Work Life Balance is a Myth! Navigating Workplace Stress by Leveraging Past Struggles

✨ Work Life Balance is a Myth! ✨ 
✨ Navigating Workplace Stress by Leveraging Past Struggles  ✨

🙏 Special thanks to our sponsors Lifeguides & GoHappyHub. Your dedication empowers our quest to tackle workplace anxiety.

Highlights: 📍
🔁 Accepting the Inevitable: the reality that stress never ceases, prompting a mindset shift towards consistent management rather than temporary relief.
🍰 The Cake Analogy: Unpacking the allure and pitfalls of short-term stress soothers
🎾 Sports as Metaphor: the importance of positive self-talk and mental preparation to maintain equilibrium in life's pressures.

We're joined by Dave McNeff, Founder and President of Peak Consulting Group and the author of "The Work-Life Balance Myth." Drawing from personal battles and a wealth of executive coaching experience, David offers profound insights into transforming workplace tension into triumph.

With a mix of vulnerability and expertise, David dissects the seven slices of life that demand our attention. His approach moves us beyond the myth of perfect work-life balance to embrace a more harmonious and introspective journey through life's stressors.

➡️ For anyone grappling with professional demands or seeking a blueprint for serenity amid chaos, this episode is it.  

➡️ If you love this podcast, please leave a 5-star rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 and share it with your network!

🌟 LET'S STAY CONNECTED…

🔶https://thecultureworks.com/
🔶 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/chester.elton/
🔶 X - https://twitter.com/chesterelton?lang=en
🔶 Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550916264292
🔶 LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chesterelton/

#WorkLifeBalance #StressManagement #SelfReflection #AnxietyatWork #EmotionalWellness #PositiveSelfTalk #PeakConsulting #TheWorkLifeBalanceMyth

