Balancing the demands of running a business and maintaining a personal life can be overwhelming.
In this age of constant connectivity and busyness, finding patience, managing reactivity, and achieving a sense of peace seems impossible.
Many CEO’s attempt to address the reactivity, overwhelm and stress through mindfulness practices such as deep breathing and meditation. However, they often find themselves struggling to integrate these practices effectively into their hectic schedules.
If you really want to become less reactive and more efficient, it’s time to address the real issue at hand. How can you build in time for freedom when you are buried in your day to day?
Stop Trying to Stack
Business owners frequently face a scarcity of white space in their schedules—dedicated periods of time for reflection, rejuvenation, and personal growth. The idea of creating white space can even cause more stress.
This absence of deliberate gaps in your calendar leads to heightened stress, reduced patience, and challenges in maintaining a consistent sense of peace.
So then you are constantly searching for peace, with nowhere to put it.
You’re trying to put breathing exercises, meditation, mindfulness, and personal growth into your schedule hoping that it will give you more patience and peace.
And it doesn’t work, because there’s no availability.
And even if there is space, you put time blocks in your calendar to make sure you get to it, and you skip them… because there is something that feels more important at that moment.
The intention is there, the follow through isn’t.
Anytime I am sitting on the floor with my kids, building the tallest towers possible, trying to use all the blocks we can – I remind them of the importance of the foundation.
We can’t stack it higher, or scale it bigger, if the foundation (us, as the business owners) can’t withstand it.
Or as I tell my clients before we begin: You cannot build sustainability on sand.
Your problem isn’t that you need more meditation, your problem is that you don’t have any white space.
So, you want to be more balanced, productive and efficient but you don’t have the space to do what’s necessary to get there?
Create The Foundation
You don't have a problem with being able to cultivate peace, you have a problem with being able to effectively control your calendar.
The foundation of your business is you, the visionary, the leader, the example.
The best leaders are the ones who can ride the waves of business ownership and make it through to the other side. Making it to the other side require prioritizing sustainability over instant gratification.
Before you can prioritize self-care and peaceful practices, you have to remove what’s no longer serving you.
Instead of having the unrealistic expectation to add peaceful practices to your calendar, it’s time to audit how you are spending your time and energy and clear the clutter.
Take a look at your current work-load and for each appointment on your calendar ask two questions; Can this be streamlined or delegated?
Does this really need to be on my calendar or am I holding onto it because I am afraid?
After identifying things that are on your calendar that don’t need to be there, you can create a plan of action on who you need to communicate with or what processes need to be changed to remove it.
And lastly, but most importantly, you have to set boundaries to protect the new-found white space.
When you have a clear picture of your responsibilities and you are holding boundaries to protect your freedom, you have space to breathe.
And space to breathe creates balances and efficiency.
Maintaining Peace Practices
There’s always going to be challenges in maintaining a harmonious work-life balance.
While mindfulness practices like meditation and deep breathing can be helpful, they won’t fix the underlying issue of limited white space.
By prioritizing clearing the clutter and auditing your time, you are able to get white space that contributes to better leadership, more freedom and greater efficiency.
It is only then that you have the time, energy and space to maintain practices that create and maintain true peace. Making white space a non-negotiable aspect of your business strategy will empower you to navigate your professional and personal life with greater ease. That ease is required for greater happiness, fulfillment, sustainability and success.
