Michael Hyatt:
I came bounding through the back door with this big fat check in hand knowing that it was going to blow your socks off and you were going to be so impressed with me. I showed it to you. I mean, in fairness, you’re usually my biggest cheerleader, but you kind of were impressed. You kind of looked at it and kind of gave me a half smile and said, “We need to talk,” and I knew in my heart of hearts that I was in trouble. Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Gail Hyatt:
And I’m Gail Hyatt.

Michael Hyatt:
What?

Gail Hyatt:
Yup.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s right. Megan Hyatt Miller is not with us this week, but her mother is. And I promise you, this is going to be a very interesting show, because we’re going to be talking about the whole life impact of work-life balance. To keep me honest, I’ve got my wife of 43 years here. Here’s the deal, we-

Gail Hyatt:
Actually, it’s really close to 44.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s true.

Gail Hyatt:
I mean, just a few more weeks.

Michael Hyatt:
Like six weeks. All right. We recently surveyed and discussed in a previous episode more than 200 Full Focus Planner users who identified as high achievers, and about half said they worked more than 50 hours a week, even though only 18% said their employers expected that of them. In other words, this isn’t required. This is something they’ve just decided that they want to do. They want to work that much.

Gail Hyatt:
That doesn’t surprise me.

Michael Hyatt:
In a sense, it doesn’t either.

Gail Hyatt:
I bet you, and these are people who work for other people, right? People who work for themselves, it’s got to be even higher than that.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, no doubt. Well, when I talk with business owners, when they start our Business Accelerator Program, they often struggle here and usually to a greater degree, just as you’re pointing out, Gail. But every business owner I know does struggle with this whole thing of work-life balance. I mean, it just seems like there’s so much to get done and there’s so little time to do it. When the success of your business is on your shoulders, you put your back into it, right? But this often comes at the cost of the people closest to you. I certainly made that mistake for a decade or so in our early life. This conversation is going to range over a wide range of topics. We kind of have an outline to go by, but we’re not going to stick too close to that because I think the peeps want to hear from you, Gail.

Gail Hyatt:
Yeah. Well, I might have some things to say.

Michael Hyatt:
All right. Okay, so here’s what we’re going to talk about, we’re going to talk about three truths about work-life balance.

Gail Hyatt:
Do you want to say it what they all are or are you going to just gradually go in?

Michael Hyatt:
No, one at a time.

Gail Hyatt:
They have to stick with it to get all three.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s exactly right. I learned that from Ken Davis. Don’t give the whole outline. Because if you do, you break the tension and nobody wants to stay with you until the end.

Gail Hyatt:
Oh, there’s so much to come. Stay until the end.

Michael Hyatt:
Truth number one, work-life balance is distributive. What do we mean by that?

Gail Hyatt:
Well, your work life balance is distributed among a lot of different domains. You’ve got work. You’ve got family. You’ve got health. You’ve got vocation, vacation. You’ve got spiritual. You’ve got mental. All the different domains of your life.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, and they’re all interrelated. Like your health determines the quality of your relationships or your ability to focus at work and to actually get stuff done. I think that one of the mistakes that I made early in my career, and I just didn’t know any better, was that I kind of thought life was work, and then whatever was left over from work could be distributed to whatever was left.

Gail Hyatt:
I think that’s a good word, leftover, because it’s not a good experience, but it’s an accurate word to describe how most people live. The people that you love the most, the most important in your life, or other activities, they get your leftovers.

Michael Hyatt:
Do you want to describe what that was?

Gail Hyatt:
Typically, that’s what most people experience.

Michael Hyatt:
We had a reckoning, you and I, in about 2001. At that point, we’d been married, what, almost 25 years. Describe what it was like to be raising five daughters to be living with me, with somebody who was consumed with their career.

Gail Hyatt:
Well, before I answer that question, I think it might be helpful to take you into my brain a little bit about what I was-

Michael Hyatt:
That’s a scary thought.

Gail Hyatt:
…what I was trying to grasp as a newly married woman.

Michael Hyatt:
This goes even back before.

