Work-Life Balance is a Lie

This is the Momentum podcast.

Whenever I hear an entrepreneur talk about work life balance, I cringe because I know they're going down a path that is going to be challenging. They're going to feel like they failed and it's going to make them feel like they're in constraint, which is one of the most dangerous places to be for entrepreneurs like us.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few, who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent positive human evolution, and we always will be.

The discussion around work life balance in the entrepreneurial world. is a challenging conversation for me. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life and I've been coaching and helping and supporting entrepreneurs since I was 21 and I'm now 51. So I've been doing this for three decades. And one of the discussions that invariably comes up over and over again is how do you balance your work and your life as an entrepreneur? And whenever I hear this, here's the picture that happens in my head. When I hear somebody say, I want to work life balance, I can't help but see somebody on a tightrope walking between two tall buildings and they're walking across and they're trying to balance their work in life and they're holding on to that tightrope pole and the wind starts blowing and the wire starts shaking and that tightrope is moving around and then they fall because If you're trying to balance work and life, it is not going to be easy to stay on that tightrope. The fact is that for us as entrepreneurs, we will never balance the energy we put into our work and the energy we put into our lives. If that's what we're going to focus on, we're going to have a hard time because our work takes a tremendous amount of our time and our life takes a tremendous amount of our time if we let it.

And so when we integrate the two, that's where everything changes. When we integrate work and life, when we start looking at opportunities for how we make both work, that's how things move forward. And that's how we really start to create progress as entrepreneurs. See, for us, when we say work life balance, we get this picture of everything working perfectly in order. And our life's over here balanced and our work's over here balanced. But the reality is those two conditions live on top of each other. Our work is part of our life and our life is part of our work. It's very hard to separate the two and create some type of balance. But when we accept the fact that work and life are integrated for us, and there's really no way to separate them into two balancing ends of a spectrum. Then we can start to really make progress because here's what it takes to integrate your work in life It takes a clear system so that you can come up with the outcomes that are important to you in the three most important areas of your life. And I call these the three alignments of the entrepreneurial personality type. When we create clarity in our alignment with ourselves, like what we want to do when we create alignment in our relationship. If we have a significant other relationship, but if we don't, it's in our relationships in general, and then we create alignment in our business. Those three areas of alignment. When we are clear on those three things, we actually begin to create. Integration. And so let's just talk about those three real quick and understand each one of them.

So alignment with ourselves is things like maybe you have some health goals, maybe you have some wealth goals, maybe you have goals about what you want to do in your life and how you want to be in your life. I'm 51 years old and I had the goal this year to get in the absolute best shape in my life. Actually last year I did. It's just at the beginning of 2024 here, and I ended last year in the absolute best shape of my life. 11 percent body fat walking around with almost 100 pounds of muscle mass. I feel incredible. My cardio is crazy, but if I back up to look at how that happened. Early in the year last year, I decided that, Hey, this is really important. I want to be in the best shape of my life this year. And then I put together some process and structure to make it happen and to help me actually have that alignment with myself and on the process and structure that I have in place is not just to analyze where I want to go, but it's also to execute on a daily basis and make sure that if I have a goal, I'm bringing that into my day to day existence. The fact is, if you look at most goals, depending on who you read somewhere between 70 and 88 percent of goals fail. And I'm sure there's numbers that are even higher than that. And the reason is because we like to set outcomes as entrepreneurs. We like to set goals. We like to say we're going to do something. But if we don't have process and structure where we take Hey, I'm going to get in the best shape of my life. That means I need to change how I eat. That needs to change how I move. That means I need to work out more or work out in a different way. And if we don't take that goal, break it down into steps and put it into a structure, it's going to be very difficult for us to actually achieve that goal. And having structure, having process is how we actually move forward and how we create what we want in our lives and how we create that integration between work and life.

Now let's talk about the second alignment, relationships. For me. My marriage with Cadey, my wife, is the most important thing in my life. And right behind that is my relationship with my two daughters. And so we have process structure and routine around, around both of those areas of my life. So every day, Cadey and I sit down in the morning and we go through an alignment process using our momentum planner system. And we get really clear on what she's doing for the day, what I'm doing for the day and where we can support each other. We actually go through a pretty extensive process where we share with each other what we were grateful for the day before and what we felt where we felt like we won, then we share our intention for the day. We share where we were uncomfortable the day before, and then we share the top three things each one of us is going to do. And then just because we like to, we share the three most important things are the three things that have come up for us about the other person. And when Cadey and I do this on a daily basis, and as we've done this on a daily basis for over a decade, Our relationship has not been perfect. In fact, we've had some really tough times. We've had some very difficult transitions. Two entrepreneurs working together, you're going to have that. But by sitting down every day and going through this process and having process and structure, I integrate my marriage into the productivity of my day. And I make sure that a day does not go by ever where I haven't sat down, connected, and created intimacy with Cadey. This morning we sat down and we went through our momentum planners and I shared with her the top three things that I love about her. I said, you share what's going on with you in a way that gives me confidence. We can work through anything. I love to touch you and you regulate and calm me in a way that's exciting. When I share those things with her and she shares what she feels with me, it is this moment of connection. But what I know, it's also a greater moment of integration. We're not balancing. We are making the two things work together.

