Chris LoCurto: Welcome to the Chris Locurto show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.
Welcome to the show! [Laugher] today we’re talking about balance. I must not have a lot of balance right now in my life [laughter]. We’re talking about how to find balance in every area of your life. Today we’re going to be talking about the wheel of life and the things that we do, and how we discover balance and how we make sure that we’re paying attention to the important areas of our life. Now we asked you folks what your biggest struggle was, and two years in a row you answered time management and work life balance. And work life balance happens to be one of the top questions I get at every Next Level Leadership live event when we do our q & a’s. That tends to be something that people ask about a lot. “Chris, how do I do this? How do I balance my life with my work?”
And so today, as we’re talking through this, you know I’m going to use the word balance a lot. There’s no true balance because you can’t spend the exact amount of time in each one of those areas… well you could, but then the considerably more important things are gonna fall apart… you don’t need to spend as much time in your social life as you do in your family life, right? The family is more important. So if you spend more time in your social, guess what’s going to happen to your family? So it’s not an equal balance. Most people on the planet do not spend anywhere near as much time in the spiritual, the God aspect of their life as they should. As a matter of fact, that’s usually by far the smallest portion of this process that you know, focusing on each area of their life.
That should be an area that we spend more time in. So we use in next level life, we use the wheel of life. Now, Zig Ziglar, I don’t know if Zig created the wheel of life. There’s a ton of different versions of the wheel of life, but I can tell you this, the tool that Zig created has been something that I have used for decades and that very tool that’s one of the most read blog posts and it has stayed one of the top blog posts on our site and that is the zig ziglar wheel of life. We use it. We have a tweak to it, but it’s not much, it’s just a change of perspective, but we use that in every single next level life. We use that focus to say, these are the areas that you should be really concentrating on, you know, how are you doing in these areas?
How healthy are you in these areas? So Zig created a phenomenal tool to show people how to distribute their time, their focus and where goals need to be set in each area. And again, that’s called the wheel of life. It could be seasonal. Again, there’s no perfect science. There is no perfect balance to all of this stuff. The key is not being considerably out of balance. The key is making sure that you’re putting energy into those areas that you should be doing. So again, zig created a phenomenal tool to show people how to distribute their time, their focus, and where goals need to be set in each area because really you should be setting goals in each area of the wheel of life. Right? Well, Chris, but I’m single. I don’t even have a family. Okay, well what’s your goal, man or woman?
What’s your goal? What do you want it to look like? What kind of husband do you want to be? What kind of wife do you want to be? When it comes to marriage? You don’t have to even be in a relationship to decide right now what goals you want in that area of your life, right? If you set those goals now, then it can change the way you date people or not date people. Go spend a ton of time creating a great friendship at the point that you know this is somebody you don’t want to spend life without. Then start dating him, so make smart choices. Set goals in each area of the wheel of life so that you’re focusing on making each area of your life the best it possibly can be. So one of the things we discover in next level life, and by the way at the end of this episode, we’ve got a free tool.
It’s a great tool for you to utilize. So we’ll talk about that towards the end. But one of the things we do is we go through, when we take a look at each one of these areas and we find out what’s healthy, what’s unhealthy, we find out how well you’re doing. What we discover ALL the time is that people do really well in the areas that they tend to spend the most time in. So it may not be the most important area of their life. Like some folks, their career is super healthy but their marriage is tanking, or their relationship with their kids, or their relationship with God is tanking. Or some folks, you know, their social life is phenomenal, but their personal life, their personal growth is sucking wind. And when you look at these things, usually the things that people are doing really well and it’s not the most important things to them, it’s just where they’ve put their attention.
It could be someplace that they get the most worth in life, but it’s something that they tend to struggle with, and that is why the wheel of life is such a powerful tool that we use in next level life. And this episode is brought to you by next level life. So folks, if you’re feeling stuck, if you find yourself feeling burnt out or lacking, balance in work and life are stuck in the same old patterns but not moving forward. Take action. What if you woke up every morning with a clear purpose? Where would you be five years from now if you had more clarity, purpose, and peace,? Probably different from where you stand today. There is a better way and it starts with taking action on the right information. Next level Life is a two day personal discovery experience. It’s a one on one personalized event where we guide you through a process to help you get unstuck in life.