Transcript

Welcome to the Anxiety at Work podcast. I'm Chester Elton and this is my co-author and dear friend, Adrian Gostick. We hope the time you spend with us is going to remove the stigma of anxiety and mental health in the workplace and your personal life. We invite experts from around the world of work and life to give us ideas and tools to deal with anxiety in our world. And we want to thank our sponsor, Lifeguides, a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a guide who's walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge of life experience as you. So go to lifeguides.com forward slash schedule a demo and add the code healthy2021 to receive two free months of service. Two free months! All you got to do is put healthy2021 to the free text box and you get two months free. How great is that? It is great and we also want to send a big thanks to our sponsor Go Happy Hub, the most inclusive and timely way to communicate and engage directly with your frontline employees and candidates with 95% plus open rates. With Go Happy Hub, you can send text messages directly from corporate and enable permissions for your frontline leaders to communicate with their team, whether they want to send notes of gratitude, logistical updates, referral opportunities, LTOs, new hire introductions, learning content, celebrations, and more. Easily get to the right message to the right people with simple segmentation by location, job type, language, etc. And you get feedback from the field in a structured, digestible, and actionable way. That's GoHappyHub. Wonderful. Well, our guest today is our new friend, David McNaff. David founded Peak Consulting Group in 1995 to develop executive talent and bolster the performance of executive teams for companies all over the world. A CEO coach and trusted advisor, his clients include MetLife, Prudential, Vertex and Biogen, among others. Dave has suffered from work-related and personal-related anxieties in his past and now uses that knowledge to help his client base and companies with these issues within their workforces. Dave's solutions are articulated in his wonderful book, The Work-Life Balance Myth. David, welcome to our humble podcast. We are delighted to have you here. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Again, thanks for joining us, David. First question. Now, in your great book and in other writings you've done, you write that we've never been more stressed with all that's going on. So what exactly is it that you say that's stressing us out so much? And I love that you talk about, so many of us are turning, unfortunately, to negative coping devices. So talk a little bit about that, set the stage for us. All right, good. So setting the stage is actually putting everything in a context here, it's really important. So particularly in COVID, pace of play in terms of where's the stress getting manufactured, it's the pace of play that's creating more workload. COVID has officially blurred the line between work and home, because for a lot of people it's the same, even though the hybrid is starting to develop, which is also creating a new level of stress, oh, by the way, over the past two or three months. And basically, it's the workload, the people issues, the questioning of does this work well for me, and relationship management at home and at work with that line being blurred has just quickened everything. So that everything that's been coming at you prior to COVID quickened. And this pressure, you know, to be efficient while being challenged to also be effective has created this anxiety level for an individual on Zoom to wonder how well am I doing? So with this constant stress, what I've noted, you know, even prior to COVID, what I've noted for years is people would seek the negative coping devices. And the coping devices I refer to are overeating, over drinking, over sexing, over gambling, etc. You know, pick, you know, under quotes, pick your poison. And so people often ask, you know, later after they've gone through it, well, why did I do that? You know, why did I choose to overeat or whatever? And I'd say, you know, because you're a human being and immediate gratification from anxiety is all of our goals. I mean, so if you ate a piece of cake, well, the stress went away for that three minute period and then it came rushing right back. So I think I'll have another piece of cake and so on and so on. And whether that's, you know, drinking or whatever. And we all have our issues and I'm no holier than anybody else. And so the book sprung out of this how to manage stress outside of that. So, okay, Dave, if you're so smart, how am I supposed to manage this stress in work and at home successfully? And so that's, I used the seven slice method starting about, I don't know, 15 years ago with individual clients who were going through a tough time, which I write about in the book, and it happened to work for them. So their encouragement was, you really should write a book about this. And it took me a long time to finally sit down and do it. And the trigger point was I gave a talk on it, you know, down in Nashville to 700 HR professionals. And I mentioned, I think I'm probably gonna write a book about this. And afterwards, the business editor from McGraw Hill came up to me, who happened to be in the audience, and said, you know, if you write the book, we'd like you to submit it to us. You know, literally, I said, well, okay. Yeah. And, you know, that kind of kicks this whole thing off, but, you know, going back to the stress thing, you know, it's, stress is never going to stop. What's going to stop is how you handle it to either get, it's either going to get better or it's going to get worse. And so I think COVID has brought every person that I've been in touch with to ask that question. Does this work for me? And if not, what am I going to do about it? Exactly. I think that second question is the most important one, right? What am I going to do about it? Because it's never going to