What if your perception of 'work-life balance' is inherently flawed and potentially damaging? What if it's not about separating the two, but fusing them together for holistic development? We're challenging the conventional wisdom of work-life balance in this episode, arguing that our actions at home and work should complement and enhance one another. We'll guide you on a journey to redefine this often misunderstood concept, creating a world where we're equally thrilled to start and end our workday, and where fulfillment extends beyond our personal lives.
Then, imagine a team member with an insatiable hunger and a relentless drive to succeed. This episode will illuminate how a single driven individual can be the catalyst to success for the entire team. We share personal anecdotes and real-life examples of how a tenacious work ethic can help you identify underperformers and inspire everyone to do their best. Are you ready to harness the power of ambition and redefine your work-life balance? Join us on this enlightening journey.
What if your perception of 'work-life balance' is inherently flawed and potentially damaging? What if it's not about separating the two, but fusing them together for holistic development? We're challenging the conventional wisdom of work-life balance in this episode, arguing that our actions at home and work should complement and enhance one another. We'll guide you on a journey to redefine this often misunderstood concept, creating a world where we're equally thrilled to start and end our workday, and where fulfillment extends beyond our personal lives.
Then, imagine a team member with an insatiable hunger and a relentless drive to succeed. This episode will illuminate how a single driven individual can be the catalyst to success for the entire team. We share personal anecdotes and real-life examples of how a tenacious work ethic can help you identify underperformers and inspire everyone to do their best. Are you ready to harness the power of ambition and redefine your work-life balance? Join us on this enlightening journey.
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Speaker 1:
This is on leaching leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, and welcome to episode 32, which is about being hungry. We've talked about the hungry, humble, smart framework laid out in the ideal team player. In the culture episode, we talked about the fact that, in order to have the culture, you're going to have to have people with very strong character, and that character is rooted in the virtues of hungry, humble and smart. Buzzwords on the damn wall, right, actual, real virtues, things that people do. So we're going to this is going to be a little bit energy pack. This is going to be I'll probably talk too fast during this episode because it's another. This is like fucking silos.
Speaker 1:
I get excited about this, right, like, let's start with the king buzzword of them all work life balance. People put this on their wall when you walk into the office. What the what the flying F word does that mean? What are you talking about with work life balance? You know what work life balances is weakness. You walk in the door and you go whole work life balance and you start defining what that means and you know it's different for everybody. It's literally different for everybody. You got to scale someplace. You're going to balance this out. You're going to measure minute for minute or activity for activity or what? How do you even measure work life balance? It's different for everybody and it's like the dark side Once you start going down it. You need more life balance part of it.
Speaker 1:
I very rarely see people go oh yeah, I need to do more work. Part of it. And when they do, is probably because of a major performance issue. And once you create those bad habits man, we talked about that in earlier episodes you create bad habits, god. It's awfully hard to get out of them. So, work life balance.
Speaker 1:
You want more money, you want a bigger title, you want to be in charge, you want freedom, you want more time off, you want a four day work week. You want to work from wherever you want. You want to company as loyalty, you want perks and benefits. And then you want to draw a fucking mode around it and you want to say this is my space and this is your space. Don't come in here unless I tell you to. Really, you want more. And maybe it's not you, right, it's somebody you know, maybe it's an employee. They want more and more and more, and they ain't asking what they can do for it, they're just saying I want. That's their idea of balance. That's where this goes.
Speaker 1:
This is a selfish, stupid, destructive term that it mind fucks you. All right, Use that explicit. We're going to get into it today. It is messing with your mind. It's the parasite in your brain. You know we've done an episode on that. You are introducing something that is going to cause you brain cancer. Why would you put it in there? Why would you let it in?
Speaker 1:
Did somebody convince and this is a rhetorical question Somebody convinced us somewhere along the way, and we used to do this. You know, I will admit that we were doing this when we were recruiting. We were doing this when we talked to employees. We don't do it anymore. The reason is because it created a some huge internal issue. We're going to talk about one of them.
