's Website - https://www.gailgoldenconsulting.com/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Gail Golden and we are talking about work life balance. A balance life is a happy life and yet many people are overworked and are under slept and have little time left for relaxation. Obviously, something isn't working. So expect to learn how to decide what's important while embracing mediocrity can be a tool rather than a weakness, when to say no, how to curate your workplace, and much more. I know an absolute metric ton of people that need to improve their work life balance. So hopefully today you'll pick up some tools that will help you to let go of the work tether and enjoy your evenings

a little bit more. Big shout out to everyone who tuned in on Monday, we broke the all-time single day plays record. We landed in the top 20. An Apple Podcast chart is so good. Just an amazing response to the episode with Ollie Marchon. If you haven't listened to that, go back and check it out. It was phenomenal. Also don't forget, the ultimate life hacks list is still available for free over 200 ways that you can upgrade your existence head to

chriswillx.com slash life hacks and you can download your copy today for absolutely nothing and it'll make your life infinitely better, it'll make your life better at least a little bit better. But for now it's time for the wise and wonderful gail Golden. I'm joined by Gail Golden, Gail. Welcome to the show. I'm delighted to be here. Very good to have you here. Talking about work life balance today, 21st century I think a lot of people listening will understand when work starts to creep into life, right? The barrier gets blurred between what you're supposed to do by day and what you want to do by evening. So your background, the things that you do, the people you've worked with, what are the

common problems that you see people encountering with a work-life balance? You know, it's a great question. So very quickly, my background is that for the first half of my career, I worked as a psychotherapist, working with all different kinds of people who were struggling with various sorts of psychological and emotional and relationship problems in their lives. In my career, I decided I was ready to do something different, so I went back to school, got my MBA, and since then, I've been working with executive coaching and business leadership, and different kinds of people with different kinds of issues.

The thing that began to dawn on me was that although these two kinds of work and two populations were very different, there was a problem that crossed over those two populations, which was that almost everybody, almost all the time, felt overwhelmed, exhausted, inadequate, and as if they were not meeting their own or other people's expectations. Whether you were the senior executive of a global Fortune 500 company, or whether you were a stay-at-home parent hanging around with little children, that same theme kept coming up. And meanwhile, we've been talking about work-life balance forever. And I thought, wait a minute, something is not working here.

This concept of work-life balance, I don't know anybody who has a balanced life, myself included. And then we somehow imagine that other people do, and that just makes us feel even more inadequate and overwhelmed than out of control. Maybe it's time to start thinking about this problem in a different way. I loved your analogy in the book where you were talking about how you always look at other people, like they've got it together. You know, I think you were talking about someone that was learning to play the guitar and there was a PhD student and did this and had a family and was altruistic, we can't endure

in sathole all that stuff. And from your view, he had it together and the mother of five who had seven dogs and parachutes on a weekend, she had it together and everything else. But internally, everyone's just a chaotic mess. And I think this asymmetry between what we see of other people and what we see of ourselves is one of the big explanations for why we often feel inadequate, right? You only get to see the highlight reel of everyone else, but you get to see your own blunders from the front row seat. That is so true. I would say the phrase that I often use is don't compare your own insides to other people's outsides.

And we do that all the time. And I'll tell you one of the big realizations for me was as I was doing that, looking at the people, the kinds of people you're describing and thinking, oh my gosh, you know, they're so amazing. And then one day I began to realize that there were people who were looking at me as if I was one of those people who

had it all together and was doing it all. And I thought, my God, don't they know what a train I am? I'm so competent. I don't know what I'm doing. Sometimes I got to work and I haven't got any pants on. You know, I just, let's, we've all done. I've faking it half the time, you know, all of this stuff. But that made me think, well, okay, if other people think that's my life, then I'm probably mistaken about those other people who seem to have it all together. And that got me thinking then about, okay, how could we really move towards a life that felt more meaningful, more focused, more using my energy for the things that really matter? And that's what I started to work on. You touched on a keyword, the energy. What was the book that you suggested that you said

started your journey? I can't remember it. Absolutely. It's a wonderful book. I recommend it to almost every one of my clients. It's called the Power of Fold Engagement by two guys, Lower and Schwartz. And these two guys started out. They were athletic coaches who were specializing in working with athletes who had fallen off their peak performance. They were not able to perform at the level they previously had been able to reach. So the question was, what's going on with these people? They clearly have the capacity, why are they not performing at that level?

And out of that work, they developed some principles which they then began to apply to the people they call corporate athletes, high profile leaders in high-stress jobs. And one of their key, what, recommendations, one of their key findings was, don't talk about managing time. You can't manage time, you get 24 hours a day. There's nothing you could do about it. It just keeps coming. So it's not useful to think about managing time.

