Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think there’s this misunderstanding that if you’re good at something it’s easy, and I think that is so unhelpful because it’s rarely true.

Michael Hyatt:
Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael Hyatt:
This is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed at life. Today, we’re going to be talking about reasons you can’t stop working. Megan, what do you think about this topic?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, I am excited to talk about this because I don’t know that we’re super self-aware about why we feel so compelled to work. I think you and I have both had that compulsion ourself at times, and certainly, we’ve had people who’ve worked for us who just couldn’t stop working, and I think we need to become more self-aware so that we can really understand what’s driving that behavior rather than trying to fix it after the fact. That’s what we’re going to get into today.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, before we get into working too much and why we work, let’s talk about why specifically we’re not working today like we probably have been in the past, or at least in the last week, and it all has to do with that dreaded COVID.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. Here’s the deal. You can run, but you can’t hide, apparently. I have one adult child who’s moved out, six people left at home, and we currently have four positive cases. I am still negative as of this recording, but I feel like my days are numbered, and our 11-year-old, Jonah, still negative, but has some symptoms, so we’re kind of on the struggle bus at the Miller household because in the last five weeks we have had one week of childcare. Our nanny got COVID. There was Christmas before that, then child number one got COVID. It’s all been very staggered. If we could just all got it on the same day, knocked it out, we’re back in action the next week, but that, come to find out, is not always how it works. I should probably say, because this is still relatively new, fortunately, it’s all been pretty mild. We’re all vaccinated and boosted, everybody that’s eligible, so it’s been mild, but it still keeps you from having your childcare, which is the hardest part. Can I get an “amen” from the parents, right?

Michael Hyatt:
Well, I’m so sorry. It’s been going through our extended family. Gail tested positive yesterday morning for COVID. I had it back in October. She tested positive yesterday. We were planning to go to my parents’ house for a visit yesterday after church for lunch, which is what we typically do on Sundays. I just had this hunch because she kind of had a running nose. I said, “Probably a long shot, but you ought to test yourself for COVID,” so she tested herself. Sure enough. I mean, her eyes about popped out of her head. She couldn’t believe it because honestly, she’s been kind of arrogant about not getting it so far, like she’s a little bit too special, you know what I’m saying?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right, right.

Michael Hyatt:
The rest of us, if we’d try a little harder, we wouldn’t have gotten it. But there she is, she’s gotten it. Thankfully, her symptoms are mild, but today, her energy is really low and she’s got the sniffles and she told me, she said, “I’m just not feeling that great,” so I suspect she’ll have a few days where she’s not performing at 100%.

Michael Hyatt:
All right, why can’t we stop working? What is it that drives us to work like we work? I think we probably ought to start with a story or two here about why this is relevant to us, because honestly, I would say that for much of my career, I was a workaholic, and if I’m honest, I still struggle with it, so I’m a little bit like the addict that got sober but still has to be careful because certain things can trigger me.

Michael Hyatt:
This last quarter, we had a very, very busy end of November all the way through December, 1st week of January, and for me, I was working harder than I’ve worked probably in 20 years, and a lot of things, a lot of my habits that I took for granted, like my morning ritual, like my workout routine and all that kind of fell by the wayside. I guess to put it in the most positive light, it was a great reminder of what happens when you work too much, and on the negative side, I just think it was also a reminder that this is something to be wary of because it’s not a sustainable thing and it’s not good for me, it’s not good for the people around me, it’s not good for the company. There’s a lot of downsides of working too much.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay, so the thing I think we have to consider before we dig into the real reasons why we can’t stop working, maybe we could talk about the reasons why we tell ourselves that we can’t stop working because I think there’s a real difference between these two things. We talked about this a little bit in our book, Win at Work and Succeed at Life, and I think this is a good exercise in self-awareness to just differentiate between the two. What do you think people tell themselves about why they’re working too much?

