211. Work-Life Balance Stages for Entrepreneurs and Parents

The entrepreneurs and or professionals I've seen that have the most fulfilling relationships. And by their report and their children's report the happiest relationship with their kids, they're making sure they're investing time with them. It might be on weekends, it might be when they come back from trips, it might be they've had long trips on their way for two months at a time. But when they come back, they make time. So it's not about a specific schedule, but it is about investing just like in any other relationship long term friendships, business relationships.

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If you're a parent, you know what it's been like to try to figure out navigating life after you have children. So there are different stages I found in my journey as a parent and there's probably more to come. I want to help you navigate through this because a lot of people, myself included, sometimes get caught up in very specific views of what things are supposed to look like. And in some ways that can be helpful to aim for something. At the same time, it can be helpful for us to be open to things, looking different ways, and to also realize that famous saying that sometimes what worked for you to get you here is not going to work for you to get you there. So as I've been through this journey of work life, balance of enjoying life, hopefully making an impact on people's lives, making money, enjoying time outside of work, I found that there are some different stages I've gone through. And as I talk with people, whether or not they are entrepreneurs or professionals, there is this commonality that seems to happen and then there's certain pieces that are unique to entrepreneurs.

The first stage is just making enough money as a single person to pay your own bills. Whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you work for somebody. The first stage of economic adulthood is being able to not need to depend on somebody else to know that you can pay your bills, to know that you can live within your means, hopefully without a credit card. Hopefully you're able to cash flow every month and make sure stuff is taken care of. This is a very fundamental stage. It's also a stage that if you don't really master it, it could haunt you for the rest of your career. Put simply, there's this difference between always being a couple of days early, let's say on making a credit card payment and maybe earning the 1% on the purchase you've made versus being a couple of days late and always being in debt. So in general, we want to make sure that the first habit you establish and I establish or anybody, is that we're living within our means. The second stage is about being able to free your time up to enjoy life. So hopefully you have enough money now, you're paying your bills and you're able to make time to enjoy life, family, friends, experiences.

If you were single before and if you wanted to get married or wanted to find somebody special, maybe you create that time and that space for that to happen. And so this is a stage. Whereas before the focus went from, hey, I had all this hopefully free time, maybe as a kid, maybe my parent or parents were able to provide enough that I didn't have to work so much. And maybe even this started the stage of working earlier if you had to work to support your family. But at some point that focus goes from money now to quality of life and free time. So stage two were about how can I enjoy life? And if we can find balance here, then work becomes less of a hindrance, less of a bother. It doesn't need to be quite so fulfilling, at least for most of us, because we're getting our emotional and our social needs met very often outside of work. We might also get some of them met at work. But overall there's this bigger vision. Work is not the only thing in life and so work doesn't have to meet all of our needs.

The third stage if you decide to participate in this, is to become a couple with somebody, to share dreams, goals, perhaps even share finances. This is where you now are giving up the single life, where you get to make all the choices and you have to decide everything. And there is a bigger goal, a bigger dream, a bigger vision. Maybe it's having a family and having kids, maybe it's not. Maybe it's just having someone special in your life. But you start to plan together now. And how that impacts work can vary. If you have really good control over your time and your flexibility and you can still do vacations with your someone special, it might not matter as much. And you might continue going on from a career standpoint, whether you're an entrepreneur or professional doing the same thing you're doing. So work life balance, the habits you perhaps established at stage one and two might be just as good or all you need to keep you doing well in this phase. If you never decide or end up having children, it might be that mastering this stage is enough for you to have solid work life balance for the rest of your career.

The fourth stage of work life balance for most people if you decide to have kids, is doing just that. Having kids, discovering your roles as a parent, whether that's as a single parent if that is as a married couple or whatever that looks like and searching for a new type of balance. So hopefully you were able to establish balance of work and life as a single person and maybe you decided to couple up with somebody and now have children. Well now there's this new sense of balance simply because before you had kids it was just you and your partner deciding what was going to happen and for the most part as long as you two wanted to happen it would happen. Now with kids things are not as simple. There's a lot of up and down moments. There are things that are beautiful, there are things that are scary, there are things that are annoying and frustrating and fatiguing and tiring and as a human being one of the most challenging things that you'll ever hear people talk about is being a parent. It's also one of the things you'll hear people talk about being one of the most fulfilling things in their lives.

