September, 2022 - APPLEBRIGHT COACHING

22nd September 202222nd November 2022

Six tools to balance your business and home life when they collide

So, the summer is over, the children are back to school, what are you doing with all your spare time? (That you so wish you had!)

You are working hard as a business owner and entrepreneur or in your chosen career and the transition from shapeshifting through the summer between home and your business or work will have been exhausting and an endurance test, but now the frustration is ramping up because even with the children back at school or nursery, that pressure is no less. The frustration is largely aimed at yourself because somehow you perceive that you should be feeling the benefit of the sun setting on the summer silly season of juggling.

This year of course, that juggle has come at the end of two years in which family and work life has been turned upside down through the pressures of living with covid, trying to keep jobs and businesses buoyant and potentially simultaneously becoming a home schoolteacher as well as a carer for other family members. The toll of all of this is both physical and mental and the result of it can be a growing self-doubt that your control over your own destiny is ebbing away into the far distance.

A toolkit to help you find your balance

**These tools are hard change, but they will work for you**

Has September brought you back to that familiar feeling of being overcommitted? Do you sense that the old enemy of overwhelm and white noise is deafening you? Are you feeling stressed out and completely out of balance? Are any or all of these happening for you?

Working hours feeling out of control as you catch up after the holiday?
Feeling tense, stressed, or overwhelmed with the constant juggle?
Missing out on quality time with family or friends?
Eating quick meals and have no time for real exercise?
Feeling exhausted and wondering when your mojo will ever come back?
Falling behind on important work tasks, your to do lists and your life admin?
Sleeping poorly again?

Then this toolkit is for you!!! It will make you feel less stress, more in control, more productive and create the satisfaction and fulfilment that you deserve in creating more quality personal time, increased revenue in, and focus on your business and there is only one cost to you… you will lose your ‘overwhelm’.

“The ONE tip I can passionately share with others about balancing motherhood while running your business is this: Understand and accept that something’s gotta give. Sometimes the housework has to give. Sometimes the business has to give. Sometimes my marriage has to give. Sometimes the kids needs have to give. The only true goal to a balanced life should be to make sure that everything doesn’t give at once.”
Renee Wood, President, The Comfort Company

**Walking the tightrope of a healthy worklife balance can be achieved**

Tool #1 – Start by saying ‘no’, start by working out what you will stop. If you are saying ‘yes’ to changing your worklife balance then you have to be saying ‘no’ to so many other things! Say ‘no’.

Firstly, remember that this is your life and your profession / business, there is no formula and no perfect solution that others have magically found, so make sure that you are ploughing your own furrow by creating the plan for change that suits you and your family. Turn down the white noise of others who always know best!!! The hardest thing for proactive people like you is that saying ‘no’ is really hard because it feels like one of two things :-

Letting others down when of course they need you, they are used to all that you do!
Letting yourself down because saying ‘no’ must be failure, you always keep it all together no matter what!

Start the process of saying ‘no’ closer to home, start it with ‘you’. Not saying no to your own striving to cram 48 hours into 24 hours is your first enemy in truly getting in front of this feeling of being stranded on the endless merry-go-round that has just replaced the circus juggling of the summer holiday!

Tool #2 – Think about 12 months ahead and of the ebb and flow of your work, business and home life – plan for them now!

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy” Helmute Van Moltke 1880

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” Mike Tyson (appraising Van Moltke!)

So plans can be tricky ! Though having no plan at all definitely guarantees chaos, you can make this approach work for you. Only you know when the busy times are in your work and business and how they may coincide with very busy times at home such as Christmas, birthdays, holiday periods and other such commitments. This year you can guarantee that Christmas will be in the last week of December!

Can you prevent these times from being busy? (NO)

Can you create time that doesn’t exist to make them easier? (NO)

Can you trim your overstretching more rather than the Christmas tree? (YES)

Can you be kinder to yourself? (YES)

Can you delegate more at these annual pain points? (YES)

Can you plan and prepare others for this now (YES)

This is the diary equivalent of saying no to your yourself and to others. Planning for it can make others on point when you need them to be and some other expectations will need to be scaled back at these times to show true kindness to yourself. This part of your 12 month plan is a vital part of your essential personal and professional growth. Look after yourself.