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, so if you noticed a difference in how I sound, it’s because I switched mics. Hopefully, this is better, but for those audiophiles out there, this is the explanation. Well, let me ask you this question even before we get into that, why is that a problem? Because I don’t think that most people even think it’s a problem because we live in a society that sort of congratulates and celebrates people with a “strong work ethic” or people that are willing to leave it all on the field and play full out, but why do we even think that’s a problem, because there’s probably some of the people that are listening to this that are going, “Wait a second, we’re trying to fix what?”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. Well, if you’ve been around Lead to Win for any length of time or read anything that we’ve written or heard us speak or anything, you know that we are about the double win, which is winning at work and succeeding at life, and so part of what we talk about is that we refuse to accept that you have to choose between winning at work and succeeding at life.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Now, that’s not some kind of magical proposition. I mean, part of the way that you accomplish that is that you get laser-focused on the highest leverage investments of your time and energy so that you actually can achieve more by doing less. Again, it’s not magic, but the problem is when you overwork, when you’re working 50, 60, 70-plus hours a week, what we’ve found in our own experience, through our clients, and just in our audience in the world is that you end up having to pay the price with your health and your most important relationships in particular. Somebody’s going to write a check somewhere and usually those are the places where the check gets written if that goes on for too long.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I mean, certainly, there are short periods of time where, you got to pull the ox out of the ditch, so to speak. But we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about workaholism, or sustained periods of overworking, and that sense of compulsion that, “I just can’t stop working. I’m working at night, I’m working early in the morning, I’m working on the weekends, and that’s not just because I’ve got a big thing coming up here and there, that’s just kind of my M.O.”

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, which I would say that’s exactly what I experienced during the month of December and the first of January, as it was much more of that. We just were introducing a lot of new things and it just required all hands on deck. Frankly, the difference was there was a time in my career when I really enjoyed that and I thought it was very gratifying, I got something out of it. In this situation, I realized that there was a cost and it wasn’t sustainable and I couldn’t wait to snap back into balance because I knew that it was a cost I didn’t want to pay.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right, right. Okay, so that’s the negative, right? That’s the negative of overworking. Let’s talk about why we tell ourselves that that trade-off is worth, it, it, or we don’t even think about the trade-offs because it doesn’t even feel like there’s a choice. In your experience, what were things you used to tell yourself about it?

Michael Hyatt:
Well, and this is the key, because this is, I think, a conversation that we have with ourselves and these statements are going on inside of our head. One of them is, “Everything’s going to fall apart if I don’t work hard. I’m the glue that’s holding everything together. I’m the prop that’s keeping everything from falling apart.” I think that’s definitely a major reason that a lot of people, particularly business owners tell themselves, and I would say that they kind of have an outsized or overinflated view of their own impact and what they bring to the table.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, you can get a hero complex if you’re not careful.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. Again, things show up that sound like complaints, but they’re actually bragging. When somebody says, for example, “Gosh, I’m just so busy,” that’s basically a way of saying, “My life matters and I’m really significant.” This also happens when we’re working really hard, or we think that, “Gosh, if I want it done right, I’ve got to do it myself,” and it’s just sort of a way of patting ourselves on the back and saying, “Gosh, my standards are so impossibly high that only I can live up to them.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right. I think the other thing people tell themselves is, “There’s just no possible way I can get it all done in a reasonable workday. I spend too much time in meetings. My boss is too demanding. Basically, I don’t have a choice.” I mean, this sense of powerlessness, “This is just what’s expected and I’ve got to get it all done, right, so I’ve got to work longer.”

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. Well, I get that a lot of times from clients when they initially come into our coaching program. They’re like, “I don’t know what planets you live on, but in the planet where I live, you can’t get by on 40 hours a week, or 30 hours a week.” They’re incredulous, like, “What are you giving up? Or what are you settling for by not working as much as you should?”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right. I actually saw somebody say the other day that they needed to work six days a week because that was just the phase of their career they were in, they had so much exciting stuff happening, and I just thought, “Ugh. What’s the cost of that?” Right? The cost of six days a week is pretty intense, especially if those are long days.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, I know people that work seven days a week, and I had one of my really close friends say to me at one point, he said, “Well, it’s really simple. I work this much because I love my work.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Oh, that’s another good one, another good reason that people tell themselves they’ve got to do this. Yeah. Well, I think these are important reasons to just be mindful of because these are not the real reasons in most cases, these are the reasons we’ve convinced ourselves are the reasons that create this setup where there’s no other choice that would be reasonable but to work this much, and they’re the things that we tell our spouses, they’re the things that we tell our kids, they’re the things that we tell the other people we work with as justification for why we have to work so much, and it’s not fundamentally honest, and the other people in your life, they know it. I mean, basically what it says, particularly with your family members, is, “You’re just not that important,” or, “You’re on your own.”