Gail Hyatt:
Yeah, I want to go back even farther, like when we were first married, because one of the things that attracted me to you was that you were very ambitious. I knew you would succeed at whatever you decided to do. In order for that to happen, you had to work really hard. The first several years of our marriage, you were really pouring yourself into your career. You would get there early in the morning. I remember you would talk about getting there so early that there were no other cars in the parking lot. If anybody else came in after you and they were to put their hand on the hood of your car, your car would already be cold. It was just you were the first one there, you were the last one to leave, and you worked really hard.

Gail Hyatt:
And as a result, you kept getting promoted. All of that was great because you have a lot of opportunities that were given to you. But with all those opportunities came a lot of pressure. And then with a lot of pressure, also at the same time, opportunities were coming, a lot of obligations were coming as we started having a family and all that kind of stuff, all that thrown in together, mixed up together equals stress.

Michael Hyatt:
Yes.

Gail Hyatt:
There was a lot of stress in your life, which overflowed into me and into our family. It was hard, but what was interesting is I kept trying to say to myself, “Why is winning at work important?” Because if I understood the why behind why you were working so hard, then that would help me to accept it and to support it and all those kinds of things. What I realized is you got to pay the bills. We had five children in 10 years. We’d been married about a year and a half, almost two years when we had our first child. And then by the time we’d been married 12 years, we already had five children.

Michael Hyatt:
Then we figured out what was causing it.

Gail Hyatt:
Just to put that in perspective, our fourth daughter, Madeline, just had her first baby. She and Sean, her husband, have been married for 10 years. They had 10 years to adjust to work, to adjust to their marriage, and all that stuff before adding children into the mix. Well, we didn’t. Everything was happening all at the same time.

Michael Hyatt:
It was crazy.

Gail Hyatt:
It was really, really crazy. But I kept thinking, okay, you need to be able to provide for your family. You need to be able to realize your goals and your career goals and things like that. I wanted you to have a sense of contribution. You wanted to make sure you were contributing in this world with your job. When you’re winning at work, all of that is happening and you’re helping people. At that time, you were in the publishing business, and so you were publishing books that were really helping people. There’s a lot of good reasons to win at work.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, I would say the other thing too is that I had convinced myself and I convinced you and looking back on it, this was kind of the great lie, that at any given point, when you would start to complain, I would just remind you and I would remind myself that that situation was temporary, right?

Gail Hyatt:
And that’s going to come up in a minute. Hang on to that.

Michael Hyatt:
You’ve got your own outline. I’ve got my own outline here. Okay? I want to tell it now.

Gail Hyatt:
Well, okay. Well, what I wanted to also say is but succeeding at life, the other half of the equation, which we really weren’t thinking about in those early years, like that just wasn’t even on the radar. We were surviving and you were succeeding. Those are kind of the two things. There wasn’t win and win. But what I’ve come to realize and what you teach is that succeeding at life is important because, as you mentioned, number one, it affects your relationships. If there’s a lot of stress, if you’re tired when you come home and I get the leftovers, then that does not help to build the relationship and make us closer. It didn’t help with the kids. It didn’t help with the friends that we had. Everything just kind of got the leftovers.

Gail Hyatt:
When you succeed at life, the relationships are way, way better. Your health is way, way better. You have talked about in other podcast episodes about how you had these heart attack scares. To my knowledge, you had three separate ones that ended you up in the hospital.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s right.

Gail Hyatt:
But none of them turned out to be actual heart attacks, but they were stress induced-

Michael Hyatt:
Panic attacks.

Gail Hyatt:
…and really scary. That affects your ability to perform and all of that. When your health is suffering, it affects your energy level. You eat a lot. You eat a lot of the wrong kinds of foods. You put on weight. That makes you even more lethargic or unhealthy. You know what else I remember about those early years is you were sick a lot. Every winter you’d get bronchitis. You just were suffering from digestive issues and back pain. It seems like a lot of that kind of stuff-

Michael Hyatt:
All stress induced, which again points to this fact that life is interconnected. When we create sort of this worldview that says work is the only domain and everything else is like a barnacle on the ship, then those areas suffer. And in fact, it begins to back up into your work. Those times when I had those heart attack scares and I went to the emergency room or whatever, I mean, even for just a day, like I was knocked out of work, because then they had to do all these tests and all this stuff to find out that, “Oh no, it wasn’t a heart attack. It was something else.” Just to complete the story there, it wasn’t until I finally went to a cardiologist who ran me through a whole battery of tests who said to me, “Your heart’s fine.”

