Off Balance

Matthew Kelly: I think the essential problem is that the term in and of itself is fatally flawed because it separates work from our life, and our work isn't separate from our life, our work is part of our life, and our work is a substantial part of our life and should be an important part of our life. So when corporations, you know, 20 years ago started asking employees in employee satisfaction surveys "Do you feel like you have work-life balance?" Essentially what they were saying was "Your work isn't part of your life, how do you feel about that, how's that going?" So I think that the term in and of itself is based on a false assumption, the false assumption is that your work isn't part of your life, and of course it is.

Rachel Salaman: Are you okay though with the idea of balance?

Matthew Kelly: I am okay with the idea of balance, I'm not okay with an obsession with balance. Should our lives be out of balance all the time? No, but do we have to have it perfectly balanced all the time? No, because why? That's actually not achievable. And also I think that if you follow your satisfaction you will actually have a higher chance of finding balance than if you don't, because balance is something very, very, very elusive to measure, whereas satisfaction is much more easily measured. It's easy to say "I'm satisfied or I'm not satisfied" or "I'm mostly satisfied, 1 to 10, I'm a 7." When it comes to personal satisfaction or professional satisfaction it's very hard to measure balance. You know, when I was interviewing people I said "If you had to choose between balance and satisfaction, which would you choose?" and people overwhelmingly chose satisfaction. I don't think anybody wanted a balance before we started asking them about it, you know, all the time, but they always wanted satisfaction in the workplace and satisfaction in their personal lives.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned conducting interviews with people about satisfaction and balance, what research went into your book?

Matthew Kelly: More than 3,000 one-on-one interviews were conducted, with predominantly 80 percent or more folks from essentially the Fortune 500 space in the US. Other than that and prior to that I examined the work-life balance portion of employee satisfaction surveys from about 300 companies, again primarily in the US, some in Australia and some in Asia, to get a sense of what the questions that were being asked were, and then studied the results to see is work-life balance as it's being defined in these surveys increasing or decreasing in corporate cultures? When it's increasing, what is the cause of that? When it's decreasing, what is the cause of that? What I discovered overwhelmingly is that work-life balance as it's defined in those surveys is decreasing almost universally at this point in time.

Rachel Salaman: And did you conclude there was any reason for that?

Matthew Kelly: I really believe that if you set people up to chase something that is impossible to obtain, you know, over time they just become discouraged, depressed, turned off by the whole idea, and I think that for 20 years we've been talking about work-life balance. In the companies where I did the surveys I asked them to show me their work-life balance champions, I said "Okay, well who's the champion of work-life balance in this company?" And they would point me to one or two people and I would interview those one or two people, and inevitably I would discover that these people were not champions of work-life balance, but they did have higher levels of personal and professional satisfaction than their colleagues, and that's what people associated with as making them these work-life balance champions. But, you know, when you ask people to talk about the most satisfying times in their life, they talk about either working an 80 hour week to crack out a project that's big and important, or they talk about laying on the beach in the Bahamas for four or five days. When you talk to people about satisfaction, they don't talk about some idyllically balanced life. At the same time I think it's very important to point out that routines are very important to our lives, so if you have a routine of working out or a routine of having breakfast with your kids or taking your kids to school, or a routine of meditating or a routine of reading, whatever your routines are, are very important and they are critical to satisfaction, and those routines are very often associated with balance, if that makes sense. But routines are not balance, routines do, however, lead to incredible satisfaction.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you discuss different definitions of what you call "the best way to live," and you conclude that there are three principles in common to everyone's idea of this, and the first of those three is that we're here to become the best version of ourselves. What do you mean by that?

Matthew Kelly: I believe that everything makes sense in relation to this principle. I woke up this morning and I have choices, you know, things I will do or things I won't do; will I work out, why I don't work out, which will help me become a better version of myself? What will I eat? Some foods help me become a better version of myself and some foods don't. Throughout my career and throughout my life I've discovered that I am most fully alive when I'm becoming a better version of myself, and I've observed this in other people as well. It doesn't matter which aspect of life, physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, personal or professional, I think we're most fully alive, we're most animated when we're becoming a better version of ourselves, and I really do believe that everything in life and business makes sense in relation to this principle.