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, which is a terrible message to give. I know in my situation, I gave some of those reasons to my family and I always felt a little disingenuous about it, but I kind of felt like the family went along with it, almost like the family of an addict who enabled me. That’s not to put blame on anybody else beside me, but I have to say, I feel a lot of regret looking back, and I wish I could go back and do it all over again, but of course, you can’t, but at least you can pass on to the next generation where you failed, and hopefully, they’ll do better.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, that’s part of why we’re talking about this today, because hopefully, part of the redemption of your own story and our work is that we get to help people have this realization before it’s too late to do it over, and fortunately, you have great relationships with all of us girls, all your daughters, and that’s awesome, but not everybody has that outcome, and so we want to try to spare you of that if we can.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Let’s talk about some of the real reasons why people overwork, the reasons underneath the reasons.

Michael Hyatt:
The first reason is that you’re finding your sense of meaning in your work, and we have to admit that work does give us a sense of meaning, and we are meaning-making, meaning-seeking beings. We can’t live without meaning. Meaning is what gives us the reason to press forward, to go through tough things, to keep going. It gives a reason for our existence, and so meaning is a very important component, but it’s sad if we’re only getting meaning out of work and nowhere else.

Michael Hyatt:
I think that’s the problem. It’s not that deriving meaning is something we should neglect or can’t have, it’s just that to vest that in one domain of life is not fair to that domain. We’re putting the weight on something that wasn’t intended or is not equipped to bear it and it deprives a full-orbed approach, that is, actually gives you deeper and richer meaning, and course, and there’s the other aspect, is that if that suddenly goes away, you get laid off, you lose your job, your company goes bankrupt, then your meaning evaporates with it, and that’s definitely not a good thing.

Michael Hyatt:
I saw this in my predecessor at Thomas Nelson Publishers, who was so committed to the company, that was a good thing, there was nobody that would doubt his commitment to the company, but when he stopped being the CEO and he passed the reins to me, the first thing he said when he came back into the office the first day he was not the CEO is he said to our CFO, he said, “Man, if I’m not the CEO of the company, who am I?” That reflected something, I think, very sad. Not only did he not have a sense of meaning as a result of giving up his position, but he lost his sense of identity, and honestly, that played out in some very, very unhealthy ways over the course of the next couple of years.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay, I have a question for you. Do you think this has gotten worse during COVID, this striving for meaning in your work? Here’s my thinking on this, and I don’t know what I think about it, but here’s what makes me wonder. I mean, a lot of things that used to give us meaning, travel, socializing, volunteering, being involved in faith communities, all that kind of stuff has been, for at least a lot of people, heavily impacted by COVID, to greater or lesser degrees, but probably none of us are coming through that unscathed, so I’m just wondering, does that put more pressure on our work?

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, it’s a good question. I’m not sure I have the answer to it. I’ve seen it go both ways, frankly. I’ve seen people that have rediscovered the rest of their lives because they’re not going to an off us where they can isolate themselves by virtue of proximity, they have to be in and among their family. A lot of those people have discovered what they can do with the time that used to be reserved for their commute.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
True.

Michael Hyatt:
I think some of those people are living a more balanced, more full-orbed life. I’ve also seen people that are depressed, conversely that are depressed because now, the thing that gave them meaning, being in the office, having that corner office, or having that important role is suddenly, I don’t know, not as present to them, and there’s a loss, and they feel that.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
The other thing is people who are working remotely maybe for the first time find it really easy to go to work at all hours of the day or day of the week.

Michael Hyatt:
There’s that, too.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right, because it’s just so accessible and there’s an expectation that you’re always on, which, again, is not the root cause, but it’s something that is one of those surface reasoning reasons where the payoff of that is you feel a lot of meaning on the backside of that.