Gail Hyatt:
Tell me what’s going on in your life.

Michael Hyatt:
Tell me what’s going on in your life, because I think there’s something else that’s the cause of these panic attacks. He told me, he said, 30% of the people that he sees as a cardiologist who thought they had a heart attack or who thought they might be having a heart attack, it turned out to be a panic attack. That’s completely stress induced. Anything else you want to say about sort of the interplay of these things?

Gail Hyatt:
Nope. I think that’s a good summary of where we were. And then many years later, as we’re trying to navigate all of this, you started recognizing that something could be different, that there was a different way.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, that wasn’t until we had this reckoning.

Gail Hyatt:
Okay. That’s true. We did have a reckoning.

Michael Hyatt:
We did have a reckoning, and the reckoning came after I had taken responsibility. This was like the biggest promotion I’d ever gotten. I finally became the publisher of an actual publishing company. I was running one division of Thomas Nelson’s 14 divisions, and I had the opportunity to turn this division around. It was the worst performer in the entire company. At first that kind of discouraged me, and then I thought, “Whoa! This is an opportunity to be a hero and I really can’t screw it up,” because I could make it worse. It was already last, right? I created a vision with my team. We rolled up our sleeves. I was traveling constantly, working 60, 70 hours a week, traveling even on the weekends, not eating well, eating out, eating fast food a lot. It paid off in a way, because after 18 months, we went from number 14 to number one. I ended up with the biggest bonus check I’d ever received in my life.

Michael Hyatt:
More than my annual salary. My team ended up with big fat bonus checks too. We were flying high as a kite. I couldn’t wait to get home and share it with you. Now, just little secret thing here, I’m an Enneagram 3, achiever. On the StrengthsFinder’s test, achiever is my number one strength. This was like feeding my personality because I accomplished what I felt like at the time was the ultimate thing. I’d turned this division around. I came bounding through the back door with this big fat check in hand, knowing that it was going to blow your socks off and you were going to be so impressed with me. I showed it to you. I mean, in fairness, you’re usually my biggest cheerleader, but you kind of weren’t impressed. You kind of looked at it and kind of gave me a half smile and said, “We need to talk.” I knew in my heart of hearts that I was in trouble.

Gail Hyatt:
I wished I had journaled about it or could go back and read a journal, because it’d be interesting to know what else was happening at that time. Because you’re right. Normally, I am your biggest cheerleader. I want to be there to say, “You can do this. You have what it takes. You’ve got this.” And yet something at that time was happening that really showed me that it came at a huge cost.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, I want to recount what I heard you say, and you can correct this for the record if this is wrong, but here’s what I heard. We sat down. You were very gracious, but I could tell this was a very serious moment. There was emotional intensity in this conversation. You said to me, you said, “I want to be excited for you. For sure, I’m grateful for all the ways that you provide for our family, but I’ve got to be honest with you, you’re never home.”

Gail Hyatt:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
I started to feel defensive. And then you said, “And your five daughters need you now more than ever.” And then what I remember is you kind of tearing up, starting to cry a little bit, and then saying, “Honestly, I feel like a single mom.”

Gail Hyatt:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
And even though I felt defensive and I wanted to defend myself, in my heart of hearts I knew you were right. At that moment, I just wanted to quit.

Gail Hyatt:
Well, first of all, I think being a single mom is the hardest job on the planet.

Michael Hyatt:
No kidding.

Gail Hyatt:
We’ve had a heart for single moms for as long as I can remember. For me to actually say something like that, ooh, that’s big.

Michael Hyatt:
It was a reckoning.

Gail Hyatt:
That’s big, big, big.

Michael Hyatt:
I faced at that moment what I’ve subsequently come to call the impossible choice. Because on the one hand, there’s you and the girls. If you were to ask me what my values are, what my priorities are, theoretically, you guys come before work, right?

Gail Hyatt:
Right.