So, for example, what makes a good friend? I believe a good friend is someone who helps you become the best version of yourself. What makes a good meal? Good food is food that helps you become the best version of yourself. What makes a good book, movie, music? Those that inspire you to become the best version of yourself. Why do we send our kids to school? To learn skills that can help them become the best version of themselves. What's the purpose of relationships? Is two people challenging and encouraging each other to become the best version of themselves. So I believe that everything in life makes sense in relation to this principle, I believe that we are constantly choosing between the best version of ourselves and some second-rate version of ourselves. I believe that the principle goes beyond any sort of religious barrier or any sort of political barrier or any sort of philosophical barrier, because I believe that most men and women of good will can say "Yes, it's better for me to be a better version of myself than a worse version of myself, or a lesser version of myself," so in this we have a universal principle.

If you're related to the business world, imagine what a team would be like if every team member came to work in the morning thinking to themselves "What can I do today to help this company become the best version of itself, or what can I do today to help this organization or this team or this project become the best version of itself?" Of course, you've have a phenomenally engaged team because it is the question, and, you know, in the book I start the section out by saying "All of the great minds in history have been obsessed with the question: how is the best way to live?" You know, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, whoever you want to pick, this is the question that the great minds of every age have pondered. In any culture I think you can explore the richest or the poverty of that culture by thinking about "How much time do we spend on that question?" Unfortunately now in our present culture we spend very little time on the question, we don't think too much about how is the best way to live. We spend a lot of time thinking about "How do I want to live?" and I'm not sure that's getting us anywhere.

Rachel Salaman: Well your second and third principles in the definition you present in your book address that precisely. The second one is virtue, you believe that has an important role to play in this, can you explain that?

Matthew Kelly: It's important to point out I think to our audience that when we talk about "How is the best way to live," there are some things that are common to us all, you know. There might be some things that are unique to you, Rachel, and some things that are unique to me, but there are some things that are common to us all, and I believe this idea of seeking the best version of ourselves is common to us all. I also believe that virtue as one of the best ways to live is common to us all, and I don't mean virtue in the religious sense, although I certainly don't have anything against that, but I mean virtue in the classical Greek sense of the word. So, you know, I would rather have a patient neighbor than an impatient neighbor. You know, I'd rather have a patient lover than an impatient lover. Two patient people will always have a better relationship than two impatient people. Not sometimes, not maybe, but every single time. So in this we find a universal principle, two generous people will always have a better relationship than two stingy people. Two selfless people will always have a better relationship than two selfish people. And of course you multiply this out between two families or two communities or two states or two nations, and you get the same result. Two patient, generous nations will always have a better relationship than two impatient, selfish nations, and this of course is what we're seeing in the world and we're seeing it in our neighborhoods and we're seeing it in our cities, is that this loss of this universal principle, that virtue is better than lack of virtue. We all prefer to associate with people of virtue than we do with people who lack that virtue, and so that second principle is virtue for that reason.

Rachel Salaman: And the third principle is self-control, which we've touched on a little bit already. In your experience how hard is it for people to develop self-control if it doesn't come naturally to them?

Matthew Kelly: Well it doesn't come naturally to anybody, and I think it's important that we recognize that. People are not born with self-control, people are not born patient, people are not born generous, people are not born selfish, people are not born angry and violent. People are not born these ways, we develop these things through education and experience. I think it is possible to develop self-control. Very often we go at it in large ways, and what we have to do is go at it in small ways. If I say "Listen, you haven't worked out for three months and you really should work out," and I say to you "From now on I want you to work out for an hour every day, you know, intense cardio vascular working out," well you're not going to do that, you know. But if I say "Listen, just go outside and take a walk for five minutes each day this week, you'll feel better about yourself and you'll feel better about life," you can do that. So it's a matter of breaking it down into manageable steps.

Rachel Salaman: One of the chapters in your book is called Can You Have It All, and your answer in the book is no, you can't. Now why is this particularly important to understand?

Matthew Kelly: I think the reason is because we live in a culture that proclaims that you can have it all, and it's just such a distortion of reality. You cannot listen to two radio programs at the same time, okay. I mean, you can but you won't hear them. You cannot really watch two TV programs at the same time. If you go out to the movies you can't watch two movies at once, you have to choose. You can't play tennis and golf at the same time, you can't have one job and work another job at the same time. Life is essentially choices, and our capacity to make choices determines the richness or the poverty of our life very often, and I don't mean financially but I mean in every sense. So what happened is I think in our culture is we're scared of missing out on stuff, and so we say yes to everything and what we don't realize maybe in that is that by saying yes to everything we miss out on the things that are just for us. So, for example, I have a couple of friends who are dating people at the moment and they know that that is not the person they want to end up with. They know they want to end up with somebody, and they know that that is not the person that they want to end up with, and I say to them "Well what are you doing?" They say "Well, you know, I like having someone to be with and I like having someone to do things with on a Friday night." What I'm unable to communicate to them is, is that every Friday night that they go out with that person is a Friday night when they are not meeting the person that they potentially will spend the rest of their lives with. So every time we say yes to something we say no to everything else, and I'm not sure we're always aware of that.