Speaker 1:
Somebody convinced you, though, somewhere along the line, that work stays at work and life stays at home, or home stays at home. You're supposed to have this imaginary line where we don't. We don't talk about that at home and we don't talk about that at work. Right, like? You got some kind of switch. You're a robot. You can turn it on and off. No wonder why you're miserable. No wonder why you can't be fulfilled. You're not allowed to talk about how you're living half your life. You can't let anybody in. You got to lock it all out when you leave the office or when you get to the office. Life is every single moment and that includes your work.
Speaker 1:
What you do at home should make you better for what you do at work. What you do at work should make you better for what you do at home. They overlap. If you're on a mission for personal and professional development, if you want to get bigger and stronger and better as a person, you can't just turn it off and say, well, when I'm at home, I'm a shithead, and when I'm at work, I work really hard. Or you can't say, well, when I'm at work, I tune out. When I'm at home, I'm really tuned in. You got to be committed 100% of the time. That means that the line between the two is very, very, very blurry.
Speaker 1:
Why don't you find a reason to get as excited about going to work as you are about checking out of work? Stop making work the enemy. Somebody will say well, that doesn't work, doesn't fulfill me. Well, that's a you problem. What fulfills you anyway? Half the people you ask what would fulfill you. They don't know, they can't give you an answer. So coursework can't fulfill them. Home can't fulfill them either. They just don't know what makes them happy.
Speaker 1:
You probably met people like that. No matter what, they're never happy. They're always bitching and moaning about something. Let them bitch and moan, then. Let them go do it by themselves in the corner though. Well, my kids make me happy.
Speaker 1:
Well, guess what? Your kids are going to grow up and move out and you're going to have to have an identity. You're going to have to be a person separate from your kids. So go to work and practice Right, give them a break too. Well, why are you fulfilled by your kids then? Well, I'd love to see them grow. Don't be so selfish then. Go to work and watch and help somebody else grow. It's not just about you and your kids. It's about the bigger, broader community that you belong to. You can't survive alone, just with your kids. You have to be connected to the rest of the world.
Speaker 1:
Can you go to work and find somebody that you are really excited about, to watch their growth? To watch them achieve new things? Their families grow, their successes? The same thing that makes you excited about watching your kids. You can find that in others, find it. Don't push it away, don't lock it up and say, well, that's because it's work. If you really only look at work as work, you will never be committed, your quasi-committed, you do lip service but you're never actually fully in it, and that's why you won't understand what it means to be hungry.
Speaker 1:
If you say, well, somebody's blocking me, I would do that, but they don't let me do that at work. They make us keep things separate. They make a change, change your damn life. And if you say, well, somebody at home blocking me, they won't let me do it, then change your home. You have control over that too. You need to find fulfillment in life for yourself. Nobody else is gonna do it for you. Well, this is the only job I can do bullshit I see, for hiring now signs. All the time we're hiring, all the time I talk to people, all the time. You know what? There is not a single job that only a single person can do out there. People are capable of much more than they want to do. It's just whether or not their mind will allow them to do that. So you are not restricted. You might say, well, I can't get paid as much as I get paid if I go do something else. So what then? Adjust your life. You want to be happy, you want to be fulfilled or you want to be miserable. Which one is it? Change your life. You can do that.
Speaker 1:
We had an employee we had. This is a story about two employees. One employee new, younger employee Leads our procedures team for our financial planning team, so he's in charge of procedural training and Every month he gets to lead a meeting. It's a 30 minute we call a power 30 and it goes over all the training updates and I mean he loves it. He's in some of the best presentations you'll ever see and he's living and breathing this stuff.
Speaker 1:
He is very regimented about making sure he spends time with his young family and spending, you know, time working on his craft, but it never ends. It's just part of his life and what he's doing, and so he's got some time scheduled off and it happens to be over one of his power 30 meetings and he has complete control over this, because there there are no. This is pretty loose as far as we happen to have the meeting in the certain Friday of every month, but it's not required to be in like such so he could have somebody else run the meeting. While he's off, he could reschedule the meeting or cancel the meeting. He keeps the meeting, so he's off spending time with his family, and he jumps on for a 30 minute meeting which he had to prepare for. I'm sure he had to do that in his personal time as well To lead the meeting on a Friday morning out of personal choice, because he's hungry, he's trying to grow, he's excited, he wants other people to grow around them, he wants to show everybody else how to do a better job. And he leaves the meeting.