go away. You know, as you were listening to people's reactions, how do you solve the stress problem, and you went to sex, drugs, I thought for sure you were going to go to rock and roll. Yeah, I love rock and roll. Yeah, you can't do too much rock and roll, Chas. Exactly, it's sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I mean, that's the Holy Trinity, right? I do love your solution with cake, though. I agree, cake, it really does relieve a lot of stress. And again, can you have too much cake? Well, Marie Antoinette would say yes. You know, you talked about your seven slices, you know, and this work-life balance, easy for me to say, work-life balance myth, and so many companies that you've worked with. The thing is, you still have to hit your numbers, you still have to get stuff done, right? So you talk about this seven-slice method. Can you take us through the seven slices? Yeah, and where the myth comes from is the principle of the seven slices. So most people think, oh, I need work-life balance. Right. Because, I'm thinking, I call them slices of our life. And the other five are you have a personal life, a physical life, an emotional life, an intellectual life, and a spiritual life, which I call these seven slices. And I defined each slice in the book and when I first did this years ago with people they go what's a personal life? I go well a personal life is something you do just for yourself. Now it might include a member of your family or your whole family but it doesn't have to. It's something you do for yourself in the form of a hobby, an avocation, a pursuit but it's something you do for you on a regular basis. Physical life, you know, until we're about 30, you don't really have to pay too much attention to your body, it kind of takes care of itself, but after about 30, you know, oh, by the way, what you put in it, how you exercise it has an impact on the rest of your life. So you have a physical life. So you need to spend some amount of time there. And then your emotional life is, number one, admitting you have them. So it is a commonality that we all have. And I have numbers of people who say to me with dead serious, I don't have any. They're all gone. I burned them all out 10 years ago. I said, well, that's too bad because they're still in there haunting you. Right. Isn't it interesting your self reflection on that about your emotional life? I mean, I'm guessing that your work as you're going through the seven slices, there's a lot of self-reflection. You know, we're talking about, well, what is my emotional life? What is my physical life? And so on, right? Yeah, I've had, I don't know how many CEOs have said to me, well, David, I don't want to go to a therapist. And I go, I'm not asking you to go to a therapist. I'm asking you what you feel about a series of subjects I've got for you, like your job. What do you mean, how do I feel? That's a, and I go, that's a problem. You should know how you feel about this menu. How about, how do you feel about you, your life, your job, your family, your friends, your siblings? Give me a feeling, give me a word. Oh wow, this feels like therapy. We've got a long way to go. It kind of sounds like therapy too, Dave, by the way. Yeah, I know. And then, you know, the work I do is primarily around executive talent development work. The intellectual slice is critical because that's where your curiosity lies. Sure. And in talent development, you don't grow without curiosity. You can be told you have to grow, so you do it for a short period of time. So a lot of the work that I've done with people under stress is, it's okay under stress to pursue things you're interested in. Like a subject worth reading for 10 minutes a night before you go to bed. You know, yeah, I love, you know, you're bringing in some rituals here too about, you know, define what it is, go for it, you know, set aside that time. Your seventh slice is the spiritual one, and Adrian and I, as we've been doing more and more of these podcasts, this spirituality, particularly through COVID, seems to have spiked as well. Now, whether it's a part of a formal religion or it's meditation and so on. When you talk about this spiritual slice, I think Adrian and I would both be really interested in how do you address that because there's this one side of business that says the two things you never talk about are politics and religion, and yet it's getting safer to talk about spirituality. Would you agree with that? Oh, totally. I don't think I violated any of those codes but years ago I started this we go into that spiritual slice I just asked so what do you believe it outside of everything you see around us outside of every tangible wall chair desk what do you believe is actually going on in the universe do you think you have a purpose you know where it where is your spiritual ability to get out of your moment and look at the world and universe with you a very small part in it so what do you think and this is where people would say well you know I I try to meditate, okay, and then other people would say, you know, I try to pray it's hard, I used to go to a church service or belong to a church or whatever, I let that go I've got kids now, I kind of wrestle with it, and I said, well you know, as long as you don't ignore it it has a real benefit. All the research and data shows, in every survey, people who have a rich spiritual life live longer and have fewer health problems. That's what I would say. That might be worth a try. What do you think? You know if you need a tangible reason why because a lot of people want to wrestle with me you know or people like me. Oh you're going to talk about god now did they go or whether you want to talk about god or not where do you believe or not is not that important well i just want to know if you spend any time per week because if you do it will help you manage distress in your work and at home which is where all the tangible and intangible stresses are. And then they would sit back and look