Rachel Salaman: So you would say it's very important to really think carefully before you say yes to anything, before you commit to something?

Matthew Kelly: Obviously there's a range or a spectrum, you know. Before you commit to what you're going to have for lunch I don't think you need to do a SWOT analysis, but as those decisions become larger decisions, yes, absolutely. I think people find themselves in jobs that they don't really love, but they hang around there and they probably hang around there for too long, and by saying yes to that they miss out on the job that is just for them, that is in their passion point, that's in their sweet spot, that puts them in the zone. Just the same as with the dating thing.

Rachel Salaman: Is that linked to fear do you think?

Matthew Kelly: I think it's absolutely linked to fear. I think people are paralyzed by fear very often in these sorts of situations, they're scared to take a leap. I see that a lot with people who come into perhaps their early 40s, have had a career for a decade and a half and have come to the conclusion that this really isn't them, this is not really a good use of their talents, but they feel trapped, and they might wake up at 40 and say "Gee, I really should have been a schoolteacher," and they feel trapped because of their financial situation or because of other commitments and they're scared to make a change. In those cases I often say to people "Well, you know, if you feel called to teaching, that doesn't mean you have to quit your job and go off and teach. You know, maybe you can volunteer to teach somewhere on a Thursday night or on a Saturday morning." Sometimes it's more of a fantasy than a reality, and they go and teach on a Saturday morning and they come to the conclusion that "You know what? This really isn't for me and I don't have to give up my career of 15 years, and I'm glad I scratched the itch in a non-permanent, temporary way."

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Rachel Salaman: One of the most insightful passages in your book outlines an activity with a glass of water that you do in your training sessions. Can you tell us about that?

Matthew Kelly: Yeah. It's a lot of fun. So usually I have a couple of people come up to the stage and I say "How long can you hold this glass of water for?" And it's just a regular sized glass of water, and then I have them hold out their arms straight and hold this glass of water. Now usually most people can't hold that like that for more than two or three minutes, their arm just begins to ache intolerably, and if you force somebody to do that you would actually do them great harm. You know, you could force somebody to hold that cup of water and not drop that cup of water and not lower their arm, and you could probably force them to do it for a significant period of time. It's extraordinary the damage you could do to your body just by holding a glass of water with your arm out straight for a long period of time. All sorts of issues you develop in your back and your spine, and of course in your muscles around your arm and your shoulder. So the reality is that you can't actually hold that glass of water for that long, and then I basically say to the audience "Okay, but if I let you hold it out for a minute and then rest for a minute, and then hold it out for a minute and then rest for a minute, how long could you hold it for then?" And it turns out people actually then could hold it forever, and the point that's trying to be made is that we are capable of enduring periods of stress, it's actually very good for us. Stress is actually very good for the human person, it has been scientifically proven, but stress without relief is the problem. So we have to find ways to drive ourselves, which can sometimes create certain levels of stress. We have to find ways to drive ourselves, but we have to also find ways to give ourselves relief from that. In the modern context we're very good at driving very hard, we're not that good at giving ourselves relief from that.

Rachel Salaman: And you say that we all need to figure out how long to hold the glass of water so to speak and how long to break from holding it. What tips do you have for working out those things?

Matthew Kelly: I think the first thing is that it's different for everybody and not to measure yourself against somebody else, because somebody else may or may not be being honest. Some people are able to hide stress more than other people, and some people can pretend to be very happy and very fulfilled but on the inside they're all very, very churned up. So I think it's very important that you have your own compass on this and that you just start to toy with things. You know, one of the things I talk about in the book is "How do your best days begin?" That's different for everybody. I think many people don't know how their best days begin, you know, and the only way to find out is to try a few different things and say "Yeah, when I did that seven out of ten days were great days, when I didn't do that it was hit or miss." So I think it's very much a self-exploration to work out what worked for you, and then to honor that in your life.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you talk about four levels of energy, can you tell us about those?