Instead start thinking about managing energy. And how do I want to utilize my energy? And for me, that was a very powerful message because it changed the question for me. If somebody comes to me and says, hey, Gail, we'd like you to work on this project. We think you'd be great. Will you do it? I don't ask myself, do I have the time for that? Because it's really easy to cheat and say, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm free between 2 and 2

and 3 in the morning so I can do that. Instead, I started to ask myself two questions. The first one is, do I want to use my energy for that? My finite amount of energy that I've got, do I want to use it for that? And secondly, given that I don't have a lot of empty space in my life where I don't know what to do with myself, I have to ask myself, if I'm going to take on that project, what am I going to do less of? And if I can't come up with an honest answer to that,

then I can't take on the project. And so those two questions, do I want to use my energy for that? And if I do, what am I going to do less of? It's really a good way of not turning myself into that over committed, frenzied person who feels so out of control, right? I couldn't agree more. The number of times where I've just said yes to things because I want novelty, because it sounds like an adventure, because it sounds like something that might

be fun or interesting or different, or I explain it away as hedging. Oh, well, this, this is me playing the field. It's going to, I'm distributing my portfolio more effectively or it's multiple revenue streams, man, or whatever it might be. All the different ways, all the different ways that it comes through. We recently had Greg McEwan author of essentialist on the podcast. And I think a lot of your ideas and his align, which is that you need to focus on the vital few and not the trivial many. But as you've identified, we just like the idea of new and it's easier to say yes than it isn't weird that it's easier to commit to doing a thing than to say no because doing the thing actually involves a state change.

It's easier to say, yeah, I'll do, I'll take the kids to school, I'll do the dog walk, I'll add this project in, yeah, I'll do the presentation. It's weird, isn't it? Yeah. Well, yes, and look, I think, I think this is a simple idea which is very complicated to make it work in your life. And that is another one of my basic principles, is that, you know, we're not talking about simple problems, simple problems, people fix those. These are complicated, difficult issues. Saying no, I mean, what makes that so hard?

First of all, as you say, sometimes the thing looks really exciting and appealing and delightful. And yeah, I'd love to do that. In the same way that a museum curator who's putting together a good exhibit, which is the analogy that I use throughout my book, that curator has all kinds of beautiful works of art that they could put into the exhibit, but most of them aren't going to fit. And so finding where to say, yeah, you know, that's a great Rembrandt, but it doesn't belong in my Van Gogh exhibit. You know, that's the challenge that we have. So it's both our own desire for all these things. It's also our inner voice that says, well, what's a matter with you? Other people can manage to get

all of this done. You should be able to do it as well. And then there's the fact we don't want to disappoint other people. We don't want to let people down. We don't want to have people not like us. And so that's another piece I think that makes it hard to say no. That's such a good framing there. Those those last two are really, really important. The fact that you don't want to let other people down and also that you see other people being able to get stuff done you presume that you will upregulate your productivity or downregulate your sleep as appropriate to fit stuff in right it just is it's and I've done it for years and years and years because you see your own inefficiencies

for years and years and years, because you see your own inefficiencies from that front row sea. And you're like, wow, I spend 45 minutes a day on YouTube or Instagram or whatever. All I need to do is say yes to the project and get rid of the Instagram. And you're like, you need to start from where you are with regards to your efficiency, not where you think that you could get to if you added this thing in. And this is Chris Sparks, past modern wisdom podcast guest, has a strategy very similar to yours, which is in order to pick something up, you have to put something down. Absolutely. What you're talking about actually feeds right into the other one of my very

favorite learnings from the powerful engagement. When they studied these athletes, what they found is the most highly productive, high achieving people. Have a rhythm where they manage their energy, that is sprint and recover. Sprint means you do something full force, you work at it as hard as you can, whether it's a physical activity or a mental activity or putting on the best podcast you can possibly figure out how to do. You do that with everything you've got for a defined period of time and then you stop and recover and rest. And that's how highly productive people get things done. Meanwhile, we live in a society that says,

oh, I've worked 24 or 7. I never have to take a break. I run, run, run, run, run, run, run until I drop. And that's a recipe for inefficiency. So going back to your idea about I'm spending 45 minutes a day looking at YouTube, you have to. You'll need that. That's your recovery time. If you don't do that, you're going to be less productive. So instead of doing it and feeling guilty about it, you say, okay, I'm going to work hard for 90 minutes, two hours and then I'm going to go look at YouTube for 15, 30 minutes, get my recovery, get my break and then come back and work again. That's how people get it done.

Looking at Cow Newport's deep work, I think he found in that that even the absolute peak performers of knowledge work could squeeze out top end four to six hours of focused deep work per day. Right. Right. What does it say? What does it tell us that the average the average work at the full-time work is at work for eight hours? I don't know. What does that say? Well, it, I mean, it certainly says we aren't going to be spending all of those eight hours doing that deep work that you're talking about. People just can't or don't. The same as somebody who's hockey players when they play hockey, they're not on the ice all the time.

They skate like mad men and then they go off for a few minutes and then they rotate and they're rotating them in and ice all the time. They skate like mad men and then they go off for a few minutes and then they rotate, they're rotating them in and out all the time. That's the model that we need to learn to use. Now, that doesn't mean that in your eight hours at work, you're not doing other productive kinds of work or connecting with coworkers, making relationships that lead to collaboration

and creativity, just spending a little time reflecting, doing the do-da work that has to get done as part of any workplace, that the low intensity work. So it doesn't mean that, you know, for four to six hours a day you're doing nothing at work, but you won't be doing deep work the whole time. That's for 100% sure. I get it. Okay, so we're going to do a work-life balance, M-O-T. Where do we start?

You first, you have to tell me, where do you, where do you, where do you, M-O-T? Oh, God. I forget that you're right. So it's when you take your car in for a service. It's just where are we beginning? We need to frame the fact that someone has terrible work life balance. How do they know? How do they know? Why do they start? Right. Okay. Sorry about that. Not for me. It's fine. It's anger sizing everything. You know, I don't believe that America doesn't have MOTs. Well, you know what? It means something entirely different in the United States. And that's why I thought I've hopefully shouldn't ask. I don't want to know what it is.