When you even listen to interviews by famous athletes or musicians, world class performers if they're often asked what's most important to them they'll often say something like well at one stage my career was and the fame and the fortune or the achievements or the creativity or whatever it might be and then eventually it was my family. At this stage we're looking for balance in a different way. We are in some way surrendering to the family dynamic. We're saying look okay, the kids especially at younger ages they're not all that rational, they're not necessarily all that reasonable and yet I'm committed, I'm in. So things are going to shift and this is where for people the work life balance equation becomes very difficult. Often because work was going so smooth and I still want to afford the nice house. I don't want to change my hours or my business is going so smooth. If I'm an entrepreneur I don't want to change things. And yet depending on what your vision is for parenthood, depending on how you've been raised, depending on how you want to do it you might or might not want to continue to work in the same hours and have your spouse continue to work in the same hours as you did before.

And so there are pros and cons to either continuing to make money and invest less of your direct time with your children and perhaps outsource things, having them more in daycare earlier in your life. And there's pros and cons to perhaps saying, okay, we're going to slow down our income earning and have one of the spouses be maybe that primary caregiver, or just have both of us reduce our hours. I've seen it work in both situations. I've seen it not work in both situations so I don't think there's necessarily an absolute right answer but I do think that like anything in life if we forget some of the fundamentals of life, which is that if you want to get good at something you put time into it. And that at least in my experience, the entrepreneurs and or professionals I've seen that have the most fulfilling relationships and by their report and their children's report the happiest relationship with their kids, they're making sure they're investing time with them. It might be on weekends, it might be when they come back from trips. It might be they've had long trips on their way for two months at a time.

But when they come back, they make time. So it's not about a specific schedule but it is about investing just like in any other relationship, long term friendships, business relationships. And so there's so much we're working on here to find this balance. And so even in my work, in my journey, I have spent so much time thinking, okay, well, if it looks this way, it's going to work. So before my wife and I had children, we were both working our jobs. Everything was going along fine and we're doing our own thing, so to speak. And we'd come together and hang out and then we'd go back out individually and do our own thing. And then in our case we decided that we wanted to have one of the parents. In this case it was Rosana, my wife stay at home with our children. And so I now had to figure out, okay, well, how do I do this work life balance thing? How do I make sure I'm still making enough money? In my case I was working from home. Which also makes isn't for an interesting equation when the family is literally in the home and you're trying to make things work.

And so in that for so many years we try different things and it would work for a while but then the child, the child our children would go through a different growth stage and let's say they were sleeping for a while but then they weren't sleeping. Then they're not schedule changed or all these different things. So this constant evolving process and now our children are 17 and 14. They're both in high school and they're starting to reach that phase where they're really more doing their own thing. They've been doing this for a while where now as a father, I feel like it's much easier simply because also they sometimes tell me to pull back from my kids because they're already doing their things and they don't want to necessarily spend all their time with mommy and daddy. They want to go out and do different things. And so now as parents, it becomes the situation of saying, okay, well, how do I continue to balance this and how do I prepare for this next stage? It also is for some parents a time of regret if they weren't able to create that balance or the time to be with their kids.

Sometimes if your kids are born over a long span of time. Sometimes the first kid is the wake up call where the parent says, gosh, I wish I'd have spent more time with this kid. They're already out of the house, they're off to college or they're off to move wherever. I encourage you not to beat yourself up. We're always all doing our best at this, but there is a time to look at things and see how you can make it work best. So in my case, the three day weekend, four day work week split was very important for me for a very long time because on the weekends I needed to be very present with our family. And as an entrepreneur, if I start doing work on the weekends, I can just kind of go off into that world and never come back in. And that's not what I wanted. However, at this stage now, as our kids are 17 and 14 and they have all these different schedules, I'll find that sometimes on a Saturday I'll have three to 4 hours with nothing to do. I've already relaxed, I've already watched some TV, I've been to the beach or I hung out with friends and I'll get some work done on a Saturday because I've got time.