Matthew Kelly: Sure. So the first level of energy is depressed, exhausted, burned out, defeated and overwhelmed. We all experience that from time to time, of course we never want to experience that. The second level of energy is angry, fearful, anxious, defensive and resentful. Again we all do experience that from time to time, we never want to experience it. The third level of energy is mellow and serene. Most people don't have much experience with that at all. And the fourth level of energy is confident, joyful, enthusiastic and invigorated, and predominantly that's where we want to spend our time. We also predominantly want to spend time with people who have fourth level energy. So who do you want on your team at work? People with fourth level energy. Who do you want as your neighbors? People with fourth level energy. You don't want people as your neighbors who are depressed, exhausted, burned out, defeated, overwhelmed, angry, fearful, anxious, defensive and resentful. You know, you don't want those people on your team, you don't even want those people as your customers, even if they're giving you a lot of business you actually don't want those people as your customers. Interestingly, every successful product has fourth level energy in its packaging, and you don't need to be a marketing expert to work that out. You can walk down the aisle in the supermarket and you can tell the packages that got it right and the ones that missed. It's also interesting I think to note that the most successful sales people have fourth level energy. You know, if you get a call from a sales person who's depressed, exhausted, burned out, angry, fearful, anxious, and that sales person says "Let's go to lunch," you know, I don't think so. So the most successful sales people tend to be people with fourth level energy as well.

Rachel Salaman: And you say in the book that we have more control than we think over how much time we spend at each energy level, so what are some ways to control that, how can we spend more time in fourth level energy without pretending?

Matthew Kelly: I think one of the instant mood altering devices available to us is gratitude. I'm healthiest when I'm grateful. I spend more time in level four when I'm grateful. I tend to slip into other levels of energy when I'm not grateful. One of the exercises I did for a whole year once was I put a gratitude list in my wallet, just a list of people, things, opportunities that I was grateful for, and every time I got in a bad space I would take the list out and I would just reflect on it, just for 30 seconds. It's extraordinary how gratitude has the capacity to become like a mind-altering experience, so I think that's one thing. Definitely emotionally, psychologically, there are things available to us that allow us to shift the level of energy in our lives. Of course physical is huge as well. If you're taken prisoner of war one of the first forms of torture that would be used on you is sleep deprivation. In the modern culture most people are tired most of the time, and actually sleep deprivation is one of the forms of torture we use on ourselves in the modern culture. The problem with that is that fatigue makes cowards of us all, fatigue essentially turns us into cowards. How often you know that you have to have a conversation with a colleague or a spouse or a child because something has not gone as it should, and then that moment for that conversation comes and you cower away from it. Why? Because you're tired, you just don't have the energy, and that's what fatigue does, it turns us into cowards. So I think one of the very important things is to think about what are our sleep patterns. In one of my other books, "The Rhythm of Life," I talk extensively about the science of sleep, the tremendous breakthroughs we've found in the last 20 years and how important sleep patterns are to our lives, so I think that's one thing.

Another thing of course is diet. You know, you go out to lunch, you eat certain foods, you come back in the afternoon, you're tired. Are you aware of that? You go out to lunch on another day, you eat different foods, you come back to work and you're energized. Are you aware of that? And then of course the other one is exercise, nothing impacts energy levels like a routine of working out.

Rachel Salaman: And in your book you say that if we want to increase our satisfaction levels we need to have a system, so you outline your five point system, which starts with Assessment. So can you talk us through this first step?

Matthew Kelly: Absolutely. If you want to change something the first thing you always have to do is measure it. If you can't measure it you can't change it. In the book I take people through essentially 20 questions to measure personal and professional satisfaction, and actually at floydconsulting.com they can take that assessment, it's free, they can go on and take the assessment, and it will shoot them back a personal satisfaction score, professional satisfaction score, and a total satisfaction score. Then they could go on once a month or once a quarter or once a year and measure it, but the first thing is to actually measure it. You have to measure how satisfied or how dissatisfied are you, and that's really the role of the assessment, is to work out how satisfied am I, where am I at, so that we can work out how to move it from there.

Rachel Salaman: And then it goes on to Priorities, and you offer a useful way to determine your priorities, to really figure out what they are. Can you just explain how that works?