But it's not terrible, but it's very different. Oftentimes, members of the Jewish community will use the phrase MOT, which means member of the tribe. And it's a way of identifying other Jews. They couldn't have been. It could have been more different. Imagine if you took your car in and you were like, I really want to, I need to get my car sorted.

Would you be able to give it an MOT and then you come back and there's just someone Jewish sat there that was like, Hey, I'm your new friend. I'm here to be friends with you. Oh, no, we are service. We are doing a work-life balance service. Right, okay. So, as I say, it's not hard to identify when it's out of work. You feel bad. You feel

lousy. You feel inadequate. You feel like everybody else is doing more than you're doing. That something is not right about your life. And by the way, your suggestion that we do this to ourselves all the time, we say, oh, yeah, I can sleep less. Really bad idea. Really bad idea. Both psychologically and physically, a recipe for breakdown. So not a good idea. So you start with that discomfort. I'm, you know, this is not working for me. And then my curating model says the first thing you have to do is to figure out what is your exhibit about? Okay, what is this exhibit you're trying to design? What's it about? At this particular time in your life, what matters to you?

What are you passionate about? What are you focused on or what should you be focused on? And that, of course, changes over your lifetime. Your exhibit at 25 is going to be probably quite different from when you're 75. But you need to do that work to sort of understand what are the things that really matter. And this is very individual and customized. And I was just talking with a woman this morning for whom one of the main things her

exhibit is about right now is making a lot of money. She's the main earner in her family. She's got two young children and she wants to put her energy into a place that is going to make a lot of money that sets her family up to be comfortable from now on. That might or might not be what drives you or what drives me. But for her, that's what her exhibit is about right now. And she then should make choices based on that value, that importance for her. Somebody else, their exhibit might be about, I don't know, how can I work towards better racial equity in the United States, which is a very big

issue for us right now? For that person, they need to then organize their exhibit differently. So number one, it's what my exhibit is about. And then just like a museum curator, you look around at all the stuff you could be putting in your exhibit or you have been putting in your exhibit. And you see that it's kind of a cluttered mess if you put all that stuff in. So you have to start making decisions

about what doesn't go into your exhibit. And it doesn't mean it goes in the trash. It may mean that it gets put in the back room for now, but it's not going to be in your exhibit right now. I can give you an example. When I mentioned, I went back to school mid-career and got my MBA. For two years mentioned I went back to school, a mid-career, and got my MBA. For two years, I was going to school full-time

and running a private practice full-time. I had two full-time commitments. And so I had to do a couple of things. One was I went to my husband and my one son who were still living at home and said, I can't cook for the next two years. What's up, how did that go, Don? When I went down great, my husband said, fine, I got it.

You bought a microwave. So it's my favorite. I've never had such a bloke solution, isn't it? It's a terrific solution and it worked great. And for those two years, he did it. I also went to all my friends and said, I'm going to be a social dropout for the next two years. I will not be able to hang with you guys. I love

you. I'll see you in two years. And that worked out fine with everybody except one friend who was really angry and said, you know, I must not mean anything to you. That's how you're going to treat me. And I lost that friend and I'm sad about that. But frankly, it was a curation that I had to do. Those were things I had to eliminate from my life in order to do the things that my exhibit was about, which were running my practice, going to school and trying not to completely destroy my family

in the process. That was it. So number one, what's your exhibit about? Number two, what am I not going to do? And then there's a whole process for how you eliminate stuff by saying no, by delegating, by stepping back from things. Oh, there's all kinds of ways you can do that. The next step is for many people the most difficult. Because these are the things I'm going to have them in my exhibit. I have to have them in. But they're not the most important thing. So in using the museum idea, they're off in the side room somewhere. If people really want to look at those things they can go in, but it's not

the focus of the exhibit. In the real life parallel, it means that I make a conscious choice that I am going to do those things just well enough. What are some examples of things like that that tend to be in people's lives? That you're going to do just well enough? Well, again, it varies from person to person. I mean, everyone's exhibit is unique. I can tell you, for my life, pretty much my whole life, housework has gone into the just well enough piece of my exhibit. My home is not immaculate. My, it's never going to be on the cover of architectural digest

magazine. It, you know, it's not, you know, nobody's coming and condemned it yet, but it's, you know, my attitude is, if it's visible, I want it to be reasonably tidy if you open a closet, it's on you, what you're going to find. I mean, it's such a good heuristic. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's just good enough. For somebody else, for whom that really matters, that's part of their peace of mind or part of their brand, then they should do that to perfection. But it's not part of my, the most important things in my exhibit. In the workplace, it's harder to do this.

But again, we have to, I would like to read every professional journal in my profession and be up to date on all the research that has any relevance to my work. I don't. I don't. I read two or three journals most of the time. It's just good enough. Does that mean things are going to fall through the cracks? Yeah, sometimes there's going to be an important article. I'm going to miss it. But that's what I have to do in order to have the energy for the things I want to be great at. That's what I have to do in order to have the energy for the things I want to be great at. When I want to be provocative, I call this embracing mediocrity because it seems to me most of us have a terribly hard time doing this because we've absorbed these lessons that say, you know, if you're going to do something, be great at it.

