I’ve been noticing a theme among my clients lately- one of wanting to find other ways to run their businesses so they have more energy and attention to the quality of their lives.
Our conversations have focused on the idea that when you starting wanting a better life, it means you can start to have a better business. When you put your quality of life at the top of your priority list, it makes your business choices suddenly that much clearer.
For instance…
If you decide that you want to finish work by 6pm each day, you will quickly run into a situation that asks you to demonstrate your commitment. You might have a project that is due, or something might be taking longer than planned. You notice that it’s 5:55 and you start to have an internal conflict about whether you should work late, or not, or leave it for tonight, or not.
There is no right answer, just a question of where your greater commitment lies. You might decide to keep working and finish the project, so you can enjoy your evening more. Or you might decide to wrap up with it for now and pick it up again tomorrow. Both can be quality of life decisions. What determines which one is the best one for you is how you feel after deciding what you’ll do. But in both cases, keeping quality of life as your main focus keeps the conversational emphasis where it needs to be.
Similarly, if you decide that the quality of your life is the most important thing, you’ll find yourself avoiding troublesome clients (or even letting them go). You’ll gravitate to projects that support your commitment. You might even raise your rates so you can make more while working less.
In short, you’ve made a choice about your business or your life and are living into this choice- demonstrating it with every decision.
It’s not enough to mentally commit to having a better life; we have to behave as if we want a better life, too.
This has been on my mind a lot, personally, as I have been recently confronted with the death of two high school friends in the past eight weeks. This has prompted me to examine my own choices around my business or my life, and I’m finding that I’m walking the same path that many of my clients are on too.
I’m ending my workday earlier so I get some time to be in the sunshine. I’m finding ways to streamline my business processes and to invest more fully in the clients I really like. I’m spending more time in the service areas where I have a unique talent or brilliance. I’m reducing a lot of the extras I don’t really need.
The reasons for making these kinds of changes may be any; what I see as important is that these changes represent an upleveling of your business, not a rejection of it. When you are the best you that you can be, your business will benefit.
And now I ask you- your business or your life?