Matthew Kelly: Sure. So essentially it's a fairly simple priority exercise, and for the sake and simplicity of our conversations let's say that somebody came to me and said "Matthew, my three priorities are my marriage, my children and my health." I say to them "Alright, well which is most important?" and they might say "Well my marriage is most important, if I don't have a good marriage I can't really raise my children in the way that I would like to and that's important to me." I say "Alright, fine, so your marriage is your number one priority?" and they say "Yeah, my marriage is my number one priority," and then "What's your number two?" "Well my kids are my number two priority", "And so your health is your number three priority?" This is what we usually do when we think about our priorities, it's a conversation we have with ourselves or a conversation we have with each other, only in this case a fatal mistake has been made, and the reason is because if you don't have your health you don't have a marriage and you don't have your kids. So even though intellectually we might think "Okay, my marriage is my most important priority, and then my kids, and then my health, and then my career and then my finances." The reality is, no health, no any of these other things. So we need a tool to help us really get to an understanding of what our priorities are, and of course in the book I outline the priority exercise in a couple of different ways and I have people measure things against other things. So if you could only have one thing, money or your health, which would you have, and people would say "Well it's clear now, I'd have my health, because if I have my health I can go out and make money, if I don't have my health I can't go out and make money." So the priority exercise is designed to help people measure things against each other and really get a sense of what priorities are.

Rachel Salaman: And if you could just briefly talk us through the other three steps one after the other; the third is Core Habits, the fourth Weekly Strategy Sessions, and then comes Quarterly Review?

Matthew Kelly: Sure. So the Core Habits we talked a little bit about earlier, sort of around the concept of routines. We do need these routines to thrive, and when you look at the people who have very high levels of personal satisfaction, very high levels of professional satisfaction, you discover that they have these core habits. You know, in the professional life it could be something like "Well two hours a day from 10 to 12 I don't schedule any meetings, I don't schedule any phone calls, I just have that time to work on the most important project that's at hand that day," that could be somebody's professional core habit. Personally there's obvious ones we've spoken about, working out a lot. One of the ones I have this year is drinking a gallon of water a day, which is a lot of water, and we need these core habits to stabilize and to focus our lives.

Then the fourth one is the Weekly Strategy Session, and this is not mine, I have an Executive Coach I've worked with for many years and he gave me this. And he basically counseled me to just take 20 minutes on a Sunday afternoon and look at my week and really identify one project that I wanted to work on each day, or one project that I wanted to move forward significantly each day, and then to really focus in on that as I came to work that day. What tends to happen for most of us is, the first thing we do each day is check our email, and what the email tends to do is draw us into sort of a tyranny of the urgent, everything is then urgent and we start doing urgent things. The problem with that is that the most important things are hardly ever urgent. You know, we don't check our email and think to ourselves "I'm so glad I checked my email first thing this morning because now I'm strategically focused for the day," you know, that doesn't happen, what happens is that our email tends to distract us for the day. So what we need to do is have a focus on the day before we expose ourselves to all of the distractions of the day.

Then the fifth point in the system is the idea of a Quarterly Review, where we sit down with somebody else, preferably, and we allow that person to review us and tell us how well we're doing, based on the objectives that we set out at the beginning of the quarter.

Rachel Salaman: How useful do you find those Quarterly Reviews, and who do you do them with, yourself?

Matthew Kelly: Well I let my wife do my quarterly review and it can be a challenge sometimes, you know, because somebody else sees you as you really are. We don't see ourselves as we really are, and that can be a challenge and that can be very fruitful if we stay open to it. I think it requires a great level of humility and a great level of vulnerability to let somebody close to us do that for us.

Rachel Salaman: You say that people should approach this process with the long view in mind, ideally a decade long view you say. Why, what are the benefits of that perspective?

Matthew Kelly: Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a week, and most people also overestimate what they can do in a month and underestimate what they can do in a year. Most people don't have very long time horizons. If I said to you "Rachel, what can we get done here in the next three days regarding some huge project that you're working on?," you tend to cram into that three days, "Okay, I can do this and this and this and this and this" and you over-commit yourself. But if I say to you "Rachel, what would you like to accomplish in your career in the next decade?" What it does is it frees your mind up to possibilities, and possibilities that are not normally thought of when you're on small timelines. Most things seem possible within a decade. You know, many things seem impossible within a month or even a year, and so what the long view does is it gives people the ability to become people of possibility and say "Yeah, I can do that. It might take five, six, seven years but I can do that."

Rachel Salaman: And ultimately I suppose, to bring this back to the central theme, that will lead to greater personal and professional satisfaction?

Matthew Kelly: There's no question. There is a vision within all of us, there are dreams within all of us, there are hungers and desires within all of us that go unfulfilled because we refuse to think in the long-term, and when we start thinking in the long-term we see that some of those dreams or visions that we have for ourselves, our lives, our career, our business, our team, are really possible if we give them a little time and focus on them.

Rachel Salaman: Matthew Kelly, thanks very much for joining us.

Matthew Kelly: You're very welcome, great to be with you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Matthew's book again is "Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction." You can find out more about him and his work at www.floydconsulting.com, where you can also find the online assessment that he mentioned.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.