Michael Hyatt:
But the reality was just the opposite. My work was basically squeezing out or taking up all the oxygen in the room and there was barely anything left for you guys. I had you on the one side and the girls, and on the other side of it, this is why I call it the impossible choice, was my team, my work, the expectations of my boss, the need to provide for the family, to save up for college, and all the different things you have to do, weddings, with five daughters, all that stuff. I was really discouraged for a while because I couldn’t find a way out. I could remember talking to John Maxwell, who was one of my authors and it become a personal friend at that point. I said, “John, I think I needed executive coach.” I kind of framed it up like I just needed help with some work related stuff, but I really needed help to solve this conundrum that I was in.

Michael Hyatt:
I can remember me going to Daniel Harkavy, who was my very first executive coach, and I described the talk in the den that I had with you. He said, “Well, tell me about your work day,” and I described to him that typically I would leave the office around 6:00 or 7:00, come home, eat a quick meal with the family, and then I would crack open the laptop and keep working. And then I would work on the weekends and I worked through vacations. Usually I’d allow little time in the middle of the day for the family, but I was up early on vacations working because I didn’t want to fall behind. I was on this constant treadmill.

Gail Hyatt:
I think Daniel is the first person that introduced you to this idea of the double win.

Michael Hyatt:
Absolutely. Because we started working on a life plan. He said to me, and this was I think-

Gail Hyatt:
He helped you to see about these different domains, that you were a total person comprised of all these different aspects of you and not just a working machine.

Michael Hyatt:
He helped me get a vision for those different things. I can remember him saying at one point, he said, “You’re meant to be more than a human doing. You’re a human being.” He said, “I really think that a great way for you to feel progress in this is to go ahead and establish some boundaries around work,” because he said, “The difference between a river and a swamp is that a river has banks. There’s a controlled flow. It’s going somewhere. But a swamp is just the water going everywhere, and that’s what your work is right now.” I remember making the commitment to him that I would end work at 6:00, that I wouldn’t work on the weekends and I wouldn’t work on vacations. I can remember him saying to me, “Well, great. Are you committed to that?” I said yeah, and he said, “Okay, then you won’t mind me calling Gail periodically to check in on your progress.”

Gail Hyatt:
And he did. He did call me. He would say, “Okay, I want to hear how’s Michael doing?” I’d give him the good, bad, and the ugly.

Michael Hyatt:
That was so good.

Gail Hyatt:
But it was a lot more good back then than-

Michael Hyatt:
Well, because I had the accountability. That’s what was helpful. I would say to those of you who are struggling with this issue, one of the best ways that you can begin to see progress is established boundaries around your work. This is counterintuitive. You say, “But how will I get it all done?” Well, the thing about a boundary, and it’s kind of like having that boundary of quitting work before you go on a vacation, you got to get all this work done and you’re uber productive on that Friday before you leave on a one week vacation, that can be every day if you have a boundary on it. You make better choices. You prioritize your work. You get the important stuff done.

Gail Hyatt:
And that is exactly… I’ll put a little plug in here, and I’m not being paid for this, but that’s exactly why you created the Full Focus system because the planner and all the things that relate to it and all the…

Michael Hyatt:
Free to focus.

Gail Hyatt:
Everything that you do is really designed and has the tools in order to make that possible for somebody.

Michael Hyatt:
Truth number one, work-life balance is distributive.

Gail Hyatt:
Truth number two is that.

Michael Hyatt:
You want to go to that one?

Gail Hyatt:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, this is the last one.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay.

Gail Hyatt:
I’ll tell you why in a minute.

Michael Hyatt:
No, I get it. Yeah, I can see that. Truth number two is that work-life balance is determined. What do we mean by that?

Gail Hyatt:
Well, you have to determine that you are going to make it happen. You’ve got to cause it to happen. You can’t just expect it to just naturally appear. That it’s an intentional decision, a strategic move on your part to bring this balance into effect.

Michael Hyatt:
I like what you said about it’s caused. It’s a cause thing. It’s not accidental. Nobody stumbled into balance and said, “Oh amazing. I have this amazing balance in my life now.”

Gail Hyatt:
That’s right.

Michael Hyatt:
No, it’s something that you have to be determined and make some decisions.

