Work/life Balance: How Personally Sustainable are You?

How much energy do you have? How sustainable is your leadership? Do you pull off your work at the expense of your family, your health or your peace of mind?

To lead with courage and authenticity, successful leaders must develop personal energy that lasts through sustained change. Energy leadership realizes a true impact at work and at home.
Busy days, full schedules and heavy workloads are here to stay. These facts won’t change, but how you engage them can. The hero’s journey starts here.

As a business and life coach, I’ve seen that true success involves more than making your numbers or building a powerful team. True success and personal fulfillment happens when you’ve found a way to make EVERY part of your life work, and to navigate the challenges of your work/life balance.

If you’re ready to create better results in every area of your life, to build stronger relationships and to have an authentically powerful impact, you’ve got to be ready to DARE TO ACHIEVE FULL ENGAGEMENT.

The lifestyle of the modern leader is tough. You can struggle against it, hide from it, or you can authentically ENGAGE it.

The choice is yours.

You CAN:

• ENGAGE challenging situations, relationships and schedules for clean, powerful outcomes.
• ENGAGE your health and well-being. That’s the foundation (and secret weapon) – the powersource – from which true, well-rounded success emerges.
• ENGAGE your mission and your desires — stopping the busy-ness long enough to evaluate your life and work and put systems and strategies in place for work/life balance.
In my years of leadership coaching, I’ve learned that for the typical leader, it usually comes down to a combination of seven obstacles:

Work/life Balance Obstacle #1: Fearing to step out of comfort zones,

Work/life Balance Obstacle #2: Being unclear in vision, intention or desired impact,

Work/life Balance Obstacle #3: Being unaware of impact on others,

Work/life Balance Obstacle #4: Making assumptions that hinder your team,

Work/life Balance Obstacle #5: Not knowing “how,”

Work/life Balance Obstacle #6: Avoidance of direct engagement and communication with people,

Work/life Balance Obstacle #7: Lacking the “decision,” time, focus or energy to take (and stay in) action.

These obstacles are not minor. There IS a limited amount of time to your day and these obstacles have the potential of sucking HOURS AND HOURS out of EACH day. But there’s hope – you CAN overcome these obstacles and take back your day. As a business and life coach, I have seen many of my clients engage and conquer these seven barriers to creating the results they want and achieving “work/life balance.”

DARING TO ENGAGE is about succeeding at work AND at home. As a leadership coaching expert, I’ve seen lots of people who can pull off one or the other. But it’s the rare hero who discovers the secret of being a fully engaged, effective leader at work and a committed, loving participant of life at home.

Anese Cavanaugh, of Dare To Engage, Inc., is a Certified Professional Coach with a focus in Leadership Development, Performance Improvement and Health and Productivity. She works with individuals and groups, privately and in organizations, to help them lead authentically and be their own best heroes in business and life. To learn more about her work with people, the DTE Programs and services, and for additional resources and tools, go to www.DareToEngage.com where you can also sign up for a Free Report (also available in audio format), on “Three Key Strategies to Lead Your Energy and Create Results (in Business, in Life and in Leadership,)”

Bringing DTE Home: Recovery in Motion in the Cold

Enjoying the beautiful and chilly season? We are! We’ve been in the Midwest for 8 years now and every year, my California blood has to re-adjust to these temperatures! Brrrr.

I am often asked by people all the time,”Why in the world would we leave California to come to Illinois?” It’s days like this that I can really get on board and start colluding with folks in this question. You can imagine my internal dialogue:”Why did we move here? Why is it so darn cold? What were we thinking? Gosh it’s horrible, horrible, horrible!! Brrr!”

You can also imagine how empowering that dialogue is and how energized I may feel going down that slippery slope. And if I take it one step further, imagine the impact that attitude can have on those around me! It’s pretty contagious!

This not only applies to the weather, but anything. Think about it. What do you focus on that doesn’t support you? Where do you get caught in focusing on what’s not working or how “cold” it is?

The trick, I have found, has been in the “recovery” – how quickly do I recover when I start to focus on how cold it can be? And how long do I want to “stay” in that cold and miserable frame of mind?

What I’ve found is that I can choose to make a whole day miserable if I focus on what’s not working and how I wish it was warmer, etc. And I can impact those around me – it’s contagious. But I also have the power to do just the opposite and focus on what is working about the “cold.”

BTW, this doesn’t mean that I deny my feelings. Absolutely not, that wouldn’t work either. I get to experience my authentic emotion, to be annoyed, frustrated, cold and all that good stuff. Then once I’ve acknowledged my real emotion, I get to decide what to do about it. What is important is to give myself permission to have the feeling, notice how long I stay there, be aware of my impact, and just notice whether the internal dialogue and focus supports and creates good energy, or not.

If not, then I am at choice to make a shift in my focus. Cool, eh?

So a funny thing to be writing about, AND as I sit here shivering in my shawl writing this (grin), it struck me that what we focus on creates more of the same. And it creates an impact. It’s not just about the cold – obviously, cold is just a metaphor. Whether it’s personal, professional, or physical – what we focus on expands.

So how does this apply to you, your life, your energy and your leadership? Notice what you notice and have a fantastic week!

Stay warm, cozy, and daring.

Until next time,