Michael Hyatt:
I wonder if this is one of those things where the pandemic has acted as a bit of an accelerant, so that if you were on a trajectory to recover balance, it accelerated that, and you saw everything come into sharp relief and you got more balance than ever. But on the other hand, if you were on a trajectory to become or be a workaholic, that this gave you an even bigger excuse, “The world’s falling down around us. I got to really get my attention to it. I’m trying to keep my company afloat,” whatever, but like a lot of things in life, it just manifests the trajectory of where you were going. It made it even more pronounced.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think that’s a really good insight and I suspect that you’re correct in that, at some level, anyway.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay, so the second reason why you can’t stop working is that you’re staying busy doing downhill work, imagine that’s in air quotes, instead of buckling down on high-leverage work. What we mean is that you’re just kind of doing all that filler busy stuff a lot of the day, which is causing you not to be productive. You’re really not making progress on the things that matter most, you’re kind of avoiding the hardest work that makes your greatest contribution, and so it just takes you forever to ultimately… It’s kind of like a way of procrastinating, I guess, would be the best way to say it. You’re procrastinating doing your high leverage work because it would require something of you that’s significant and you’re spending the majority of your time doing things that are more trivial, which then, eventually, you got to face the music, and sometimes you’re doing that late at night or on the weekends, getting to the real work.

Michael Hyatt:
I’ve been pretty honest here in revealing my foibles, but for you, what does that look like? First of all, do you struggle with that? Do you procrastinate with downhill work? If so-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
… What does that look like?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Sometimes I do. It’s interesting. I feel like there are times when I’m ready to go, I can make great progress, but I also find that if I have to do something that simultaneously really important and really difficult, which is frequent, right, this is, to me, I think there’s this misunderstanding that if you’re good at something it’s easy, and I think that is so unhelpful because it’s rarely true. You may have a natural aptitude for it, or you’ve developed a high level of skill, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy, that just means that the outcome is great, and maybe you even find joy in doing this. But for me, that would be developing communication that needs to go out, or articulating vision in a written document, something I have to do on a pretty regular basis in my position.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I will find on days where I need to write something like that, that the compulsion to waste time and to suddenly feel the need to do all kinds of stuff is very strong. I will inevitably end up doing the thing that is the most important that I’ve got to do at about an hour from when I have to leave to go get one of my kids, like there is this immovable deadline, and I know, “Okay, now, there is no more procrastinating. You’ve got to do it now,” and I’ll get it done. For me, this doesn’t look like overworking is not the consequence, but it does look like I have done things that I don’t have a lot to show for it, and frankly, someone else could have done, or not done it all, and I wait till the end to get it done. Sometimes the more important it is, the stronger that drive feels.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I’ll tell you one that I’m having right now that is driving me crazy that I just, ugh, man. This is not work-related, but one of my goals this year is I’m doing this course that’s in a book called The Artist’s Way. This has been around forever. It’s all about recovering your creativity. It’s a fantastic book that I’ve been through before years and years ago, probably 20-something years ago, so I’m doing it again, and one of the things that I have to do every day is I write this journal exercise, or complete this journal exercise called morning pages, which is basically just your off the top of your head, stream of consciousness, thoughts about whatever. It’s just a discipline that you do. Then you also do on the weekends at some point an artist date. You go and do something that’s creatively inspiring for an hour or two once a week on your own.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I cannot tell you how resistant I have been to do these things. I literally would rather code the transactions in my Quicken app than I would write these pages or go on an artist date. I mean, when I’m doing it, I like it, but it feels important and vulnerable and I’m avoiding it. I know I am.

Michael Hyatt:
I think I experience a lot of that, too. Whenever it’s a creative project, especially, that’s the easy stuff. That’s when I’m more likely to check social media or whatever. In fact, I was reading, I can’t remember who said this, it might have been John Acuff, maybe, another author friend of mine who said, “My closet is never more organized than the first week when I’m supposed to be writing a book because I find all kinds of things to organize. I work on the garage, I work on my closet, I do this, I do that, but I’m doing everything except what I should be doing.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s what downhill work looks like, but that’s why it’s easy to, I was guilty of this, is that I would do things that weren’t that important back when I was in the corporate world, and let’s be honest, you could spend eight hours a day just responding to email.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Sure.