The good is the enemy of the great. You know, well, I say the good is the friend of the great, because the reality is most of what we do in our life, we do mediocre. We just do, we don't have the bandwidth to be great at most of what we do. It's just good enough. I don't ever want to be great at doing the housework. My cleaner during lockdown, my cleaner hasn't been able to come, and I'm barely even competent,

but I am doing it. Being correct, good, being the enemy of the great, or the friend of the great, that's up for debate, but I don't think that anyone can debate that perfect is the antithesis of progress. If we try and be perfect with everything that we do, we never take the product to market. As we're recording this, only yesterday I released my website for the first time, right? And there's stuff on there where I'm like, oh, that animation could be a little bit more of this thing. Maybe I could have a slightly more sophisticated tracking pixel

up. Maybe that logo, if I sent it back off, but I've done this before. And it is the mark of an unmatured person delivering products that they don't realize that minimum viable product is what it says it is. It is the minimum to get it to market and then you iterate from there. It's like jumping and learning to fly on the way down. Obviously, you can jump too early, but I think in my experience, people are far too prepared to use their perfectionism as a proxy for procrastination, that if they continue to perfect on this thing

and iterate on the stuff that they know doesn't matter, they never actually have to look at the stuff which does matter that they're uncomfortable with. People are happy to do name generation. I'm sure you've fallen prey to this at some point coming up with the name for a management company or whatever it might be. You'll do name generation, brainstorming,

take eight hours of meetings once a week for the next two months. But then actually getting down to the nitty-gritty of like, okay, so who's looking after clients and who's looking after this and how we're going to structure the blah, blah, blah. People don't want to do that, but they'll play around with logos and names. There's people that are listening, that are cringing at the fact that they've got a thing they want to do. They want to start a business, a blog, a blog, a podcast, or whatever. And they've been mincing over the name or the logo or the,

something that doesn't what type of webcam, whatever it might be. And it's like, that isn't what people care about and also isn't what brings value. So yeah, I like the good facilitating the great. Yes, yes, exactly. You've made so many points just now that I just totally want to agree with.

One of the things I suggest is you have to look at the ROI, the return on investment. We can put 75 hours into creating a logo with 10 high paid people in the room. Like, really? What's the ROI on that? Not so good. Not so good.

Right? I can spend an awful lot of time making my house immaculately perfectly clean. Well, you know, I charge a pretty good hourly fee as a consultant. Those hours, do I want to be spending them, you know, with a toothbrush, scrubbing the underside of my bathroom sink or something? No, you know? So I think, look, there are things where perfection are close to it matter. If you are my neurosurgeon and you are going to be inside my brain, I want you to be a perfectionist. I don't want you to be saying, eh, close enough. Yeah, that's about right. That was how it was when I went in, right? So, I mean, there are places in

life where perfectionism really matters. You're the engineer and you're designing a bridge that I'm going to cross over. You know, I want it to be 100% certain that it's safe. But, as I said, most of what we do in our lives is just good enough. And then we waste energy feeling bad about that. Instead of saying, that's my choice. That's not where I'm putting my best energy. I'm just choosing to be good enough in that stuff.

And then, if you do those two things, you say no to the things that you really don't want to be doing in your life right now, or maybe you want to, but they don't fit. You let yourself be good enough on all those things where good enough is good enough. You will have the energy for your greatness, for the things that are important, the things that are your legacy, the things that really matter to you. And you won't have to feel inadequate and overwhelmed and exhausted all the time because you'll have enough energy for the things that really matter. And you'll hang those paintings front and center in your exhibit where people can see them.

That's the model. The satisfaction that you get from those paintings, right, from the ones. They're so disproportionately more than if the house was cleaner, if you were a tiny, if you were 2% less body fat, if you were whatever it might be, you know. Like the fitness side of things is an interesting one coming from the fitness industry myself. I see so many people who want multiple goals, some of which compete and almost all of which can't be achieved at the same time. So I was this morning, I was chatting to a buddy Andrew,

and he was asking about some stuff to do with diet, because he wanted to be a little bit leaner because of this. But he's also got an ultra marathon, an endurance long distance event that he's got coming up, plus he's on furlough, but about to go back to work. And I was like, dude, like just pick your battle. Whatever battle it is, it doesn't matter, but pick it, get this race out of the way,

crush the race, and then get lean, or get yourself back to work, nail work, get into your work routine, and then prep for the race, or then do, you know what I mean? And that's, you're right, you're life. You're right, you're life. You should have, Gail, you should have said it. My video guy, video guy Dean, the guy that will be editing this very video,

I'm not even kidding you, an hour ago from now, he sent me a video, title of the video, what is work life balance? And as I do, search the title of the lady that I'm about to podcast with and search what the subtitle of that book is curating your life ending the struggle for work life balance. And he was like that's so freaky so but this isn't

Serendipity this isn't coincidence this is like sheer volume of this is how Often these situations happen with the, you know, and it's everybody that's listening knows when they go too much. Okay, so we understand that we're not balancing with Kira. We've decided that there's some things that are important. We've identified those through passion. We have learned to say no to some of the bad things.

We've also learned, we kind of touched on it there, but embracing mediocre it also includes delegating, right? It does. Yes, delegating can be, it can be part of both done saying no, you just give it away entirely and somebody else deals with it from then on. Delegating is in some sense, you still remain involved, but somebody else is doing most or all of the work. And of course that, if you're doing that as part of the good enough piece, what that means is they may not do it

as well as you would, or exactly the same way you would. And then you have a choice, you can micromanage them, which means you end up doing it anyway, and they end up frustrated. You're doing more. You end up. Exactly.