To set direction in every area of the wheel of life, to improve your relationships and to discover what’s holding you back. So if you’re struggling with discontentment, if you’re filled with anxiety or frustration, don’t keep going through the motions every day. Go to chrislocurto.com/discover and take the next step. Trust me, you will be glad that you did. Now what do we see with next level like folks when they come through? So we’re talking today about the wheel of life. We’re talking about the priorities in those different areas and why this is so important to you. When folks come through the event and we discuss the very things we’re talking about right now, then what we get to see is where their priorities are. We get to see we do something that’s called Your Wellness. It’s one of our elements that we do in the event where we help people to see what makes them healthy and what makes them unhealthy.
So discovering the things that make you healthy in your career are incredibly important. Discovering the things that make you unhealthy are incredibly important. The crazy thing is is when we take a look at it as a whole, what we discover is how healthy you are as a whole. What are the things you know, how much of the unhealthy stuff is happening in your life, how much of the healthy stuff is or is not happening? So again, the key here is that the places that they’re doing the best and have the greatest amount of focus, those rarely end up being the most important things to them in their lives. They tend to be the places that give them, again the most worth. So for. Let me give you an example of my life, an area that I struggled to keep my wheel round. As Zig used to say, if you’re not spending enough time in an area, you’ve got a flat tire.
If you’re spending too much time in one of these areas, then it’s. It’s kind of an oblong tire, right? Your wheel is out of round. So an area that I struggle to keep my wheel round is the work life balance. Now, keep in mind. I’m the guy who teaches a lot of this stuff and I’m the guy who helps a lot of people with this. And the reason why I’m able to do that is because that’s something that, earlier in my career was not in balance. There was a time when my work was my only focus. You know, I put my head down and I got things done and I was believing the same lie that if I built this phenomenal career or if I made tons of money, you know, all these things are going to make me happy. Oh my gosh.
You know, what, praise God, that I’ve been able to do a lot of things in life. I’ve accomplished a lot of things in my life, but I can tell you there are areas that I regret where I spent so much time with my head down building something that I didn’t focus on, other things that I could have been doing or I missed out on other things in life. All the things that accomplished in that time. There are great, great things and I’m very proud of them, but I could have spent less time and have been proud of other areas in my life. Hitting milestones was phenomenal. Accomplishing things, changing people’s lives, all of that absolutely incredible, love what I did, but I would’ve also put balance in other areas of my life. So as you look at the wheel, note what areas you’re strong in, but really take a hard look at the areas where you suffer.
If you do a great job with the career, but you suffer in the social, you’ll have a very stressed filled, boring life if you knock it out of the park intellectually, but you don’t focus on your family, there won’t be much of your family eventually, and you will hate that. Lots of people do. Lots of people experience that. So simply put, as you see the areas of the wheel that are lacking your attention, and you have to actually recognize that they’re lacking your attention. A lot of folks, I get a lot of business owners that will come through next level life that do not believe they need any focus on the social…that maybe you right now, I can promise you that is an incorrect belief. That belief system is no Bueno. God did not create you to focus on only working. He created us to be communal.
We ever since the very beginning of time, we’re supposed to commune. We’re supposed to have a social life. We’re supposed to have time with him. We’re supposed to have time with other people. It’s supposed to be more than just putting your head down and building a business or building a team or whatever it is that you’re doing in your career area, right? You’re supposed to have community. You’re supposed to spend time in your social life, so spend some quality time setting goals on what it would take to get your wheel more round. And again, keep in mind here, it’s not a perfect, you know, amount of time spent in each area. If you’re a parent with kids, your family part of your wheel is going to be considerably bigger, but if all you ever do is family then the other areas will struggle as well.
So we’re not looking for an equal balance. We’re looking for what we would consider to be the right amount of balance. As you do, you will feel more balanced in the rest of your life. So weekly action items. We created a downloadable pdf to help you utilize the wheel of life to set goals and implement so you’re giving focus to the most important things in your life. Now, this will guide you through the action items we’re about to cover, so very simple. Go to chrislocurto.com/288download to get this pdf. Now we’re not going in depth on this in the show, but the download will walk you through this process to how to set goals in each area of the wheel of life, your career, your financial, your God or spiritual, your physical, your social, your personal and your family.
Some questions to answer to set goals in each area. Ask these individually in each area of the wheel of life, what is most important to me. The first thing you want to ask, what is most important to me when it comes to, again, the spiritual side, what’s the most important thing to you when it comes to God? What does that? do you even know that? Do you recognize what it is? For me, there is nothing more important in my life than my relationship with God and the fact that I am going to spend eternity with him. There’s nothing more important. Why? Because I’ve come to a place in this life of understanding that there’s only one person who holds my eternity in his hands. It’s either going to be with him or it’s going to be an incredibly painful eternity separated from him, and I don’t want that.