Michael Hyatt:
Especially if you’re in leadership in your company, and I would often do that, and then I would go home and I’d say, “Man, to do the really important work, I need to do that tonight after dinner,” and that’s what I did, and I did that for years.

Michael Hyatt:
There is another strategy and that’s the strategy that we teach in the Full Focus System as expressed in the Full Focus Planner, which is to identify at the beginning of the day or the night before your three most important tasks that you can do and get started with those and let that low-leverage work come after you’ve done the high-leverage work and really accomplish what matters. I can tell you that that gives you a sense of confidence, momentum, and a sense of all is right with the world. When you do the reverse, you’re kind of not feeling great about yourself, you’re not feeling great about your job, and you feel like you’re always kind of doing everything at the last minute, and not doing it very well, and I don’t like that feeling.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I don’t, either. The Full Focus Planner and the Full Focus System have really helped me a lot with this. Somehow, it just makes it feel more manageable, and oftentimes, if I find myself feeling overwhelmed, I’ll just chunk it down into something smaller. One of the things that has helped me, if I have to develop communication for something, is I’ll just write the big headings to what I’m going to be talking about rather than build out the whole argument, which can feel kind of overwhelming.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Once I get that part, like last night, as I was falling asleep, I had this brainstorm for a talk I’ve got to give at the end of the week, and it was just really like a rationale statement and a couple of points and it was great, right? I just stuck that in the Notes app. It took me 20 seconds to write it and that’s the kind of thing that normally I’m not doing that when I’m going to bed, that was kind of a rare situation, but if you just think of that at that level, then it starts to feel less overwhelming, so sometimes I’ll just write down as one of my big three for the day, just come up with the major headings of what you’re going to write, rather than write this whole talk.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, totally. I do that on every major content preparation thing. Maybe it’s just a simple bit of research, or it’s writing the objective statement of the rationale, or it’s finding an opening illustration, or whatever. If I can chuck it down that small, then all of a sudden, it feels doable, and I can get that sense of momentum.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, third reason. You’re avoiding pain by distracting yourself with work. We saved the best for last.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Ugh.

Michael Hyatt:
Some people call this “medication,” like you’re medicating yourself. Some people, like Brooke Castillo, call this “buffering,” you’re trying to protect yourself from something unpleasant by putting a buffer in-between you and that thing that’s unpleasant, and I have to say that in my history, that’s been kind of it, too, like I didn’t feel that great about myself. It all depends on how we were raised and our background and all that and I felt like I had to prove something to myself and to the world and it was a way of making me feel better about myself.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I experienced this when my kids were really struggling, my children who were adopted when we first brought them home. That was a major transition for them, and it was fraught in many ways, as it is any time you’re in an adoption process. It’s just a lot for kids to transition to a new family and I was pretty overwhelmed.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
What I found is that work for me was one of the few places where I felt like I was accomplishing something, where I could check something concrete off my list, where I felt like I was winning and not failing, and that’s been my own journey around this idea of winning at work and succeeding at life is that I realized pretty quickly that I was going to have to put some hard edges on my day because I knew my kids needed me in order to heal and ultimately thrive.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
That was going to take a lot of it time and attention, and if I wasn’t honest about where those boundaries needed to be, then we were going to have some problems because it was always going to be easier to work more than do the hard work of parenting, and during that season, it was really hard, so I think this is one that a lot of us find ourself going to just like we would with any other way of, as you said, buffering, or substances or whatever, it’s just you’re basically just trying to numb one thing that doesn’t feel good with something else that feels better but is problematic in large doses.

Michael Hyatt:
There’s a sense in which when you’re having problems at home, everything else feels like low-leverage work. In other words, it’s downhill work. It’s downhill work to go to work rather than to actually be at home and have to solve this thorny problem that there’s probably not an immediate solution to, but there’s just engagement and conflict and challenges and working through it over a long period of time that that makes it work. That’s tough. I mean, we can only run so many marathons, and sometimes we pick and choose and it’s unconscious.