Gail Hyatt:
Yep. Avail yourself to tools that enable you to do that.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. I think that’s one of the things I’ve figured out in life is that you don’t have to figure out everything on your own. Somebody else somewhere has figured out the solution to the problem that you’re struggling with. One of the reasons I believe in coaching is that coaching helps you go further faster. This is why I’ve had a series of executive coaches over the last 20 years, all of whom have shortened the learning curve, made it less steep, made it faster, easier, cheaper to get to the destination I want. Again, you have to start with the decision. Sometimes, and this was my case after we had the reckoning in the den, is once I decided I was going to get work-life balance, then the resources show up.

Gail Hyatt:
That’s right. It’s going to look really different for everybody. Who’s listening. If you have a lot of children, if you’re a single person, if you’re young, if you’re older, if you’re whatever, I mean, if you’re in business for yourself, if you work for somebody else, there’s a lot of different ways that this is going to look for people, but it’s possible, absolutely possible, for everybody.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s good. One of the things I want to clear up is a myth about work-life balance. I think we assume, nobody would say this out loud because it sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but we kind of assume that work-life balance means that we give the same amount of time and attention and apply the same amount of resources to every domain of our life.

Gail Hyatt:
That’s a good point.

Michael Hyatt:
But that’s just silly. No. We apply the appropriate amount of time and attention and resources to the various domains in my life. For example, I’m working six hours today, right? But I will probably spend an hour and a half with you tonight, maybe two hours, because I’ll probably work out. I’ll do a few other things. We’ll sit and we’ll talk. We’ll have dinner together. I don’t need to spend six hours with you for me to have work-life balance. Because if I gave six hours to everything-

Gail Hyatt:
An hour and a half is about all I can handle right now.

Michael Hyatt:
We have a great marriage, and that’s one of the reasons why. Work-life balance is determined. Truth number three, work-life balance is dynamic. It’s not static. The natural state of things is for them to be out of alignment and things… Maybe I’m way out over my skis on this, but one of the laws of physics is that things tend toward disorder. Was it the third law of thermodynamics? I don’t know. But any rate, it applies in your life. Things go from balance to imbalance and it takes energy and effort to keep things in balance. Now, we had the great reckoning, and then I worked hard to get things in balance. Did they stay in balance?

Gail Hyatt:
Nope, they fluctuated. There were seasons of more intensity on your work time. I think that that’s one of the things that was kind of hard to get used to because I did expect that everything… If we follow this particular method, that everything would be balanced, everybody would be happy and live happily ever after. But crises come up. There’s all kinds of things that interrupt and cause you to have to focus more on one thing than another thing. There’s a lot of fluctuation. Like I said, there’s seasons where you are focusing more on one thing than another, but it’s kind of like you know where you’re starting, you know where you end up, and in the middle, there’s a lot of adjustments, a lot of moving around, back and forth, until you get back centered again.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay. To that point, I got to read a quote. Labor economist and Stanford Business Professor Myra Strober uses the metaphor of a rocket. And here’s what she says.

Gail Hyatt:
Oh yeah, I’ve heard that one.

Michael Hyatt:
She says, “A rocket is exactly on target only at takeoff and landing. Between those two points, it constantly moves away from its trajectory and has to be straightened out. So too with work and family. The two are rarely in balance and each member of the couple needs to keep an eye out to discern when the imbalance requires correction.” Now, I want to go back to the story that I started to tell a moment ago and you said save it for later. Okay? The story is about convincing myself and convincing you that the situation was temporary. The first time I can remember doing this is I got my first big job in the publishing industry and I was a marketing director. Only problem was I had zero training in marketing.

Michael Hyatt:
I said to Gail, I said, “Man, I’ve got books to read. I’ve got to take a course. I have got to get up to speed. We’re going to be out of balance here for a while. I just need to understand the situation is temporary. Once I can kind of get a handle on my job, then I’ll snap back into balance and give you and the girls the attention you deserve.” But no sooner had I said that, a few weeks pass, and then I say, “Oh man, I thought I was going to get back into balance and I’m certainly past the startup phase in this job, but now we’ve got a vacancy and now I’m covering for somebody else.”

Gail Hyatt:
Or now you’re doing such a good job that they added-

Michael Hyatt:
Promoted me.

Gail Hyatt:
They promoted you or added more work to your schedule.

Michael Hyatt:
These temporary situations… I mean, truly there are seasons when you have to go out of balance where the problem comes in and so you start to deceive yourself that it’s temporary. You roll from one temporary situation to the next temporary situation, to the next temporary situation. You’re essentially lying to yourself and you’re lying to the people that you love the most.