Exactly. Or you can say, good enough is. So when I started my business now as a coach and leadership consultant, I hire other people to work for me sometimes doing psychological assessments on people perhaps who are applying for a very senior level job and the company wants a really good assessment of, you know, what's the house this guy put together, or a woman? And so, you know, you do give the assessments, you evaluate the results, and then you write a report.

So this person who was working for me would write the report, and he would send it to me because I co-sign it, so I always want to see how it looks. And it wasn't really written quite the way I would write it. It wasn't that it was bad or that it was wrong. It just, you know, the turn of phrase, it wasn't quite the same. And I would have done more of this and less of that. And at the beginning I was doing all this redlining and rewriting, and then I'd thought, wait a minute, you know, I'm paying this person to write the report. There is nothing wrong

writing and then I thought wait a minute, you know, I'm paying this person to write the report. There is nothing wrong with the report that he's written. It just doesn't sound exactly like Gale Golden. Well, that's okay. Let it go. And it's that learning how to delegate and let other people do things their own way to their own standard. That's the art of it. And so many people have trouble with that. That's a really important insight that I hope that a lot of the people that are listening, especially the young entrepreneurs or people that have a desire to go into business, that Red Pill took me a decade to swallow. We used to say, me and my business partner used to talk about, we would an ongoing joke about if you want a job doing properly, do it yourself.

Yes. And here's the absolute perfect example of that. So I run club nights, that's what I've done for the last 14 years, I get people drunk in nightclubs. And we were the directors, I've been the director since I started, I founded the company director of the company for 14 years. And me and my business partner, every Saturday for four years, without a break, 210 Saturdays in a row until I had a stomach bug that meant that I couldn't, I couldn't be at work. Literally, I had to be dragged away by a virus. We would turn up at 11 a.m. at the club, let ourselves in and do stuff like set up the inflatables because if we delegated it to someone I knew that maybe the inflatable would just be off to the left a little bit and then there's a particular way that they have to put the cable ties around the

Barriers outside and there'll be a ton of the guys that work for me that are listening and thinking yeah I remember that bit and I remember that bit and I remember that bit. And that took me when I look back now, that was my mid-twenties. Every Saturday I wrote off the daytime, I never had a Saturday daytime. I used to know off by heart the different radio presenters that would present on the radio because I'd know who was presenting on my way in,

then who was presenting while I was in there, then who was presenting as I left. I hate the radio, the radio sucks. But my point is that I sacrificed so much, not only of life, or I could have been enjoying life, but that wasn't my highest calling within the business. I could have given that to any student that I could have paid eight pounds an hour to,

they would have got some extra hours out of it, and I could have added value in the business in some of the places that only I can, but because I wasn't prepared to relinquish, I wasn't prepared to delegate and let go of control, what ended up happening? I ended up wasting four years of my life, sat in a club, throwing, trying to throw bits of rope

over the top of awnings so that we can pull you up and inflatable and not driving more trade for the business. So that is, that's the example for you there. Totally. You know, one of my clients years ago taught me a very interesting phrase. He was a senior executive in a bank and he said, his motto was, only do what only you can do. Now, that's aspirational. Everybody has to take

off the garbage from time to time. You know what I mean? Nobody can only do what they are uniquely qualified or talented to do. But using it as a goal, only do what only you can do is a really good rule for curating your life, for figuring out what you should be putting your energy into. And your story about you spending all this time throwing ropes over things, I mean, absolutely classic. It's absolutely right. Yeah.

You know, it is delegation pieces often a very big issue for somebody in business who's had a promotion. And you get promoted because you're really good at what you've been doing in your job. And then you go up one level. And it's the most normal thing in the world, so that you want to continue doing what got you promoted, which is what the former job was about, except that's not your job anymore. And other people are supposed to be doing that job now, and you have got to get out of the weeds and up to the next level,

where you are overseeing, supervising, directing, guiding, inspiring, coaching, and not doing the work yourself. One of the most difficult challenges for people when they get promoted to a more senior role. Relinquishing that control, it is really, really difficult. Yes.

And, you know, I feel, for the people who don't know the sensation, it's almost like quite a mindful activity, the mindfulness gap of when you feel the tension sort of arrive in your body and it sort of comes up through your stomach and you feel your shoulders come up and you almost sort of move forward toward the thing that you're doing. And that's the sensation that I get some, like I say, looking at this website,

it's kind of consuming me for the last couple of weeks. Oh, that thing, and I can feel myself, and I'm like, is it good enough? Yeah, is, is it good enough? Yeah, is, that's fine. And that just allows us to roll forward. So I think you've got a really nice framework there with helping people to relinquish their time. So we've embraced mediocrity. How can we start to choose and live our

greatness? Yes. So that's, I mean, in many ways, for, well, I was going to say that's the fun part, except it's not always fun. So, first of all, figuring out your greatness is sometimes hard. Some people have so many things they're good at, or so many things they love doing, that it's hard to focus it down. And you may say, well, gee, whiz, I'd love to have that problem of being great at 17 things, but it's a problem. It's a challenge to let go of things. And I think some of us feel like, if I have a talent in this area, I'm obligated to use it. And then that feels like I'm somehow failing myself or others if I don't make use of this ability I have. But Leonardo da Vinci, who was