Tool #3 – Delegating may be a ‘trust’ challenge, but you have to do it!

This links very closely to Tool 2 above, delegating is one of the ways that you can overcome known pinch points both at home and at work or in the business. It can be constructive for those that you entrust delegation to and can be a positive benefit in their training and developing. Delegation also applies at home and you may have to enrol the support of family members, pitching in and doing more to get the vital breaks that you need. Delegating is one of the key aspects to achieving a healthy worklife balance.

I can hear you now as you read this, ‘Mmmmm, yes delegation is all well and good but it’s easier to do it myself, it will take less time than teaching someone else, will it ever be done to my standards, I’ll only have to redo it’.

This is the hard part of delegation, but it is worth taking time…

Train Others – Trust Others – Treat Yourself

Your time and energy is finite and by adopting this approach you are more likely to prosper in business, to prosper with your worklife balance and to feel that you are investing in yourself. There is no doubt that in the ‘trust others’ part of this will be a need to relinquish control. For more information on this see my previous article,

Fear of not being in control is natural, but how can you overcome it?

What will define your success is rethinking the reason that you are delegating by listing all of the positives that it can yield. High amongst these is freeing you up to do the things that matter the most rather than feeling bogged down in the day to day. Delegating will also sharpen the process of recruitment, selection and development of any of your key staff because you will be conscious that they must be skilled individuals as well as trusted.

If you are running a business there is a real difference between scaling up a business as a successful entrepreneur and being self-employed. Two of the key ingredients that good delegation will fuel for your successful enterprise are :-

You need to ensure that you have a good quality worklife balance, this will promote your health and happiness without which success will not be sustainable.
You must ensure that the business is working for you and not you for the business. This is about choice, freewill and carving the time for you in terms of home and family as well as time to consider and focus on your personal and professional development and the growth and upscaling of the business. You working for your business is purely being self-employed and not about you being able to use your energy and passion as an entrepreneur picking the strategic direction of your business or organisation.

**The balancing conundrum is baffling without a plan**

Tool # 4 – Create boundaries and ensure you are disciplined over your working hours – don’t become that ‘always on’ leader!

This positively links to the mantra in Tool 3,

Make your business work for you, not you working for your business!

This in many ways sounds like entrepreneurs’ heresy discussing the concept of being aware and setting yourself boundaries of how long your working day will be day by day and in total number of working hours that you want to work weekly. Long hours can become a habit or addiction which you feel is the essential ingredient of success but over the longer term this results in working hard but not smart. It also results in a decreasing return on the hours that you invest and in a physical and mental toll that can be serious for you and your family. Studies have demonstrated that 40 hours a week has been proven to be the optimal working week to keep unnecessary stress and overwhelm at arm’s length. In the UK an average of no more than 48 hours in a week has been a legal requirement for many years. In the UK there is also medical evidence that working 11 hour days increases your risk of heart attack by 67%, a sobering thought!

Boundaries thinking can be supported by the notion that you should treat yourself as well as you treat your own staff. We recognise that at times there will be busy pulses of work but with careful planning and with boundaries placed on your working day and week you can become a game changer!

This is a hard change for you because you may be hard-wired to work maximum and unhealthy numbers of hours. Watch yourself, keep a working hours diary so that you can review how you are doing. Make this issue a part of your 12 month business plan, be hard on yourself, face the mirror and work out what is driving your behaviours.

**A break from your ‘always on’ can feel liberating**

Boundaries and a business digital detox – On the subject of boundaries it is time to think about what issues might be drawing you into the always on culture of leadership. Just as in life, it is very easy to get drawn into social media work, emails on your laptops and other mobile devices. The outcome of this is long hours, no clear relaxation time and a blurring of your personal and work boundaries.