at me and go, you know what, you might have a point there. Thank you very much. I love that. Now, this has been really interesting, Dave, and I love the seven slices. One of the things you write about too is that you, and we do this, I hear this over and over again, is that once we get through this crisis, I'll feel better then. And as you're saying, it never stops. The stress is not going to stop. So why is this a harmful attitude and how can we break that if we do start feeling that? Well, in business, just to talk about on the business side of the ledger versus home for a moment, we now know the data is rich that when your workforce is stressed, they're less productive than when they're not. So this whole thing of I'll wait till this project gets done, the deadlines October 4th and then I can relax. And then all of a sudden on October 4th they push it out two weeks. And then what we saw was productivity went down again. So what I tried to convince my clients is can we just accept it's never gonna stop And you and I cannot go up and down this roller coaster of life with it Oh, I'm stressed. I can't be friendly warm nice caring you have to wait for me to get through my problem here Can we just decide? It's never gonna change, but we will change how we go through it. So instead of going too high when we win or too low when we lose, we're going to try and stay right in the middle because that's what leaders do and that's what followers seek. They seek consistency, calmness, and assurity in crises, stress, and drama. And I have found in my client work, whenever and I've got a client right now that's entertaining me wildly because every week there's a brand new drama. Every week it's unbelievable. Last week was a potential whistleblower. Okay. I mean you can't make this stuff up and that's what I said to the CEO. I go remember this is not going to stop because he was going up and I go we've got to just accept that what we disagree with in order to be willing to go into these seven slices to use them to mitigate the stress levels that get produced in our professional and family slices. This method has proven that's true. And I keep, you know, the culprit that stops people from doing it, of course, is time. Right. Dave, I don't have time. You don't understand. But COVID, I'm working, the kids, my wife, my spouse, my partner, it's nonsense. I go, let me help you out. A 10 minute walk is 10 minutes. It's not 10 hours, it's not a week. It's a 10 minute walk with your spouse or partner or whatever. So you combine physical, personal, and family slice in 10 minutes. I promise you, you will feel better and balanced after a 10-minute walk versus not doing it and then letting the stress pile on you and then woe is me you got to pick up that fourth drink for the night to kind of get you to go to bed. Yeah. Because this is a dead end. This is not going to work. You've got to accept that. You know, I'm such a fan of just go for a walk. You know, that you advise that is so, that really resonates with me. Because, you know, as things get stressed, and to your point, it's ten minutes. You can find ten minutes. Anybody can find 10 minutes. Well, as we were putting together the run of show, Adrian graciously gave me the next segment because you are an active tennis player and I grew up in a tennis playing family. So before I get into my question, A, who's your favorite tennis player and what racket do you play with? Oh, so the racket is a Dunlop Xeron, I think, it's the lightest racket made because I've had years of tennis elbows, so that's the racket. Good choice. And then my favorite player of all time, not to date myself, but it was John McInerney. Really? The Mac Attack. Good for you. You can't be serious. I think it's funny. You cannot be serious. You cannot be serious. Talk about stress now. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting, and we'll divert here just for a second for our listeners But before they had Cyclops before they had that, you know, you could challenge and see where it was McEnroe Of course would go crazy on the line calls Well, a guy went back and looked at like the hundred calls that he complained about and he was right 98% of the time So, you know, he had reason about anxiety. Yeah. Yeah, don't tell me not to scream and yell. I'm right Anyway, so what lessons from your background in sports do you bring to the idea of finding harmony in our lives? Because sports, as we've just demonstrated, and with McEnroe, I can't believe you picked the most anxiety-ridden player probably of all time. What kind of life lessons can you teach us from your background in tennis and sports? always an okay athlete, you know, not great, not bad, but I always played on teams that did really well, you know, through no fault of my own. I mean, I would contribute, but we had great players and coaches and so forth. So what I learned, and it was beaten into me, you know, week after week in practice, is I couldn't play tense, that I had to trust my practice routines in the matches or on the field in the sport because I played a number of other sports besides tennis. Did a lot of ice hockey. So a friend of mine, you know, we've studied tennis players for years and then a book was written about the top 100 tennis players way back in the Sampras era. were like stupendous, the difference between top 10 and like 25 in the world, was self-talk. It was the only difference, which was a mental version, I think, of the seven-slice method. In other words, if it was positive, reassuring, every top 10 player had it, and I'll never forget Pete Sampras's. His was all is well. Isn't that fascinating? So what they found physiologically was, if the mind told the brain under stress, match point, I'm gonna lose, whatever, all is well. That the body, muscles, tendons, ligaments relaxed so that the practice swing could work under pressure because what they found with the bottom 90 is negative self-talk, upset and so forth and the muscles shrink a little bit and