one of the most talented and multi-talented people in the history of the world, and even Leonardo wasn't good at everything, wasn't great at everything, you know. He made choices and he did different things at different times in his life. So, figuring out, first of all, what is my talent, what am I, what am I, what am I gifts, what am I good at? The other thing that's very real is, what's my opportunity? You know, am I in a place and at the time when I can actually pursue this because we tend to overestimate, you know, the individuals' abilities and drive and underestimate the reality that your context is going to limit you in many cases or say not now, maybe later on, but not right now. So, what are my talents? What are the opportunities available to me? And what is my passion? What do I find I'm thinking about and talking about

and longing to do? And you look for the intersection of those things to figure out what the greatness is. And again, for right now. So that's a whole process. And it can be quite complicated. And it could take a while to figure it out. And as in, in my case, I mean, what I was working on being great at for the first half of my career was being the greatest psycho therapist I could be, which

is really hard, by the way, and takes a long time. And I got to be really good at it. And then I got tired of it and it was time to to to reach for something else. And that's what I did. Let him go of our past epochs. Can be super challenging. I had a discussion with Tucker Maxx who famously founded the fratire literacy genre, which is kind of young bros, partying and getting drunk and stuff like that. And that, because he was New York Times bestselling author three or four times over with that particular type of book, and then he drapped his identity around in it. And he found it really challenging to become who he was next.

You know, he wanted to be a husband, a father, a family man, a CEO, a business owner, and you have these old labels and these epochs, right? And everyone knows, everyone that's listening has got that friend that's still stuck in the identity they were when they were at school or at college or university. Oh yeah, it's painful. It's painful to say.

Yeah, the captain of the football team, you know, I mean. I would have made it. There you go. So there's that identifying your greatness at this time. And then living your greatness, how are you going to go for it? My husband is a musician and he teaches music students and his observation is talent. Absolutely, you need talent but you can predict who is going to be a really great musician much more on the basis of their work ethic, their discipline, their willing to do what has to be done. More so than their talent. And you can be probably a second rate talent with first rate discipline. And you're going to get further ahead

than the first rate talent with second rate discipline. So it's hard work to be great at something. And you really have to be willing to make the sacrifices, to do what it takes, to manage your procrastination, to manage your distractability, to stay on task, to stay focused. And as I said, there can be great joy in that. But it also is hard work. It means not doing other things that you might also enjoy doing. And again, I want to go back to it. To me, that doesn't mean that this is the only thing you do,

that you just, you know, 24-7, you're working on that, not at all. You take your breaks, you have some fun, you fool around something. When I was writing my book, I was very disciplined about it, because I knew that was the only way I was going to get rid of my head chunks of time, set aside that this is what I do. And I remember one afternoon, I think it was a four-hour chunk. I was about two hours into it and I thought, you know, I just need to take a little break. I'm going to go watch television for a few minutes. And two hours later, I was still watching

television. So that, I mean, that happens, right? And the point is at that point I can beat myself up and say, oh, I'm such a loser, I'm never going to get my book done. Or I can say, I guess I needed to do that. So I did it. So tomorrow I get back on track. And I have to have a whole chapter in the book called Busting Loose, which is about the fact that even when you're a highly disciplined person, you have to cheat sometimes. You have to do the little things that break the rules, and the trick is to figure out

what are the little things, not the big black awful things that are going to be irreparable, but the little things where you can dip your toe into mischief and then get back on track and Give yourself room to do that How do you draw the line yourself between taking a deserved break and Pushing a lack of discipline too far so that you tumble into

Undiscipline and start to build bad habits. How do you self-discipline? You know it's a very good question and it's a no-once thing because again, I think if you try to force yourself to be on task every single minute, you're going to fail. So we need to give ourselves some room to fool around from time to time to do something silly to waste time Look, I suppose part of it is looking and seeing how many days in a row did I do that or how many hours in a row? It kind of reminds me you know wait watchers, which isn't the organization that helps people get to a healthy wait They have a wonderful saying that it doesn't in the United States

It doesn't matter what you do or what you eat on Thanksgiving day, which is a day of overeating. It matters what you eat on the day after Thanksgiving. The idea being on Thanksgiving day, you're going to eat what you feel like eating. That's what the day is for. But the next day you get back on track. You get back on eating the men in the way they want to eat to be a healthy person. If you use Thanksgiving as an excuse to overeat for the next three months, you're in trouble. If it's one day, you're not in trouble. So part of it is looking at that ability to bounce back to say, okay, that's enough of that back to work.

And then there are tricks you can use. For example, you look at a task and it looks so big and so daunting. It's like, oh my gosh, I can never get that done. And one of the tricks is to chunk it down into manageable pieces. Take your website, for example, the whole building of that website, I'm sure, was a massive project. So, you know, if you had found yourself having difficulty starting with that, you could say, well, what's the first thing I need to do?

Maybe I need to reserve a website. So, do that piece. That's all. You know, then I'll think about the next step. And then, and by the way, rewarding congratulate myself as I accomplish each of the steps along the way. It's much more manageable than looking at the whole big mountain and saying, oh my gosh, it's too much, I guess, I'm just going to go and watch some more cartoons on television

or something like that. So that chunking piece is a piece that we have learned really enables people to stay focused and to stay on task when we need to. There's no next action, next physical action, which is ever too difficult, right? Like given enough time, I could walk to Mars. If you gave me like a couple of million years,

I could walk to Mars, because it's just one step after, and it'd have to be a couple of bioengineering hacks happen to me. My point is that you can always take one more step, right? But if you were to say to someone, I need you to walk to Mars, it's a little bit challenging. Okay, so we've got ourselves to the stage where we're starting to choose and live our greatness. What about creating our workplace now? Well, so then I started to think about leadership. And as a business leader, it seems to me you have two responsibilities.