How to do this? There are a number of considerations for this. Work out how your business hours relate to your digital business activity, get them shorter and get them aligned. Consider what will work best for you with your tech! You may want different work to home devices or at least ensure that the browsers, email clients and apps that you use are different for domestic and work. There are a number of health benefits for this and some tools that you can use to ease the ‘always on’ digital white noise such as sleep modes on your devices, automated chat facilities on your website rather than always email or messaging.

Tool #5 – Health and wellbeing, you-time, mini-breaks and time to reflect

So you will already know that boosting your physical activity reduces your stress levels and improves your health and wellbeing. Creating a focus on your wellness is not a luxury with the spare minute here and there that you can find, it has to be a part of your 12 month plan and that has to be translated to every day, every week and every month. Making sure that you have created time, no matter how small, for physical activity will help your body, soul and mind. It will reenergize you and is a great time to have cutting-edge ideas with the white noise of the work and home day being suspended.

This is another one of those tools that is about ‘hard change’. For it to really have a chance of surviving first contact with the enemy, real life, then you will need to combine it with Tool # 1 – say no at work and at home to create a block of time that is for you. Then combine it with some of the tricks of exercising when you are on your everyday activities too. You need to consider that prioritising time for health and fitness is not a luxury but an essential. It will lead to many other benefits such as your health, your sleep quality and giving you the positivity to tackle your workday with even more vigour. Happiness in this context is about happiness in all areas of your life. The impact is both physical and mental in spending time on yourself for your essential fitness. Looking after yourself is very much like the analogy of how to behave in an air crash.

Get Your Oxygen and then you can take care of everyone else around you including your business. Just like on the plane….when there is turbulence and the masks descend….you don’t take care of everybody else first….you also put the mask on yourself…get your oxygen and then take care of everyone else around you. the ONLY way to balance a healthy business and a happy home is to take care of yourself first so you have the energy to care for all the needs of clients and kids.
Tracy Fox, Having a heart for God.

You should make sure that you have good blocks of time for your fitness but you can also complement them by being innovative with small bursts of exercise whilst you are on other essential tasks. This might have to be a reality on some days, there is no doubt that between your job and your family, it can be a challenge to find time always to head to the gym.

So why not do some exercise in your office or your kitchen? Calisthenic exercises can be combined within your normal workday such as taking 10 minutes to walk up and down the stairs in your work building or whilst out shopping or collecting a delivery. If you are driving to a meeting there are breathing exercises you can do, podcasts to take in, to prepare yourself, to relax and to control your heart rate. In the evening or at times when you might be able to get 5 or 10 minutes to relax you could use one of many relaxation apps available.

Check out these workplace exercise ideas.

https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/diet-fitness/exercise-at-work/10-office-exercises-you-can-do-secretly.htm

https://www.billymurray.online/desk-stretch

Take mini-breaks to reset yourself – The value of a very brief time-out cannot be underestimated, it will totally restore your confidence that you are gaining back control of your day, it will bring down your heart rate and it will almost certainly make you even stronger and more effective for the remainder of your day. The ‘always on’ mentality that you have can equate to a ‘nose to the grindstone’ effect that lasts from the moment the alarm clock goes off or alternatively, your little cherub crawls into bed next to you, to the final moments that exhaustion takes over you last thing at night. Breaks of just 10 minutes during which time you step away from your work focus to do something totally unrelated – like breathing exercises, Pilates stretches or a just a quick walk around the block – will hugely impact on reducing your stress levels.

Tool # 6 – Create a diary plan of your day / week and month – Love your plan!

Your calendar / diary / planner is your saviour!. This should be your one-stop shop to be able to see what you have on during every day/week/month. Consider colour coding your activities and make sure that you have combined work and home in this diary! This toolkit advocates separation of your work and home life in as many ways that you can achieve, but if you want to protect your time to gain that balance, then this is the one part of your toolkit that advocates the creation of combining in one place work and home commitments.