Because sometime on a Tuesday or Wednesday, one of our children might say in the middle of the day, especially during summer, hey, let's go do this for a few hours. And if I'm rigid with my schedule, I miss out on that. So the fifth stage becomes about this proactive, hopefully transition into having our kids move forward and do their own journey and helping them leave the nest, but also hopefully all the while creating a nest and maintaining relationship with our partner, our spouse, that we're not just saying oh my gosh, life is so boring now. Like, I sometimes hear parents say our kids are gone, we have nothing to do anymore, but that as a couple we continue and hopefully all the way through to make sure we have time for us as a couple, which is not easy. And yet to create a situation where we're helping our kids launch, we're being as present for them as possible and yet we're able to still maintain and transition to our sort of second career phase or third, depending on where you're at. In my wife's case, she's spent a majority of her time that we've had our children at young age where she's been a stay at home mom.

So she had a career, paused a lot of for a while and now she's starting to move back into it. In my case, I've had pre kids career, so to speak, and the with kids career. And now I'm already looking at well, what's my career going to be like? Perhaps I will invest more time, perhaps I'll work more, maybe I won't have three day weekends, whatever it might be. And so I encourage you in this whole journey to continue to stay focused on just what's most important to you, your goals, your dreams. Don't get too caught up in what it's supposed to look like. I know so many of the people I've met that have made so much more money later in their career. Because unlike athletes who have a physical prime that diminishes with age, in most cases, if you're a knowledge worker, if you think or lead or connect with people emotionally or spiritually, those dimensions will usually get wiser and stronger and better at those. And I've seen so many entrepreneurs say, wade, gosh, I was so worried about paying the bills, or I was so worried about making sure I had enough money for retirement, and Wade, I felt like I was doing the right thing.

That's responsible, right? I was saving for retirement so I could stop working at 65. Little did I know I'd have no interest in stopping working at 65 because I'd have been bored. I'm an entrepreneur weight, or I'm a top performer weight. And I just wanted to make time for my kids when they were in the household, and then after, I just wanted to work and continue to contribute and maybe over time work slightly less, but I never wanted to fully stop working. And yet this vision that was given to me by other people, that on one day or with one person might work really well, but for another person might be exactly what is not best for them, as opposed to being this dream that works for everybody. Wait, I followed that vision, and that didn't take me where I wanted. And so now I have all this money, I have all these estate taxes to pay when I die or I'm leaving money to my kids, but I missed out on the experiences. And so through this whole journey, I encourage you to consider that work life balance is an ongoing project. I don't always have three day weekends.

For the most part, I can if I want to, but it's not always what I want to do. And as I'm starting to now redefine my schedule and I might go for a swim, and I've been doing that recently, I'll go for a swim at the beach on Monday mornings, so I'm probably not starting work till maybe ten or eleven. I'm working a little later, and then sometimes I get work done on a Saturday. Why? Because the kids are happy doing their thing, my wife's happy doing their thing, her thing, and it's like, okay, that works too. So if rigid definitions help you, which they've helped me of saying, okay, I work four days, I take off three days, or whatever it looks like, great. And yet at the same time, I encourage you to be open to seeing how things evolve and always keeping the center, the focus of whatever it is that's most important to you. Usually that has something to do with having time for loved ones, having time to enjoy life personally and then professionally. It usually has something to do with making an impact in people's lives, reaching and helping a lot of people, and, yes, being productive and making a lot of money.

So I hope this serves you. As always, I look forward to helping you impact more people in your family life and in your professional life, and make more money in less time doing what you do best so you can fully enjoy your family, your friends, your freedom and your life. Thanks so much for listening.