One is to curate your own life, to utilize your energy in a way that you are putting your best energy into the things that matter the most, to you and to the organization that you lead. And by the way, curation is not a purely selfish process where all I care about is, you know, what's good for me. It also, we're social people. We're in a social context. We're thinking about other people at the same time.

So curating your life as a business leader. But the second part is looking at the environment you're creating, at the messages that you are giving to the people who work for you, and thinking about, am I leading in a way that enables and facilitates them to curate their lives? And in many cases, the answer is not so much. What are some of the ways that people often business leaders often create or places doesn't enable? A simple one is I'm a night person, I get a great idea at 11.30 at night and I fire it out to my people at 11.30 at night or one o'clock

in the morning and I'm the boss, right? And people feel that then there's an expectation that they should respond to that. You know, there's a really simple hack, you know, in, in Outlook, which is the messaging system that I use, you can stick delayed delivery schedule. So we love it. That's right. Schedule send. You know, so I can have my, I'm not a night person, by the way,

but if I were and I have my one, 30 in the morning, no, a flash of insight, I write the email and I get it sent at noon or whenever my people are going to be around, you know? And by doing so, I send the message that I want you to curate your life. I want you to have a reasonable organization of your energy. And I'm going to take a minute to tell one of my favorite stories about this, because I think it's really important. My father was a Holocaust survivor.

He escaped from Germany to England in 1939 and spent the war in England. And right after the war, children who had been incarcerated in the concentration camps were brought to England for rehabilitation. And there were a number of centers around England where these traumatized children were brought to bring them back to health. And they needed to find people who spoke German, Polish or Yiddish because that's what these children spoke. So they reached out to the community, my dad, who had zero training in this,

volunteered to be one of the counselors at one of these rehabilitation centers. And they had one day off a week when they worked at the rehabilitation center. And the director of the center told them, you are not allowed to be on the campus on your day off. You may not show your face around here. Because he knew that these people were so dedicated to the work, that they would be there seven days a week and they would drop from emotional and physical exhaustion. So he made a rule you couldn't come in on that day. That to me is an example of a business leader saying, I need to think about your

well-being, not just my own. He might have said, yeah, the kids need you seven days a week, so come on in and he did not. So that kind of thinking about helping your people to manage their energy so that they can bring their best and they get the breaks they need, whether it's taking their vacation days, whether it's not sending emails in the middle of the night, whether it's saying, hey, you know, at summertime we're all going to quit work at three o'clock in the afternoon on Friday, whatever it may be, to me that is part of a leader's job to help others pure their lives. If you're not a business leader, how can you contribute to that environment?

Let's say that you're just an employee or a worker. How can you contribute to that? It's harder because you don't really have the power that the leader has and you may be working in an environment that doesn't encourage that kind of curation. I guess my first thought is you quietly do it yourself You know you don't have to be telling one of the things I say about mediocrity by the way and being just good enough Is when you figured out what you're gonna be just good enough on don't tell people Just quietly be good enough. They will notice in most cases

You don't have to go announcing by the way way, I'm going to be mediocre on how well I shine my shoes. Just don't care, you know? So in the same way, I think you can quietly curate your life without necessarily making an announcement about it. But it's difficult. I mean, if you're working in a place that has these unreasonable expectations for attendance, length of time, productivity. That's very difficult.

And I think in many cases, you're wise to find another place to work. No, I agree that the sort of Gary V. Hustling grind mentality is never one that's really sat super well with me. It's not resonated massively. And I think that a big part of it is that I know, I think everybody knows in the heart of hearts that the person who's able to go very, very hard for four or six hours per day will outperform

the person who's still in the office at 3 a.m. Because the person that's still in the office at 3 a.m. isn't working that hard. They're just sat there, they got their phone out, they're on YouTube, like the number of times, so let's say I run club nights and a lot of the guys that work for me are students at university. And a lot of the time they'll come in around about the exam period and they'll do a full day in the office of revision. But during the full day in the office, I'll have seen them, they'll be on Snapchat for

half an hour, They'll have this. I'm like, dude, you could have been in and out of here in three hours. Right. If you'd left your phone at home, if you'd put rescue time or some other sort of website blocking app on your computer, and you just nailed it. Like, if you'd gone.

So this is another Cal Newport deep workers and where he says that work done equals time times intensity. So you can do three hours at a 10 or you can do 10 hours at a 3 and it is hard. Don't get me wrong. The higher levels of discomfort, the higher levels of intensity have a lot of discomfort with them because you don't get the little dopamine hits. You've also got to be super, super focused. But the more that you try and do that, the more that you cultivate an atmosphere of excellence, where you are focused on the things that you're supposed

to do, the easier it comes thereafter, and you get great satisfaction from it. No one, no one wants to spend 10 hours, a couple of days before a project deadline, doing 50% intensity grave and nila quality work. You don't want that. It doesn't make you feel satisfied, but you know the days that you go in when you only absolutely crush it, five hours in and out, everything's done. You've got the evening to yourself like that. That is where work feels satisfying, right? I absolutely agree.