This plan will be better if you can create more automation in it and be able to see it on your phone – this means that you have given yourself the very best chance to avoid the imbalance of clashing work and home priorities – this means that the decision is yours about what you do do and what you don’t! It will be your saviour in preventing you from booking a client meeting when you have that all important anniversary meal to go for.

Take this from being your reactive tool to view your busyness in one place (YIKES!), to making it work proactively for you! Start to block time out for you, time to think, time to exercise, time to meet friends, time to spend longer on the school pick up. Delegate to make this happen!

When you start this, make sure that you have blocked out one weekend every month for doing absolutely nothing or at the very least, as little as possible! Recharge your batteries!

Whilst on the subject of ‘time’, Richard Branson has a really innovative approach to time management as an entrepreneur that works best for him. He tries to make sure that he does more of what he really enjoys doing such as hobbies and sport and he finds that this energises him and as a result of that he feels that he finds ways to get more into his day and does the tasks that his business empire needs, as well as flying into space too of course!

Richard Branson’s Genius Method for Creating Time: How to Pursue Your Dreams and Achieve More, No Time Management Tools Required
https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/richard-branson-on-how-to-pursue-your-dreams-achieve-more-without-time-management-tools.html

**Learning from others will speed your journey**

**You can be the author of your balance in life**

Give it a try!

I hope that you find this toolkit beneficial. There will be trial and error in using it and ways that you customise it specifically for your own circumstances. Changing the outcomes of clashing business and home responsibilities is essential for success and happiness and it should form the heart of your 12 month plan.

If you would like a free copy of this toolkit please get in touch with your details and I will email it directly to you. Otherwise feel free to use the 6 tools contained here and make a fresh start to make the difference that you can make.

https://applebrightcoaching.co.uk/welcome/contact/

5th September 202222nd November 2022

Fear of not being in control is natural, but how can you overcome it?

How often do you feel stressed by the fact that you can’t control something or its outcome? Your 6 point plan will make a positive difference.

Feeling desperate image when you cannot get in control and it causes anxiety. Holding up a help sign — **The feeling of loss of control is painful!**

The sense that you need to gain control of an issue but cannot do so is all consuming and dominates every thought when it takes hold of you. As desperate as these feelings are, there are solutions that are in your control.

This feeling is painful because it is based on fear
This feeling is painful because we are not the best version of ourselves when it takes hold
This feeling is painful because it creates an anxiety to control things beyond the original issue

When we feel this way a huge part of us knows that we are potentially being self-indulgent, we feel that others just don’t understand why gaining this control is so all consuming. This means that we can’t possibly rest until we have forced ourselves onto our perception of the solution.

But just hang on a moment, be a little kinder to yourself before you start to rethink your process of taking control. This article includes some tips and a 6 point plan to get in front of this painful emotion.

So how does this pain feel when you fear the lack of control?

This fear of losing control means that we are certain something is about to get out of hand and almost impulsively we start to try to grapple for control. Our instinct to protect is as natural to us as holding our breath when we go underwater. A broad array of fears takes over and they are all such difficult feelings that our instinctive brain seeks to avoid them and forces us to behave to protect. These feelings may include hopelessness, powerlessness, despair, rage, grief and loneliness.

It is the fear of feeling our instinctive emotion in an unbearable way that again harkens back to the human instinct to survive at any cost and to stay alive. We project this fear onto others in a doomed to fail effort to prevent those awful feelings and that projection comes in the form of trying to take control over the outcome. It is important to understand this better, this cognitive recognition means that :-

We see that this is a natural instinct
We start to understand it better
We start to demystify it
We start to believe and accept that we can gain a sense of personal agency

This feeling is also the root of why so many people fear change on an almost visceral level and for leaders and people going through change it can be liberating to understand this fear. We are then able to identify what this feeling is and take charge of ourselves and find our ways of understanding that our chimp brain can be corrected through rational thought processes.