And then when it comes to my relationship with my business. Every quarter I sit down and I go through our planning system to understand how I want that relationship to change. Am I doing what I love? Do I feel like I'm in my highest and best use? Do I feel like I'm really getting what I want out of my business? Or am I giving too much to the business? As entrepreneurs, we don't ask ourselves these questions very often. I also ask myself questions like, how do I make this easier? How do I make it more fun? How do I make it feel like I'm in flow every day? By asking these questions and then pursuing outcomes on a quarterly basis that move me towards what I really want, I've been able to change everything. I'm not in the day to day of my business. I work with my team on planning and coaching, coaching them and helping them support them. But I have so much of my life back and my relationship with my business is that I have a business that allows me to have the life I want. It's not that I have a life so that I can run a business. And that distinction has changed everything for me. This is not balanced. This is integration. This is not walking on a tightrope. This is actually creating massive foundation around everything that I do. And when I focus on these three areas and I allow for the process structure and routine to help me get through it, that's how I really integrate. And that's how I create the time and space where Every day I go for a walk with my oldest daughter in the morning and a few days a week. I go for a walk with my youngest daughter on the days that she's home from school. She goes to school part time. Then she does some work here at the house as well. And every day I have connection with Cadey in the morning in alignment and then every night for the past couple months we've actually added a ceremony where we sit down, we call it ceremony. It's like a formal meeting, but we sit down and we share an intention for getting together. She shares her, I share mine. She shares hers. I open a ceremony and then we talk and we connect and we have intimacy in a way that we're talking about things that most couples don't. And we have this time and space that most couples don't make time for. And this process structure and routine throughout my life. With my relationship with myself, my relationship with Cadey and my daughters, with my relationship with the business has literally changed everything because I know that every morning I'm meeting with Cadey every afternoon or evening, we're going to be doing our ceremony. And it makes me feel like we can literally get through anything.

And so as an entrepreneur, stop thinking about work-life balance and start thinking about how do you integrate, and if this is something you're interested in doing, I want to help you. I really want to help you because I think when we have the right process structure and routine in our lives, everything changes. And I've been working on these systems and this process for over a decade. And I've helped some of the most successful people that we know in our industry or in any industry really put together these systems and processes and change their lives and completely change their business. I've worked with Russell Brunson at ClickFunnels. I've worked with Alex and Leila Hormozy. I've worked with Rachel Rogers and watched them just explode. And I can tell you because I know them personally that there is a tremendous amount of integration and not a lot of attempts at balance. Because the three entrepreneurs that I mentioned, Russell and Alex and Layla are three, three different groups of entrepreneurs at Russell, Alex and Layla, Rachel Rogers. They all work really hard in the time that they have allowed for work and then they integrate and they have the time that they have for themselves, for their relationships, for their kids, for the things that they want to do. So as an entrepreneur, here's how you get there. You put process, structure and routine in place. And we have a promotion coming up where I'm going to be teaching the Personal Operating System that we've created that includes the process, structure, and routine to help you plan where you're going, execute like crazy and understand what you really want out of your life. Because as entrepreneurs, when we have clarity, we will go fast. When we are confident, we will go forward. When we lack clarity and confidence, we start to beat each other. We start to beat ourselves up. We start to think of ourselves as procrastinators and we're not working hard enough and we're not doing enough. But if we don't have clarity and we're not confident where we're going, that's the reason we're not moving forward. So let yourself off the hook. If you are not 100 percent clear on where you're going and if you're not excited about getting there and if you don't have the commitment and confidence to go forward, you will have symptoms like procrastination and plateaus and not getting things done and knowing what you need to do, but not doing it because the outcome isn't important enough. And what we do in the Personal Operating System. What I do for myself, what my wife does for herself, she uses this every day. What our clients do is we make outcomes that are so crucially important that your life feels timeless. It feels like you're in flow. It's exciting to get things done. You integrate your productivity with the excitement of moving forward and you have process, structure, and routine to protect your life everywhere else. And it has been life changing for me. I went from being almost 300 pounds to now being in the top 1 percent of pretty much any metric for somebody my age. And I went from really struggling with a lot of different things to being independently wealthy and having a life that I'm really proud of. And to be candid, I went from having a lot of challenges in my relationship because I wasn't present, I wasn't checked in, I wasn't as aware as I should be, to creating a relationship that after 20 years I can confidently say it's better than it has ever been. And it is the most secure attachment I've ever felt in my life. And it has put my confidence through the roof. And as I've shifted my relationship with my business, I have more time for myself. I have more time for what I want. I have more time to be, and I want you to have the same.

So if you're interested in understanding more of the Personal Operating System, I want to help you. So please go to courses.simpleoperations.com/pos-order. Take a minute, go to the site, take a look at the promotion that we put together. I would love to personally coach you and help you through this system. I sell my coaching time 30,000 for a half day, 50,000 for a full day. And with this promotion, we're going to have six group coaching calls and I stay on those calls until every question is answered. I want to personally coach you to get into momentum. Integrate your work in life and make things in your life feel like flow, excitement, energy, and momentum.