And I think, yeah, I mean, you said it. And it's that satisfaction that comes from sprint and recover. And the productivity that comes from that is just, yeah. So that's where that's a winner exactly. We've got a workplace site. Can we can we curate a home as well? Because you got to, you know, I got to be a mother or father, or a brother, whatever housemate, whatever it might be.

Right. Right. Yes. I think, I think, whatever house may, whatever it might be. Right. Yes. I think the same principles apply both in terms of making a choice about what kind of energy I bring home. And do they get my leftover, you know, 25% fairly irritable self? Or do I bring my best self to my home and if so, how do I do that? There are lots of other pieces to that. I mean, what we're hearing a lot in the states and my

guess is that it's true in the UK as well as teenagers who are driven like maniacs. I mean, because you know the idea is you have to get your kid into the best university so that then they can get the job with the top firm in New York and then they can, you know, be wealthy and live happily ever after. And if they don't get a perfect score on this exam, the rest of their life is going to unravel. And I see young people, teenagers, you know, expected to get top grades, active in 17 different extracurricular activities, doing good work in the community, impossible demands, and crumbling under the pressure.

If that's your kid, you're not doing a good job curating as a parent, and you need to get real about what are the one two or three things that you want to help this kid focus on and the rest of it can be just good enough or I'm not doing it at all and yes we want our children to have a good work ethic and we want them to have persistence but part of that is sometimes the kids saying you know what I'm one of my sons decided he was going to take gymnastics for a while. He took, he's a really good athlete. He took two classes, he came and said, I hate it, I don't want to do it anymore.

I said, fine, don't do it anymore. Just because you signed up doesn't mean you have to do it. I mean, you hate it. There's a lot of things in life you have to do even when you hate. Gymnastics is not one of them. Right? So, you know, letting your kids quit stuff, letting your kids do something just well enough is part of this as well. So that's some of the home curation stuff that I think is really important. I get that. So, final thing, is there anything left to say about how discipline and liberation link together? Because I like the idea of the sprint and the recover, I think that's a really good way for people to balance their energy. But is there any more on discipline and liberation? Well, I think I touched on this, but it is an important point, I think. You simply cannot be disciplined about everything in

your life all the time. Nobody has nobody will, nobody can. And there's a certain pleasure in breaking the rules. Even the rules I've set for myself. And so, learning how to do that, I talk about there's the white zone where I'm behaving in an absolutely exemplary manner. I'm being the gale that I really want to be and the kind of person I want other people to be. And there's the black zone where I'm doing something that's really destructive. I'm stealing from my employer. I'm driving drunk. I'm doing things that are really wrong. And in between is the grey zone. Where I've just come just being a little bit bad. You know, I drink two martinis knowing that I'm going to get silly.

Or I eat chocolate cake when I'm really trying to, you know, get lean and have been physically fit. I committed myself to exercising five days a week and you know what, I'm taking a week off, I'm not doing it. Little bit bad. I tell a slightly off-color joke. Again, using judgment and dipping my toe, and there's something about that little bit of mischief, that little bit of naughtiness that feels good. And then we can go back to being that admirable individual that we're trying to be most of the time. Many of us have this rigid conscience inside that we developed from when we were really little, which is like it's either black or white, you're either a good boy or you're a bad boy. And what I'm suggesting is that adults we have room for that little place in between where I'm not being a good girl or a bad girl, I'm being a little bit naughty girl.

And we need to visit that place in order to then gain the energy back to go ahead being the person that we really want to be. I love it. I love it. I think it's really cool. I like the idea of people being able to be their anticipinarians and also getting that liberation from it. The delegation stuff, again, like that's such an important part, it's been such a crucial side of me allowing myself to do more of the stuff I want to do. I mention I have a cleaner and it's like, could I clean my house? Yeah, during lockdown I have, but does she do it better than me?

Absolutely. Does it mean like, do I don't enjoy it? It's fun at the moment because there's novelty attached. But as I said, everything else like, delegate down all of the stuff that you can't do. And if you're in a position where delegation isn't an option, as you said, look toward that what is the

minimum viable effort or the minimum viable mediocrity that I can bring to the table here, that allows me to work on what I want. And the kind of final thing that I really like of how it all pieces together is that you talked about how you want to go incredibly hard, you want to work in these sprints. If you do all of the steps before, which ensures that the thing that you're doing is close to your highest calling, close to the passion that you genuinely feel, it won't feel like work. You will want to lose yourself in writing the book for hours because that is what you're compelled to do. Yes, exactly. That's how it comes together.

And you get that exhibit where the big pieces are hanging in the middle. The necessary but not huge pieces are kind of off in a side room somewhere. You know, and the stuff that doesn't matter is back in the storm maybe for another day. There we go. We did it. Look, curating your life will be linked in the show notes below. If it sounds like this is the sort of thing that you are struggling with, ending the struggle for work-life balance, I couldn't recommend it more. It's really, really cool. It's very actionable. I think you've done a great job with it, Gail, if people want to find out a little bit more, well, where should they go? Anything to plug online? Sure, then my website, it's brilliant, of course.

gailgoldenconsulting.com, please come and visit me. You can leave a message if you like. And yeah, the book, those are the two main places. Fantastic, thank you so much for your time. You know what to do if you enjoyed the episode, like, share and subscribe or give me a message wherever you follow me at ChrisWillX. I will link Gale's fantastic website as I'm sure it is and the great creating your life in the show notes below. Gale, thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. I've really enjoyed it.

I really enjoyed it.