Adult hand holding a child's hand summoning up images of how we often find that our need to control is instinctive from childhood — **Our vulnerability causes our need to control**

Why is this so important now?

The reason that understanding this now is so important is that post covid and at a time of economic crisis there is a great sense of uncertainty and a great sense of the loss of all our norms. The so-called ‘new normal’ often does not feel normal in any sense to us. These events mean that those that feel this anxiety are likely to attempt to gain control even more, they feel disenfranchised unless they get in control.

For us to be able to do well, to be successful and to be happy as these challenges are upon us as a society and as individuals then finding a way of navigating these negative emotions is important. This means that using these tools to think differently about the process of gaining control will enable us to handle change, to embrace opportunity and really start dealing with this issue here and now.

The avoidance of this behaviour will also lead to us having better relationships with those around us because the very process of gaining control can create conflict or at the very least resentment in others who are unfortunate enough to come across us on our ‘controlling’ mission!

Help is on the way, needing to stay in control is perfectly normal!

When we have this instinct to maintain the status quo and to avoid our feared inevitable destiny by taking back control, we are simply responding to our natural human instinct and also to the natural way that our brain works. The reason that we naturally do this is that from our early childhood we interpret change as uncertainty and in that state there is danger to our life. It is about our instinct to survive. It is said that 5 times every second our brain tries to assess if what we are doing and where we are is safe, if not we start to protect and disengage. This happens subconsciously as well as at a conscious level.

Why not check how you measure up on this fear?

If you try the link below you will see a brief questionnaire that will allow you to place a gauge of exactly where your focus is in terms of these fears taking control over you. This test allows you to see if you have a tendency toward an external locus of control, this means that you will be routinely worrying about aspects that you cannot influence in any way. If you have an internal locus of control then you are much less likely to behave the way that this article describes. It is a really useful process to try before you start the 6 point plan.

Your quick control checker – https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_90.htm

Demonstrates how having an internal locus of control is positive and lists the ways this is so versus an external locus which is when we feel disempowered — **Where is your locus of control?**

So what can you do to change your fear of losing control? Circles will do it!

This pattern of behaviour that almost constantly can create white noise in our lives can be avoided, it can be controlled by us. It really is possible to reframe the things that trigger us to try to feel back in control and as a habit that we learn we can grow to decrease our fears.

Shows how you can dispose of these fears of a lack of control like burning a post it note — **We really can leave this fear behind with a new approach!**

The start of this process is to ask yourself what things you honestly truly can control rather than merely influence or worry about. Some of this thinking was put out there initially by Steven Covey in ‘The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People’. In this book he considered circles of concern and circles of influence, and this has been taken further with another circle, the circle of control.

This is a fabulous way that we can differentiate between what issues might be going on in general (concern) or in some very specific cases such as improving our wellbeing through exercise, diet, positive thinking and creating more time for ourselves (control). What will typically happen without being able to apply this technique is that we may find ourselves worrying about all things and attempting to gain control over all of them.

When we discover that we cannot gain that control we may experience very specific anxieties about these issues and in the process of trying to gain control we cause damage to ourselves, waste our time, we waste our energy and there is a good likelihood that we will damage our relationships with family, friends, colleagues and potentially in a business environment, we will do damage to our business, organisation or team.

This image demonstrates how the circle of control is what you control versus matters you may influence versus matters that are a concern but you have no control in truth so worry less about them

The basis of this model is that we can disentangle all of those fears, worries and psychoses into a process where we narrow down from concerns, to issues we may have an influence over to the final matters that we alone truly have complete control over.

By doing this and by really focusing positively on letting those concerns go in terms of believing our personal mission here and now is to control such issues then we better understand our circle of concern pain points. If we then focus on being positive about where we may have an influence only and understand fully to what extent that is possible then our approach to our circle of influence can become more realistic and less fraught with anxiety.

