Recently, I saw a video of a senior entrepreneur explaining 5 reasons he won’t hire a candidate. The first reason was that if the candidate asks for work-life balance.
My work as a life coach in India allows me to get to know a lot of people from different backgrounds. I also coach leaders from different industries. The idea that an entrepreneur must always be busy in life is getting very famous.
As a holistic life coach, I study a lot of people. To be honest, you will find two types of people who are highly successful.
- One who maintains a work-life balance
- Second, those who are workaholics
You will find ‘n’ number of people who are workaholics and are extremely successful, and you will also find ‘n’ number of people who live a holistic life and are extremely successful.
Look at our Indian film industry. We have the most successful actor, Sharukh Khan, who is a workaholic and believes this is the way to success. We also have Akshay Kumar, who gives equal importance to every sector of life, including relationships, career, family, health, fitness, and finance.
We also have Narayan Murthy, who himself is a workaholic, who has made her wife a workaholic. Also, we have Gautam Adani, who lives a holistic life.
So, the doubt should be clear that you don’t have to be addicted to your work to get successful. However, even if you love your work so much that you want to ignore everything else, it is your choice.
I myself used to live from 10:30 am to 2:30 am in the office. But what I have understood over time is that all the different sectors of life are like plants. Plants need constant watering. Some plants need water daily, some once a week and some plants need water once a month.
Leadership From Life Coach’s Perspective
The general standards of holistic living do not apply to leadership. A leader, depending upon his or her position, is responsible for many aspects of work.
Holistic life will be different for an employee working in a MNC and a leader running an organization. However, the fundamental applies to everyone.
As a leader, it becomes essential to be in an optimum condition as much as possible throughout the day. This becomes difficult when you don’t have a fixed schedule, when you have to answer your phone during odd hours.
In my life coaching programs, we work on designing an effective, holistic life in detail. However, there are some basic things everyone can take care of.
Understand Your Role
A team leader, a manager, an executive, and a director all play the role of a leader but have different responsibilities. As a leader, you must know what comes under your jurisdiction.
As a leader, you must give proper effort to play your role. But always remember that your role to play the part but the result is never in your hands.
The biggest reason for stress is expecting results. I know that many corporate culture focus on expectations and they use such terminology, but the reality is that as a leader, you execute a task to obtain certain objectives, you may succeed or you may fail, but you always learn from the result. Improvise it next time, but still the result is never in your hands. The person who expects and not aim will always be doomed as a leader.
Understand Where Your Role Ends
Boundaries are the issues of all the world. Countries fight for boundaries, animals fight for boundaries, and even ecosystems fight for boundaries.
Leaders who do not understand boundaries always suffer. They make other people suffer and they make themselves suffer in the long run.
What I mean by boundaries is that the role that we play has certain boundaries. As a director of organization, you may be responsible for the refund on a project, but as a project manager you may not.
Most people have no idea about where their role ends. So, they constantly live in stress and guilt. They have stress because there is excessive work, and they feel guilty because they don’t get expected results.
As a leader you must know where your role ends and when you should let go.
Focus On Getting Defocused
The key thing about holistic life coaching is to train the person to first focus on a particular subject and then to train the person to defocus from the same subject.
Focus is highly productive but becomes highly counterproductive if not controlled. As a leader and as a student to life one needs to learn to shift focus from moment to moment.
It is very natural that after a hard day at work when you are heading home your head will be full of thoughts related to work. Maybe you will see the same stuff in your dreams.
That is because you have not trained your mind to defocus. Defocusing is nothing but an art of shifting your focus at your will.
Life Coach For Leaders
Every leader or high performer had some coach or a mentor, who empowers the leader. Do you have such a person in your life?
