What to Do if You're Struggling with Work/Life Balance

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Transcript:

There is a period of time where things are just going to be sideways, and you're filling all four functions in your business:  you're marketing, you're selling, you're delivering world-class service, and you're counting dollars.  And you're your own visionary, and you're the CEO, and you're just doing every job in the business.  

And you have a spouse.  And you've got to keep a real open dialogue with your spouse about just the reason why you're putting in the work and the ascension that you're looking to do, and just make sure your spouse, your children, that they all sort of understand why you're making these sacrifices.  

Because there is no easy way to do this.  You cant part-time your way to building a sustainable, real leveraged business, but it is -- I just love that: "Entrepreneurship is living your life for a few years like most people won't so you can live the rest of your life like most people will never even dream of."

If you talk to my wife, she still talks about the time that I took from our family -- I cry -- just building the business.  And I knew what I was doing.  I was very deliberate and intentional, high-level communication, but it still hurts her.  There's still pain in there for her.  So if you don't communicate that with your spouse, they're going to feel just left out of the process.  

And you're going to have to lean on them heavily, and they have to know that you're fighting a fight by building a business that most people will never do.  

And I promise you the systems are here.  You've got to go do the work.  We're here to support and help you and make sure it happens, but if that falls apart in the process, ugh.

And the hard drivers in the room, you know, I can make the excuses like the best of them.  That's selling another home or building another business.  Like we're doing it to provide this life for my family.  

But I promise you, your children don't want you to sell another home, you know?  I promise you that your spouse really doesn't give a shit if you sell 250 homes or 50 homes with an admin.  

I went through years of that, saying I'm doing this for my family, and ultimately, it's a huge blessing for us, and we're impacting people, and all that good stuff.  But you're doing it because God created you to just be a driver.  

And so it's a personal decision.  It's a personal decision for you to be on this team, and a personal decision when you decide not to leave the office at 5:30, or whatever time that is for you.  

And it's just priorities.  Like, in the grand scheme of things, at the end of your day, your last day, what do you want to be remembered for?  And family is going to be a big part of it.

"You really want to just draw a line in the sand for you personally, and say if you're going to be home at 5:30 then I'm going to be home at 5:30.  You need to hold yourself accountable. Because that could cause marriage issues just down the road.  

"So you can pick and choose your battles and say,  "I can't be home every night at 5:30," or whatever the situation is, "but on Monday nights or Friday nights, we're going to do a date night."  You just need to carve out family time first and then plug in the rest with work, because work will consume your entire life.  So put those big rocks in first, like Stephen Covey."

"And one thing I would add to that, too, is we started our team in 2010, and six months later, I found out that I was expecting.  So I wasn't planning on that to all happen the way it did, but it actually worked out to be a blessing, because I could not -- at that time, I was a single agent doing everything, and there was no way I could have kept up the level I was at and have a family, too.  

"But I would say the thing that -- and I think you're one that is always struggling with work-life balance, and my thing is -- someone said this one time, and now it's kind of stuck in my head, that it's -- whatever you're doing, be 100 percent engaged in it. 

"If you get home at 5:30, but then you're just on your phone or in front of the computer, it doesn't really matter.  So I kind of think of it as quality over quantity.  And so if you're at work, be 100 percent at work, and if you're at home, be 100 percent at home.

 "And if you just have an hour but just be fully engaged in -- when he gets old enough, he's going to remember that hour you have playing football versus, oh, you were home for five hours, but you were looking at your phone the whole time."

Yeah.  That's really, really good.