This then allows us to truly focus our energy on what we can directly control, this then become fruitful and enables a more balanced and wellbeing driven series of actions that we learn and can repeat. This approach means that then we lighten our load of stress and worry and we prevent our natural human brain from attempting to control concerns, influence and control areas. This is a way of truly giving ourselves the energy to make a difference where we can and to give ourselves a holiday from trying to control what cannot be controlled and all of the negative consequences that this causes.

What might a typical circles of concern/influence/control chart look like for you?

This process can be done with a little time and patience to start to map the issues that trouble us into the three circles. It will be unique for each of us and it demands absolute honesty with ourselves. This is something that we are doing for ourselves and in many senses this supports us to have an internal locus of control that leads to better wellbeing, to a greater sense of personal agency and to the avoidance of the waste of energy stressing about the non-controllables.

An example of the types of issues that may appear in the circles of concern, of influence and of control — **This demonstrates how clearly much of what creates our anxiety cannot be ‘controlled’**

Try this to tackle your loss of control feeling – your 6 point plan

A poster for printing in which you can place your own post it notes

Print out the blank circles of control poster above, this will allow you to start the process to consider your mindset on what you feel is a concern, what you have influence over or what issues you have complete control over.
Make sure you are in a place where you can think and won’t be disturbed, this should definitely be a little time away from the white noise that you are putting to one side just for you.
Ensure that you have some post it notes, or similar and write down the things that occur to you as concerns to you, these will be the things that have been troubling you over time and you will find it eye-opening just to write them down and to see them together. Place them inside / around your circle of concern circle.
Prepare yourself for this list because seeing the issues together can be overwhelming but remember this process is about navigating a way to see these issues in a more philosophical way.
Now, your next stage, look at your concerns again and looking at the example above try to see if any of those notes can be placed into the circles of influence or control. Controlling is a high bar though as they are entirely in your control to be placed there.
Challenge yourself on those matters that are in the Concern circle, check if there is a way that you might be able to gain some influence. This might be covering issues such as tricky colleague, manager or friend relationships, but through a third party route you may be able to build some bridges, in which case this will be able to move this issue to your Circle of Influence. Think about ways you might be able to influence the things that are still in your Circle of Concern.
So at this point, having truly exhausted what can be moved to the Circle of Concern and Circle of Control you now have your final list. Write them up from the post it notes or type them if you are creating a digital copy. I would recommend that you save the document on your phone or mobile device as a photo or PDF so that you can refer to them when you have feelings of growing anxiety about your feelings of a lack of control. Remember these key FACTS:-

Areas of Concern – If you look at your areas of concern that you may have been taking so personally in the past and may have been exacerbating your anxiety, in fact in truth you have no ability to influence or control them. Your values and beliefs are a huge part of your strengths and so it is ok to consider wider society issues without them dominating you and in so doing find a new found freedom. Remember they may also sit alongside other realities that are not influenceable by you such as the weather. Puts the worries into context doesn’t it?

Areas of Influence – So these sat amongst the whole range of issues that were stressing you and often meant that you felt high frustration and to a certain extent not able to clearly see what to do about them. Now in fact through this process you recognise that you cannot control them, but with some tact and diplomacy and with a plan you can get some influence over them. In many ways this is cathartic, it gives you a release and leaves you feeling that you can be more proactive in dealing with the issues themselves without feeling abject fear and the need to over-respond in gaining full personal control.

Areas of Control – so these are those that you can legitimately say are entirely your responsibility and do not rely on third parties. This will be a small list but understanding it allows you to only feel responsible for a much smaller number of issues. This hands more control to you as you focus your proactive energy at what really matters and recognising these three types of issue supports your sense of wellbeing too.

This 6 step process will give you a plan that truly demonstrates to you how you break down the myriad of worries and concerns that have been causing sleepless nights into a manageable format in which you can remind yourself how to interact with them and what you can truly control.

So, give this a go and see what differences it makes for you

As a coach I am very well aware just how common these feelings are and they can be affecting you as you read this, you may know someone else who suffers from this anxiety or you may be a manager or leader who see this in your team members. Please share these thoughts and ideas and see if they can make the difference.