then the ball doesn't hit the middle of the strings like the way it does in practice but the anomaly to that to go back to McEnroe, he was the only player whose level of play went up the more negative he thought. So it tensed him up and he actually was more relaxed, angry. But again, in the method, we now know that we don't want you working under stress, so playing sports we don't want you stressed out. Because quote the choker, you know, it's the guy who can't handle the stress. It's really not he can't handle it, it's just that the swing has just changed under pressure. Right. Great. Well, listen, give us a place where we can find more about your work. You want to send people to somewhere, where would you go? Yeah, go to the website. It's www.peakcg.com. It's got a lot of information on the kind of work and kind of clients that I have and so forth. And it's a myriad of things from executive talent development to conflict resolution. I do jury and trial consulting for patent litigations which talk about stress, you know, billions of dollars on the line. And these lawyers and executives are just fraught with peril. And I do a lot of, you know, public speaking for keynote corporations and so forth. So that's where they can go and learn a little bit. I've got a video on there so people can watch me walk around a room and give a talk. Excellent. Yeah. One of the things, Dave, you've talked about is your own anxiety that you've worked through. So we're always interested in rituals of self-care of successful people like yourself. So talk about what you do each day or each week to really maintain your mental health with as busy as you are Yeah, it's a great question. So You know my drinking my own kool-aid kind of thing, right? So I'm one of these process guys So everybody's different. So for me, I need to plan it. So every week I Schedule these things so I schedule exercise in the form of tennis two to three times a week. I read two books a month, 20-minute chunks three nights a week, and then an hour or so on the weekend. And I manage to plow through two books a month doing that way. My faith is important to me, so I spend time there each week on a virtual church service and so forth. I write, that's my personal life, is writing, and I've got a couple more books that I'm writing right now, so I carve out time each week to do that. Otherwise, I can assure you, you'll never finish a book. You could start 100, but if you don't have a schedule they never somehow get finished. And so for me you know when I talk with associates and friends about, geez you know what's going on and you know how are you handling this and how are you handling your kids and this that and the other thing. So I've got probably two or three friends I do that with once two or three times a quarter kind of thing. So what happens is the stress level, which is moves around in my life up, sometimes down, I think, at least I appear and feel like I'm handling it okay. Now I get really run down at times and I feel a sense of burnout at times. And when that occurs, because the work generally or a family issue comes up that's difficult, I generally feel I have to lean on one of those five slices a little bit more, so I might play an extra match of tennis, or I might read a little bit more. I try and spend time that way, but I have found that works for me, but I've known other clients who do it differently, who take it a week at a time. Well this week I'm going to be leaning into my spiritual life. Next week I'm leaning into my intellectual life. So they do it a week or a day or something at a time. So we're all we all have our own different preference but the problem I have seen is people who pick it up and put it down pick it up and put it down. Because a lot of us are achievers, you know, and the big thing with achievers is once I've achieved it, I want to move on to the next one. And I have found when this method works, it's long term, consistent, repetitive, sustainable behavior in these five other slices, you will be a better person eventually by investing this amount of effort and time into you. It really is about discipline, isn't it? Like you say, scheduling that time, make sure that you stick to the schedule. You know, it's a lot like dieting, right? When you're up and down and your weight is up and down, it's the consistency that brings real satisfaction and joy. Hey, Dave, this has been a great discussion. You've shared so many wonderful things with us. If there were two things you wanted our listeners to take away from the conversation, if you could homogenize it down to just two key takeaways, what would those be? The first takeaway is what I just said. It's a method that enough people have used and tried that we know it works long-term. So this is something that works, number one. Number two, the result, the byproduct of this beyond managing stress is an incredible introspective look into you. Spending these minutes per week on you in your life in these other slices, you learn stuff about yourself. I honestly don't know where else you would learn it, particularly as a busy adult, where busyness versus productivity is always a challenge. This is very productive if you're really interested in learning why you do what you do and the way you do it. So those are the two takeaways. Well, listen, this has been a great conversation. We've been talking with Dave McNaff. He is the author of the Work-Life Balance Myth, and he shared a lot of wisdom with us today. Thank you so much for being on the show, Dave. Hey, listen, guys, thank you very much. This was great. I enjoyed it. The questions were fantastic, and I appreciate it very much. Well, Chess, some great insights from David McNeff. I love the kind of the thoughts as we began on the way, unfortunately, so many of us are coping. Our coping mechanisms are bad. Sometimes we think, oh, it's, as you said, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but it's not. So many of us are doing other things to somehow