Gail Hyatt:
Well, and you’re hoping that it’s true.

Michael Hyatt:
You are.

Gail Hyatt:
You’re hoping that it’s temporary. You’re assuming that it’s going to be temporary. But then after several years like that, you begin to see a pattern. You kind of have to stay on guard. You have to really watch out for that.

Michael Hyatt:
This is not a one and done kind of thing. If you’re feeling the tension, if you’ve struggled with this in the past and you find that you’re still struggling, then congratulations, you’re normal. That’s true for us too. Last night as we were talking about this episode, we had a little conflict. Is that fair to say?

Gail Hyatt:
Yeah. Tension.

Michael Hyatt:
Tension.

Gail Hyatt:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
It wasn’t the usual knockdown argument.

Gail Hyatt:
No, we weren’t fighting. It was just like… It’s kind of at that place in your relationship where you just sort of get really quiet and you’re like, “I can’t say anything. Nothing I’m going to say is going to make any difference, so forget it. Leave this out.”

Michael Hyatt:
You get better about that as you get older, as you’ve been married longer, because you’ve had those situations where you said something and then had to go try to fix it. Both of us are really good about not trying to say that initial thing. But here’s a reality, we realized after about two hours of conversation that we had a very different vision at this point in our life as to what the double win looks like. Now, the double win is winning at work and succeeding at life. You kind of had one definition for the succeeding at life. I had another definition. I thought I was doing pretty good, and you were kind of like, “Actually you’re not.”

Gail Hyatt:
We almost didn’t do the episode because it’s like how can we talk about the double win if I don’t think we’re really doing it? But it really helped us get a lot of clarity and I’m super excited now.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, I am too. I think that one of the things we realized is, and this happens in a lot of areas of life, you’re winning more than you think, but it depends on what you focus on. Unfortunately, when you teach on work-life balance and when you talk about things like the double win all the time, you’re very cognizant of the gap between where you are and the ideal. Now, Dan Sullivan calls that the gap and the gain. You can stay in the gap and be discouraged and feel really negative, or you can focus on the gain, and probably it’s a little bit of both. But oh my gosh, when we started, you actually started doing this. You went kind of by yourself when we got sort of that in past. You started to write down a whole list of all the places where you thought we were winning.

Gail Hyatt:
Well, I did, and I’m going to share those in a second. But before that, I want to say that when you feel that there is this misalignment between you and your spouse about how you see the double win and are you achieving it or are you making progress to it… I don’t know that you ever actually achieve it. It’s a progressive kind of journey. But I think it’s really important. One of the things I wrote down last night was that it’s so important, A, to articulate to your spouse how you visualize the win, what does it look like to you, and then hear their view about what it looks like for them so that you can understand each other, and then really work on communicating if there seems to be a misalignment.

Gail Hyatt:
We didn’t have a Daniel Harkavy to keep us accountable, or we don’t have that right now. But the beauty of being married is that you have your spouse to help you stay accountable, but you have to be willing to hear what they have to say. You have to set aside some time. We love to go for a walk in the evening and we get lots of talking done and kind of debriefing of how things are going.

Michael Hyatt:
It’s a chance to recalibrate.

Gail Hyatt:
And recalibrate. I do believe that it, that communication is, A, number one. If you find that you are not really having opportunities to talk on a deep level with your spouse, then you got to make that a priority. That’s part of the win. And then when you discover that things are out of balance or that there is one of these seasons or temporary moments in your life, to give that person grace, to give each other grace, and to say, “Boy, I understand this is a really intense time right now. What can I do to support you? How can I help you,” and then monitor how long it goes on. And if it becomes one just molding into another one, then you got to bring that up and deal with that.

Michael Hyatt:
I think in this particular situation, I was giving a lot of time to a nonprofit, that was kind of my after hour thing. It become kind of a hobby. You were feeling like the way that you were experiencing it is it looked just like more work.

Gail Hyatt:
Exactly.

Michael Hyatt:
Right? But then you started cataloging how we were winning and it kind of balanced out the perspective. Can you talk about that?