Speaker 1:
And immediately after the meeting I have another employee who responds I can't remember if it was just to me or to the group, but he should be having a work life bound. This is a major issue. What do you mean? This is a major issue? Well, he's off. He shouldn't be doing this when he's off. Well, who the fuck are you to say that he shouldn't be doing something when he's off? Who? Who gave you the scales of justice to say that that's an imbalance for him? Because he seems perfectly balanced to me. This is what he wants to do and he didn't overdo it. He shut up for 30 minutes, did a presentation and then took off and it was virtual, so it's not even like he had spent time in the car. Get dressed up Well, interestingly, when we look at the two employees, one of them directly matches up with Hungry, humble and Smart and one doesn't.
Speaker 1:
One of them shows up every single day asking for what's next and if you don't tell them what's next, they go find what's next. And everything is around lifting up other people, everything, every single action, whether it's in their personal life or their work life. It's all about lifting people up and getting better and stronger as a person. The other one is all complaints it's overwhelming, it's too much work, whatever, and it's they're doing the bare minimums Literally the bare minimums and hoping that nobody actually notices, because sometimes they leave less than the bare minimums, and all we're doing is advocating for work life balance from the party that's not doing the stuff that actually moves the ball forward.
Speaker 1:
The person who we would consider not Hungry and I have yet to find a Hungry person who's coming in saying we need this work life balancing figured out. I don't think it exists, because I think to that person there is no boundary between the two, and the reason why is because they don't need an excuse why they can't get work done. They don't need an excuse why they're poor performing. They don't need an excuse why somebody else took a position that they wanted. They are just getting shit done. Never heard it out of a Hungry person work, life, balance. And so, incidentally, one of those two is with us and one of those two is not with us. You can probably figure out who this is.
Speaker 1:
What I mean by hunger. Hunger is not about money or attention. It's about a demand for growth. I am demanding to move forward and I don't care if you give me an opportunity or not. I am going to take every inch and I am going to push forward. I'm going to make it happen. There's nothing that you're going to do to stop me from getting better. I will make everybody around me better. That is the hungry attitude. I want to work because I love the opportunity. I love how it makes me feel. I love what that brings into my life. I feel alive when I'm doing it.
Speaker 1:
We got another team member. This team member is looking to get a promotion, change positions, and so the manager of the division that she's looking to be promoted into calls me up and says you know, just checking the references, and I happen to sit right next to this person and I'm a huge advocate of them because I see the work ethic I've seen this from day one and their improvement and the way that they attack life and work. And he says you know, I'm just doing my due diligence. You know, I've met with this person and is it really what it looks like? I said bet your ass it is. I told him you better get ready to perform man, because she doesn't wait for people to get it together. She just does.
Speaker 1:
She will figure stuff out on her own. If you don't have the answers, you'll come to work the next day. She'll have done self study overnight, she'll figure out the problem, she'll have solved the problem and she'll be sitting there going what's next, boss? And if you don't tell her what's next, she'll figure out what's next. She literally will go out there and find something to do, some problem solve, and she'll be working on it. If you're behind, she's going to get you caught up. You can have people saying, well, we're behind because it's an overwhelming amount of work, whatever. No, not when you have somebody like that.
Speaker 1:
Now, when you have somebody who's hungry, they devour it. You will literally see that in action. She will perform at a level that if you have anybody on your team who is underperforming, it will be obvious, not because she points them out, but because you put that star next to their star. One's going to be glowing and one's going to look dull. It's just going to be obvious. The difference, the difference is hunger. That person wants it. They want the opportunity. They have been looking their whole life for opportunity and they have opportunity and there ain't nobody who's going to stand in their way to take advantage of that opportunity. That's the attitude, that's the mentality that you're getting. If you're not ready for that, don't put her in a position, because that's what you're going to do. She's going to say what's next, because hungry people Hungry people say and they always say, what's next.