If work is the pot you grow in, then your home life is the soil, water, and sunlight that nurtures that growth, which is why manager coaching is essential to achieving a healthy work-life balance.
Your home life feeds your work life. In other words, when you’re the person in charge, you still need to make time to recharge. But this is true for everyone, not just leadership. Decades of experience helping leaders live more fulfilling lives have shown me that a company that encourages employees to have a healthy work-life balance is happier and more productive. Still, it can be difficult to make your employees master this balancing act without mastering it yourself first.
Imagine if you were a stickler on punctuality but were always late or harped on phone usage but retreated into your office and spent hours scrolling Social Media. That wouldn’t inspire confidence. You must lead by example for the sake of everyone’s wellness and performance. Fortunately, mastering this balancing act while juggling your responsibilities is what middle-management training can teach. That’s why I’m sharing my decades of experience helping leaders live more fulfilling lives:
Why Work-Life Balance Matters in Manager Coaching
When you’re the manager, keeping pace with a demanding work schedule, looming deadlines, and investing long hours into the next big thing comes with the territory. But this is not an excuse to neglect your self-care, which is at the heart of work-life balance.
In my 20 years of coaching as a strategic thought partner, I have come to realize that in the modern work culture, receiving manager coaching to learn how to strike this balance is more important than ever because technology makes communication possible around the clock, especially for remote workers.
It’s easy to feel pressure to check your work email on weekends, take calls after you get home, or make yourself available to meet clients off the clock when you could be decompressing, but it comes at a cost.
Without compartmentalizing or setting boundaries, stress spills over from your work life into your home life and vice versa. This stress gets mixed up and starts collecting until you have a big pool of stress, making it feel nearly unmanageable.
During our training programs, I constantly remind leaders and managers that the worst management style is unsustainable. As your “to-do list” colonizes all your time and bandwidth, this hurts your performance, relationships, and overall wellness.
Creating harmony between running the ship and enjoying life should be non-negotiable. After all, what’s the point of running the ship if you can’t spend time relaxing on the deck and taking in the sunshine?
How Manager Coaching Improves Work-Life Balance
During my middle-management training sessions, I like to reiterate that work-life balance is not just about taking time off, it’s about creating a lifestyle that enables you to better achieve personal and professional goals.
If you are unsure whether or not you need to work with a strategic thought partner and receive manager coaching to improve your work-life balance, ask yourself:
- Can you disengage from work when your workday has finished?
- Do you set a positive example for work-life balance at work and home?
- How can you maximize productivity and efficiency to have more free time?
- Are you able to give your full attention to your hobbies and interests?
- How can you incorporate breaks and time to unwind in your routine?
- What tasks can you delegate to other people?
Answering these questions can help put you on track to establish a healthy work-life balance, which is crucial to avoiding burnout and inefficiency. But overcoming this obstacle requires some help. Manager coaching will help by teaching you how to:
- Regulate emotions
- Set a positive example
- Manage your time
- Stop bringing work home with you
- Set boundaries
- Delegate work
- Determine what makes life meaningful (your reason for being)
- Find hobbies and make time for them
- Accept feedback when people say you are overworking
- Make time for self-care
- Set realistic goals
- Create a support system
I’ll be the first to admit some of these are heavy. And if it sounds like soul-searching, that’s because it kind of is. But, in this case, you don’t need a darkness retreat. Take it from a bonafide strategic thought partner because I see it time and time again:
Simply enrolling in middle-management training can help nourish your happiness and success at home and work to move you a little closer to discovering the meaning of life.
Enroll in Manager Coaching in Southern California Today
We aren’t on this earth to work. We are on this earth to live life to the fullest. As a leader, it is easy to focus on skills and execution and neglect your personal relationships, hobbies, wellness, and overall happiness. This is what I call “the entire wheel of life.” In life, there are more important things than financial and career goals. Ironically, stepping back and tending to your personal life can help you achieve more financial and professional success than ever before. For more insights from a strategic thought partner, browse our blog.
Schedule a consultation for manager coaching that teaches how to lay the foundation of good work-life balance. Remember, you can be passionate without being a workaholic.