cope with everything that's going on, and we need to step back and realize these coping mechanisms are harming more than helping. Yeah, yeah. Although, you know, that cake method really resonated with me. I had three slices of cake during this podcast alone. So I mean, cake for breakfast works for me. I love the seven slices, the way he divvied it up, you know, and I think he went a little deeper. We've had other people come on the podcast and say, well, you know, there's four, there's five. I mean, make up your own slices. I love that he says the intellectual slice. Be sure that's where your curiosity lies. That really hit me that, yeah, be curious. You know, like he said, find a book and read it for 10 minutes before you go to bed. Something that will stimulate your curiosity. What are you curious about these days, Adrian? Yeah, this was interesting because I just got off a coaching call with one of the CEOs that I'm working with and as we went through, he worries about everybody else. He's three kids and his spouse and his company and I said, walk me through your routine and it was pretty clear after a while, the one thing he was missing in his life was any form of exercise and he missed that. And my challenge to him was, I said, okay, I want you to find two times a week where you can exercise for, even if it's half an hour. Just what we were talking about with the walk. But he was missing not only his physical, but his personal aspect as well, that he wasn't taking any time for himself because he's such a giver. Yeah, and it is so easy to just stay at your desk and keep working or stay in front of your computer. And that's why I love and hate my Apple Watch because it pings me. They stand up for a few minutes every hour. I'll tell you the thing, the slice that I'm always very curious about is spiritual. Like you say, it can be a bit of a landmine to talk about religion. He said, look, I just want to know what do you believe in? Are you an accident? Where do you fit into the universe? And then they said, oh, you're going to start preaching to me? He says, look, studies have shown that spiritual people are happier and live longer, so you should probably look into it. Well then he moved on to this idea that we've got to accept that crises are never going to be over. And we do this. We see this every time we coach somebody. The next week or the next two weeks we're with them, they say, oh yeah, no, but now we're dealing with this or that. It never stops. And we do this in our personal lives. Oh, when I finally get the kids back to school, I'll be able to... No, it never stops. So we have to accept that it's not gonna stop. And I love this. He said, too, we have to accept people we don't agree with, but we can still be friendly, warm, and caring. I love that. Yeah, I'm thinking, you know, he's my executive coach, and he says, Chester, it's never going to stop. And I go, really? Is that the advice I was looking for? Lastly, to wrap up, I love this self-talk. Of course, when you brought it back to tennis, I thought that was fabulous. The only tennis player in the top 100 that ever got better the more he screamed and yelled was John McEnroe. I guess there's always an outlier. This idea, though, that all is well, that you can't play tense, just such great advice. You know, our friend Gary Rich, WD40, always says, it's all going to work out. Don't worry, it's all going to work out. And we studied Michael Phelps, if you remember, for All In, our book All In on culture. That's right. And the big difference, I mean, there's other tall, lanky guys built like Michael Phelps. Yeah, he's supremely talented, but if you look on the starting blocks of the finals of the 100, they all look like Michael Phelps. And so what was the difference is psychologists have found, yeah, the difference of Michael Phelps is that when he's stood on those blocks, he didn't just think he could win. He knew he was going to win. And there was a difference in that belief, that idea of mental strength that we have to have, you know, whether it's all is well or Michael Phelps, no, I'm going to win. I used to love it when people would try to stare him down. I said, that's a big mistake. If I were you, I would not make eye contact at all. I would just go swim. Well, listen, a lot of fun. I mean, a lot of great advice. We hope it's helping you deal with your anxiety at work. And hopefully, it brought a little joy, a little happiness into your day as well. We sure appreciate you taking the time to tune in. And a special thanks to our producer, Brent Klein, out of Austin, Texas, to Christy Lawrence in Atlanta, Georgia, who helps find these amazing guests. And of course, to all of you who listen in. We want to thank our sponsor, LifeGuides, a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom, and support. And again, please go to lifeguides.com slash schedule a demo and add the code healthy2021 and get two months of free service. Can't beat that with a stick, can you, Justin? Not that you would because you're nice. Also a big shout out to GoHappyHub, the most inclusive and timely way to communicate and engage directly with your frontline employees. You know they have a 95% open rate so with GoHappyHub you can text messages directly from corporate enabled permissions, give your frontline leaders a little thank you, logistic updates, LTOs. I mean, if you need to communicate something to your frontline workers, GoHappyHub is the way to do it. The feedback and whatnot on GoHappyHub is phenomenal. We love the culture they're building there, too. Sean Boyer, the CEO there, good guy, good company, great service, and we're really thankful for their sponsorship. We do. We like to work with people who are good people that we like. So thank you for all of you for joining in. If you like the podcast, check out the book, Anxiety at Work from Harper Collins. And we want to thank you, all of you who listened, who download and share this message. Take care and be well. See you next week..