18d • Minute Reads
What "Balance" Requires
“Balance” comes up in almost every conversation I have with clients and friends who are barely figuring themselves out as entrepreneurs.
How to get more of it. How to stop feeling stretched. How to juggle 39,480,248 things at once.
I struggled with this for a LONG time, because I thought being a good adult/entrepreneur meant saying yes to everyone who needed my service and working harder than absolutely anybody else to get it all done.
It wasn't until later that I realized balance has much less to do with effort and much more to do with deciding your priorities and being absolutely freaking ruthless about them, including telling people when their initiative doesn't fall within those priorities.
Think about it: your time as a builder/founder is some of the most important time in your journey. It would be STRANGE to let anyone but you decide where it goes, right? Or to not consciously decide?
Here's what I've come to believe: most of the discontent we see and experience in our jobs isn't from choosing wrong priorities. It’s from people never actually choosing at all.
Time is finite. Every day, something gets your best hours and something else gets whatever's left. That's just math. The only question is whether you decided which is which, on purpose, or the decision got made for you (by whatever was loudest in your inbox or calendar).
Most people drift instead of choosing. The urgent thing wins by default. Everyone else's priorities become your agenda, and then you feel like you failed at balance when the real problem is you never said, “Of everything on my plate, this matters MOST, RIGHT NOW.”
Not deciding is still a decision. It just has the luxury of needing no owner, LOL.
And if you have a team that you're building with, your team is watching how you handle priorities, not what you tell them. If you drift and say yes to everything, that's what they'll copy. If you're clear about what matters most and decisive about what's intentionally not getting done, they'll copy that instead.
AND HERE'S A RECENT REVELATION:
There are seasons where you do have to drop your morning meditation/bible routine. I get how important it is but I've come to realize that what is more important is being able to carry that peace and clarity or the teachings into what you're doing. This doesn't mean you can't do it AT ALL. It just means you have to do it on days that don't require immediate work.
Balance isn't holding everything at equal weight. Something is ALWAYS heavier. Good management means being honest about what's heaviest right now, and making sure your team knows it's a decision, not an accident or afterthought.
What to do:
- Claim Your Priority Out Loud. Tell yourself what matters most this week, not just in your head. If everything's a priority, nothing is.
- Let The Rest Visibly Fall. Once you've chosen the priority, let lower items slip on purpose, and say so, so it reads as a call you made, not something that got lost.
- Ask Your Yourself The Right Question. When you look stretched, don't ask how to get more balanced. Ask yourself if you've actually decided what matters most this week, or if everything is just fighting for their attention equally.
- Revisit Weekly, If You Need To. Priorities shift fast right now. Reclaim what matters most at the start of each week rather than assuming last week's still holds.
The goal isn't balance. It's a clear choice about what matters most, right now, and then putting the rest on the back burner.
Happy Monday :) - Diego
P.S: If your business hasn't made money with it's core offer. THAT should be your priority.
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What "Balance" Requires
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