Gail Hyatt:
I just want to list for those of you who are listening how we are winning now, because we’ve worked really hard at it. One of the things that we do… And again, Michael said that the time that you spend at work doesn’t have to be equal to the time that you spend in other domains of your life. That had to sink into my head, because I kind of… Even though the math doesn’t add up, there’s something in me that said, “Oh, well, if you’re giving six hours a day to your work, then you need to give that to me too.” Well, it just never adds up. But some of the ways that we’re winning is that we usually go to the lake or do something relaxing on the weekends. That’s been a big thing because you used to work all through weekends.

Gail Hyatt:
We take vacations in the summer. Those of you who’ve been with us for a while know that we take sabbaticals and we’ve got a big sabbatical coming up this summer. We’re actually planning a trip to Peru, and we’re really super excited about that. We get to focus on our grandchildren more than we ever have. One of the things we love to do with them is when they turn 13, we’d go on a one-on-one trip with them and do something really special with them. We’ve got one of those coming up this summer. We have 10 grandkids, so it adds up there.

Michael Hyatt:
We almost need name tags.

Gail Hyatt:
So far we haven’t had two in the same summer, which has worked out great. But we’re going to be doing that. I know that it allows you to take courses. It allows us to pursue hobbies. You love playing the guitar. You’re learning how to play the mandolin. Those are some hobbies that you’re picking up. I mentioned we get to go for walks in the evenings. I mean, that’s a luxury. A lot of couples never get to do anything like that. You go take your daughters on a lunch date once a month or how often it takes you to cycle-

Michael Hyatt:
One daughter every week. Five week cycle.

Gail Hyatt:
Your parents are aging. They’re requiring a whole lot of attention. When you win at life and you’re succeeding at life, then you get to have that discretionary time to help people who need you at different seasons in their lives. We get to be involved in church more. You teach a Sunday school class. I do a lot of volunteer things at the church. One of the cool things that came to me last night that I really got for the first time is that by winning at work and succeeding at life, it makes it possible for you to give some of your time, attention, and resources to a philanthropic cause. You serve on a board of a nonprofit. You are really involved there. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to do. You get to give back to other people.

Michael Hyatt:
I think that this whole thing about work-life balance, what it doesn’t do is give you license to be selfish. Because all of us I think we find the greatest meaning in life when we’re making a contribution. And part of that contribution’s got to be outside of work, but there’s also the work component to that. Let’s summarize these three truths. Work-life balance is, first of all, distributive. There’s more than one domain. Life consists of more than work. Number two, it’s determined. It’s a cause thing. It’s not going to happen by accident. You’ve got to make a decision to get on the path toward work-life balance. I think you made a really good point. It’s not ever a destination that you fully arrive at, but you’re always going to be pursuing it. And then truth number three is that work-life balance is dynamic. I don’t care if you’re walking a tight rope or you’re driving your car, you just have to realign and get rebalanced periodically.

Gail Hyatt:
That’s the nature of living in the world.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s really true. Well, Gail, I’m going to ask you the question that I usually ask Megan and she used to ask me, and that is, do you have any final thoughts?

Gail Hyatt:
Oh, well I have to just think. Off the top of my head, I’m extremely grateful that the fact that we weren’t winning at life, that we weren’t succeeding at life in the beginning of our marriage did not result in a divorce. It didn’t result in a really huge consequential health crisis or anything like that, that somehow we weathered those years. Now I’m just so grateful that we have tools and a system that can help other people. I love it. I think it’s what we’re created to be and we need to be determined to make it happen.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, this has really become a life message for both of us and it’s become the focus of our work at Full Focus. In fact, we have an entire program called Business Accelerator, which is a business coaching program designed to help our clients get the double win. If that sounds like something that would benefit you, I would encourage you to have a free call with one of our business growth consultants. You can do that by going to businessaccelerator.com. It’ll be very clear that you can schedule a free call there, but we’d love to have you do that.

Gail Hyatt:
There are some amazing stories and transformations that people have experienced as being a part of Business Accelerator. You guys ought to just check it out.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. The videos on the homepage are worth watching.

Gail Hyatt:
Just call and get some info because it’s pretty exciting.

Michael Hyatt:
It is. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the podcast. I hope it’s been helpful to you, but until next time.

Gail Hyatt:
Lead to Win.