We have a saying that we have found to be true over time and thousands of hours of 1 on 1 coaching with our heroic business owners, “life and business necessarily intersect”.

There is not a business owner or key leader that we have yet to meet that has figured out how to separate life and work.

What happens at home cannot help but follow you to work.  What happens at work cannot help but follow you home.  They are interconnected, as is all of life.

Even our global society is unable to insulate itself from the actions or reactions of decisions around the world.

Russia stages a war against Ukraine and the corner gas station in Iowa is immediately impacted.  

Life and business necessarily intersect.  

We try to act like it is not true with statements like this, “well, it’s just business” or, “I keep work at work and home at home”.  

It is a ruse.  

How do you separate yourself from your business?  You don’t… as long as you have your business. 

A few weeks ago I met with a dear friend who shared about the turmoil within his marriage and the unfortunate end towards which it seems to be heading.  

It has and will continue to affect his work.  

What are some ways that we can operate from a place of health both at home and at work when neither may be ideal? 

First, understand what triggers you.

You can’t help but bring work home at times.  What you can help is knowing what things tend to set you off and act as a trigger that cascades you to bad places. 

Part of understanding these triggers means taking time to work with a skilled advisor to help dig into the things that shaped those triggers.  

Some triggers are born from trauma and others born from elation.  All are triggers and all carry with them a “shots fired” response. 

When we understand our triggers we can be better prepared to practice discipline in our responses when the triggers are switched. 

Second, we must vigorously define the boundaries of our time.

Johann Hari in his important book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – And How To Think Deeply Again reveals a simple and profound statistic saying, “one study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.”

Just sit on that for a second.  One hour.

Can you think of the last time you had one entire hour focused completely on one thing?  No buzzes, dings, alerts, notifications, email checks, social scrolls; just deep work on one important thing.  

Ashley and I recently stayed with a niece and nephew of ours while my brother and his wife got away for a night.  For one entire hour, my nephew and I buzzed, squealed, roared, rolled, colored, built, and laughed in the playroom.  No distractions and it was hard.  

An hour is a long time in a modern world.  Out of 168 hours in a week, we cannot find one, to be solely focused on one important task of deep work without being impulsed to check something.  

If you want to separate yourself from your business and have time to breathe, you must vigorously put boundaries on your work time.  It will require the hard work of sitting quietly and thoughtfully with your calendar and manufacturing the time you are working versus the time you are not.

We all know that your mind will bleed those boundaries and there are moments you will be thinking about business-related things while you are in non-business-related time; the goal is not perfection.  The goal is doing a much better job than we’re doing right now.

Thirdly, we must communicate our boundaries to others in a way that promotes the mission of both your family and your business.

Too many times people will announce their schedule to peers and colleagues with a spirit of “don’t mess with me or else I’ll lose it!”  

Our calendars and our boundaries need to be built in a way that serves both your personal and work missions and brings more value to both rather than less.

Healthy businesses are those that work with their teams to maximize their team members skill set and time, while also acknowledging the need for healthy relationships with work and family/personal time. 

Finally, the purpose of work is in part a fleshing out of the skill sets that have been woven into the fabric of our individual personas, in part a mutual value-add to our local and global communities, and a useful means to provide resources that fund our personal time allowing you to apply the fruits of your business success to the mission of your personal and family mission.