Michael Hyatt:
But here’s a question I have for you, if these are the problems and if these are the things that are actually driving this sense of overwork, what’s the solution? How can this help us get better? How can this get us on a more balanced course?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, this is probably not going to be a super popular answer because I’m sure you guys are hoping I just have some little nugget, something you can just sprinkle in your drink and make it easy, right, and I wish I had that, too. I actually think that if you feel that there is a compulsive aspect to your working, there’s something else going on that is worth looking into. What I would recommend is considering some therapy. We can give you all the tricks in the book about how to prioritize what matters most and identify that, I think all that matters, but if there’s something unconsciously driving your behavior, you don’t need productivity strategies, you need to get clear on what is happening that’s driving the behavior in the first place.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Again, I know that’s not a very popular answer, or maybe the one that anybody wants to hear because it’s not fast, but I think you owe it to yourself and the people that you love and the future potential of your life to just get underneath that. I don’t mean to make it sound like there’s necessarily some deeply pathological issue in play, there might be, but it might just be that there are feelings that you have that are just kind of under the surface and unaddressed need a place to be expressed instead of worked out in a sideways way through overworking or something else, or you need some different kind of self-care than what you’ve had.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I don’t know, but I just, I think that that is a worthwhile pursuit, particularly if you’re a leader, because whatever is true in yourself that’s kind of unresolved, unhealed, or you’re just not aware of will inevitably impact other people in a outsized way that report to you or that you work with, and so I think it’s incumbent upon us as leaders to do our own work, as they say, now so we don’t kind of inflict our stuff on other people, and this is one of those areas, as you said, Dad, in the middle of our show here where this will impact the people that you love, especially.

Michael Hyatt:
It really will. This is one of the things that I finally came to. I was a productivity geek. I had a blog on productivity. I was very studied and proficient in productivity strategies, but that only got me so far because what I wasn’t dealing with is this under-the-surface current that was driving a lot of my behavior and it wasn’t until I got into therapy that I began to uncover that. Like you said, wasn’t some deep dark trauma, I mean, in my case. Like you said, it may be in some people’s case, but it was just something that, frankly, needed to see the light of day and needed to be processed.

Michael Hyatt:
Once I began to process that with a trained therapist, once I was able to process that, it was enormously liberating because then when I would see that kind of behavior, I could at least be self-aware enough to push the pause button and say, “Wait a second. Oh, yeah, this is that thing that usually drives me, but I can make a different choice,” and I think that’s the thing that therapy gives you is the opportunity to make different choices, that you don’t have to feel so locked into this automatic response, but you can choose a different response, and that’s the beauty of human freedom and our own agency is that just because we’ve had a certain past, we can change the future, but it begins with self-awareness, and sometimes we need some help to get there.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, what I love about this is that ultimately, on the other side is freedom.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s right.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It’s the freedom to choose, like you just said. It’s also the freedom to make a clean contribution through your work that’s not about something that it’s not about. I think what you’ll discover is that your ability to make a contribution is greater when it’s not tangled up in other stuff, when it is clean, when it’s just about what it’s about and it’s not trying to do something else that it was never intended to do, and ultimately, freedom in your relationships, that you don’t have live with regret, you don’t have to live with disappointment on the part of the people who love you the most, that you really, you just have cleaned things up in a way that work is restored to its proper order in creation. Work is good. We are not anti-work. We love working. We love the contribution we get to make through our work, so this is not a anti-work message, it’s just about restoring it to its proper place in the created order rather than having it be in its wrongful place.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, I think what we’re saying is that if you want to be an effective leader, you can’t be so attached to your work and so driven by your work that the outcome matters so much that you’re basically willing to throw yourself under the bus or anybody else under the bus, and of course, this wouldn’t be overt, but it can happen inadvertently with detrimental consequences to everybody, so I think you got to be a little bit detached to have that calm, confident leadership, and that comes from self-awareness, where work is important, but it’s not everything. If this project succeeds, great, we’ll celebrate it, but if it fails, it’s not the end of the world because it’s not a referendum on my identity or my sense of meaning in the world. There’s always going to be another project or another campaign and the important thing is to be a good steward of what I have, to lead through it, but not be addicted to it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, folks, I hope this has been helpful for you as you consider your own relationship to work and why you might be driven to work more than you know is good for you, and I hope you feel like you now have some clarity on what might help you to break that habit and find a better path forward. Thanks for being with us and we look forward to seeing you next week. Until then, Lead to Win.