The Secret to Balancing a Sales Career with your Personal Life
Balance is one of those ever-elusive concepts in life. Quite frankly, I don’t know if it can ever be truly achieved. As soon as you think you’ve got it all figured out, something completely out of your control seems to step in and change everything.
Still, there is a lot more in your control than you may realize.
I found it interesting that we had several episodes of The Why and The Buy that tackled this concept independently of one-another. When something keeps coming up serendipitously like that, I tend to pay attention.
Here are a few lessons from the podcast that may help you find the balance you’re looking for, or at least give you that feeling of control.
Use HyperScheduling to Block Time
I read one of Anthony Iannarino’s newsletters where he explained his concept of hyperscheduling. It gave me a ton of clarity around setting expectations and limits. It turns out, there really is enough time in the day.
When you schedule your tasks into 30 minute blocks--30 minutes to tidy the kitchen, 30 minutes to write a blog post, 30 minutes to work out, etc.--you get a realistic and helpful understanding of what you can do in that amount of time.
I share some examples here of how this has worked for me and my family. The time blocks seem restrictive at first, but they’re actually freeing. I’ve not been able to completely embrace the concept for myself yet, but it is something I continue to return to, and I recommend you give it a shot for a week, if only to see the potential.
Balance Your Buckets and Define Your Boundaries
One of the things that really strikes me about Marcus Chan is how purposeful and intentional he is about the way he’s built his business and the boundaries he has. Boundaries protect his ability to be the father and the family man he wants to be. It’s really, really inspiring.
Marcus says, “I started doing this every single Friday: I built in an hour, I call it my protected hour. I'll reflect on the week, what went really well, what could be better. It's really important. So I block it out. Nothing else can be booked during that time. And then I look my upcoming week and what's on my calendar. Are the things I'm showing up for going to help my overall goals?”
It’s nearly impossible to create the space for everything you do in your life if you don’t stop every once in a while and check in with yourself. An hour a week isn’t much, but it can feel overwhelming. That’s usually the best indicator that you need to take it.
Put Energy Into Creating Your Own Magic
So many of us as salespeople, small business owners, and executives are just trying to do too much in too little time. But it’s more than balancing time you spend at work or home.
Jeff Noel said the catalyst for wanting balance started when he became a father. Christie and I dug into his journey that included 20 years at Disney.
“I just got sick of people saying balance is a myth. It's a myth because everybody believes it's a myth. I'm going to be the guy that's carrying the torch that says balance is not a myth.”
Jeff believes there are five areas that require balance. It’s not just about work and life, it’s about your mind, body, spirit, work, and home. More importantly, it’s not about balancing time, but energy.
This is an interesting concept. It completely flips the script on how most people try and approach balance. When the demands of those different buckets differ from each other, as well as from day-to-day, how can you properly allocate the time?
Additionally, you can feel energy, but not necessarily time. I think you have to pay attention to what lights you up so you can do more of it, and what brings you down so you can delegate or eliminate as much of that as possible.
Are you putting energy into each of these areas? What are you neglecting? Are there a couple you’re avoiding?
Fight Like a Warrior, But Reflect Like a Monk
Are you ready to invest time and energy into being better at sales? Maybe you want to improve another area of your life.
I’m intrigued by the warrior monk philosophy of Shawn Rhodes. He leveraged his former life as a war correspondent to become an expert in helping sales teams scale success. On our show, he talked about his experience in Fallujah and the tactics he learned that can also help sales teams improve performance.
“The idea is to put a system behind it. How do I make sure I'm one percent better every week? It's a great motto on a break room wall, or on a motivational poster, but how do you incorporate that into your life, into your business? Something that we began doing very early on in modeling, what we saw these military teams do was debriefing our sales conversations and debriefing our customer relationships.”
How often do you reflect on your “missions?” They could be your sales calls, your marketing campaigns, or even the summer chore list you give your kids. Are they producing the outcomes you were looking for? What worked well? What needs to be tweaked?
Not giving yourself the space to reflect is what most commonly leads to that feeling of not being balanced, which is often actually a perceived lack of control. When you take time to think about what’s working or not, you recognize the things you can do to influence your situation, and that feeling of control starts to return.
What do you think? Has this changed the way you look at balance? Which of these episodes was your favorite? Join the conversation online and give me your takeaways.
I do live public sales training twice a month. The topics are always changing but are likely to be something you and your sales team are likely struggling with right now. They’re free to join, and I think they’ll benefit you and your team.
Jeff Bajorek
Real. Authentic. Experience.
There’s a big difference between knowing how to sell and being able to. Jeff Bajorek spent over a decade in the field as a top performer. He’s been in your shoes. He knows what it will take. He can help you succeed.
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