Finding work/life balance by embracing mediocrity and saying no

Everywhere you look, people are feeling stressed, overworked, and inadequate. In our hyper-stimulating environment, we’re trying to do it all and we end up feeling exhausted and empty. We talk about finding work/life balance, but nobody is balanced and the concept just makes us feel worse.

As I work with my executive coaching clients to help them be the best leaders they can be, this issue of how to manage yourself for peak productivity is very often on the agenda. It's clear we need a new way to think about this problem. To give my clients the room to be great, I’ve created an approach I call “curating your life.” A curator’s job is to sort through a collection, choose the most important items for an exhibit, and arrange them in the best way to convey a message. Curating your life is a similar process. It means sorting through all your activities to determine which ones are most important right now, then arranging them for maximum impact.

I was recently invited to present on this topic at BakerWomen, the women’s leadership forum at Baker McKenzie. In a lively interchange, we talked about exactly how this curation process works. To live a curated life means learning how to say “no” — to eliminate activities that are not high-priority right now, even if they are worthwhile things you would like to be doing. Curating your life also means choosing mediocrity — accepting the fact that you aren’t going to be great at everything and making conscious choices about where you can lower your standards.

Needless to say, the high-powered women in the audience struggled with both of these challenges. Saying no and choosing mediocrity are really hard for people who put high demands on themselves. The good news is that once you learn how to say no and accept some mediocrity in your life, that leaves you with enough energy to focus on the really significant activities — the ones where you want to be great. This revolutionary approach — curating your life — enables you to systematically sort through your activities and focus your energy on what is most productive, meaningful and joyful. Curating your life is a detailed program to eliminate the clutter that is exhausting you. Only then can you identify what you will be great at and create a life of purpose and delight.

To learn more about curating your life, email me.