Ending The Struggle For Work-Life Balance - Gail Golden - #194

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Gail Golden, and we are talking about work-life balance. A balanced life is a happy life, and yet many people are overworked, underslept, and have little time left for relaxation. Obviously, something isn't working. So expect to learn how to decide what's important, why embracing mediocrity can be a tool rather than a weakness, when to say no, how to curate your workplace, and much more. I know, an absolute metric tonne of people that need to improve their work-life balance. So hopefully today, you will pick up some tools that will help you to let go of the work tether and enjoy your evenings a little bit more. Big shout out to everyone who tuned in on Monday. We broke the all-time single-day plays record. We landed in the top 20 on Apple Podcasts chart. It is so good. Just an amazing response to the episode with Oli Marchand. If you haven't listened to that, go back and check it out. It was phenomenal. Also, don't forget, the Ultimate Life Hacks List is still available for free. Over 200 ways that you can upgrade your existence. Head to chriswillex.com/lifehacks and you can download your copy today for absolutely nothing. And it'll make your life infinitely better. It'll make your life better, at least a little bit better. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Gail Golden.
I'm joined by Gail Golden. Gail, welcome to the show.

**Gail Golden** (1:42)
I'm delighted to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:43)
Very good to have you here. Talking about work-life balance today. 21st century, I think a lot of people listening will understand when work starts to creep into life, right? The barrier gets blurred between what you're supposed to do by day and what you want to do by evening. So your background, the things that you do, the people you've worked with, what are the common problems that you see people encountering with a work-life balance?

**Gail Golden** (2:08)
You know, it's a great question. So very quickly, my background is that for the first half of my career, I worked as a psychotherapist, worked with all different kinds of people who were struggling with various sorts of psychological and emotional and relationship problems in their lives. Mid-career, I decided I was ready to do something different. So I went back to school, got my MBA, and since then, I've been working with executive coaching and business leadership and different kinds of people with different kinds of issues. The thing that began to dawn on me was that although these two kinds of work and two populations were very different, there was a problem that crossed over those two populations, which was that almost everybody, almost all the time, felt overwhelmed, exhausted, inadequate, and as if they were not meeting their own or other people's expectations. Whether you were the senior executive of a global Fortune 500 company, or whether you were a stay-at-home parent hanging around with little children, that same theme kept coming up. And meanwhile, we've been talking about work-life balance forever. And I thought, wait a minute, something is not working here. This concept of work-life balance, I don't know anybody who has a balanced life, myself included. And then we somehow imagine that other people do. And that just makes us feel even more inadequate and overwhelmed and out of control. Maybe it's time to start thinking about this problem in a different way.

**Chris Williamson** (3:47)
I loved your analogy in the book where you were talking about how you always look at other people like they've got it together. I think you were talking about someone that was learning to play the guitar and he was a PhD student and did this and had a family and was altruistic, weekend endurance athlete, all that stuff. And from your view, he had it together and the mother of five who had seven dogs and parachutes on a weekend, she had it together and everything else. But internally, everyone's just a chaotic mess. And I think this asymmetry between what we see of other people and what we see of ourselves is one of the big explanations for why we often feel inadequate, right? You only get to see the highlight reel of everyone else, but you get to see your own blunders from the front row seat.

**Gail Golden** (4:37)
That is so true. The phrase that I often use is, don't compare your own insights to other people's outsides. And we do that all the time. And I'll tell you one of the big realizations for me was, as I was doing that, looking at the people, the kinds of people you're describing and thinking, oh my gosh, you know, they're so amazing. And then one day I began to realize that there were people who were looking at me as if I was one of those people who had it all together and was doing it all. And I thought, my God, don't they know what a train wreck I am?