I want be with him and I want the inheritance that’s coming right? I want to have the phenomenal life, right? This isn’t the life guys, this is the one that sets up the next one. It’s either going to be great or it’s going to be terrible. So what is most important to you when it comes to God? What is most important to you when it comes to your social life? For me, one of the big pieces that’s incredibly important to me when it comes to a social life: healthy friends, not just friends, not just acquaintances. I have tons of that. I need healthy friends to be in my life. I want healthy folks that we can enjoy time together, that we can laugh, that we can have fun. You know, I just spent some time with some dear friends of mine and it absolutely gives me life, right?
It’s joyful to spend time with them, but it also breathes life into me to be able to spend time with people who are healthy. So one of the most important things to me in my social life is having healthy, close circle of friends. Second thing you want to ask, what makes me healthy in this area? So one of the things when it comes to, I don’t know my career, what makes me healthy in my career? That I am changing lives, that I am not focusing on me and I’m loving other people really well, that I’m spending time making my team successful. These are things that make me very healthy. Here at the Poimen Group we’re constantly pushing to get rid of self and put other people first. The more we do, the less we think about ourselves. So the more healthy we get to be when it comes to our career because our focus is on how do we take care of people?
I talked about this in an earlier episode where, we brought in a, one of our guys that’s a client who’s now actually part of our team, to sit through our Stratplan. We personally do StratPlan twice a year, once to twice a year. And as he sat through, you know, we’re pulling apart our own products, our own services and saying, how can we make this better? How can we make this better? And one of the things that he commented on was these are the things that changed my life. I feel terrible saying anything bad about them. And I’m like, well why is that? And he’s like, because they work, they’re great, they changed my life. And I’m like, well, our goal is not to be stuck on whether or not they do work our goal, we’re not losing worth by ripping it apart.
How do we make it better? By having that mindset that makes me healthy when it comes to my career. Third question, what makes me unhealthy when it comes, you know, if fits in my career, what makes me unhealthy? Focusing on me, making it about me, trying to be in control, focusing on money. A lot of people struggle with this and pretty much every area of the wheel of life. If I was comparing myself to others, if I was looking out and going, oh, well, this, this thought leader is doing so well in this area and I’m not…not understanding that God has given me gifts and talents to focus on the things I’m supposed to focus on, those are things that would make me unhealthy. Right? Question number four, what brings me joy? What brings me joy when it comes to the physical side of my life, my physical being?
What brings me joy? I can tell you for me, I love going home to Tahoe and going for just incredibly long walks in the woods, hikes up and down the mountains, spending time looking over Tahoe. That absolutely brings me joy. It also gives me life. So what in each area of the wheel of life brings you joy? Question number five, if I could wave a magic wand, what would the best version of this area look like? So if I wanted my finances to look great and I was to wave a magic wand, what would that outcome be? What would that look like? You know, for me, if I could wave a magic wand, it’s continuing to have the ability to give a bunch of money away and bless people. Question number six, what do I believe God wants for me in this area?
This is a tough one guys. All of these questions are really tough. This is a tough one. What do I believe God wants for me in my family area? What do I believe God wants for me in my relationship with him? What do I believe God wants for me, my career and my finances and my social life? What do I believe he wants for me? Write those things down and you, you will be blown away by what you discover. And if you spend plenty of time on it, don’t dodge this, you know, don’t hide from that question. If you spend plenty of time, guess what? You’re going to come up with some pretty solid answers. Question number seven, what specific goals do I want to set for this area? This is one of those things where my virtual mentor, Ravi Zacharias, had a phenomenal set of goals for his marriage.
You know the things that he wanted to be as a husband and what his, what his mission statement was for his marriage. When you have specific goals set in those areas and there are things that are measurable and you can actually go after them and you put them into place, you do something about them and incredible thing happens. You start to accomplish those. When we do next level life, what we make sure is every single person leaves with an action plan in every one of these areas. We spend two days getting to that action plan. Here’s the things you’re going to go and do in each one of these areas. It’s dang powerful. Let me just tell you that. So you can download this easy to walk through template we created to set goals to get your wheel of life more round so that your life is more balanced.
It’s super easy. You just go to chrislocurto.com/288download to get that and start taking action today. So again, two of the things that people struggle with the most is time management and work balance. If you’d like to have better work life balance, focus on this right now and get the download. Get going on this. If you do that, guess what it’s going to give you? Better time management as well. You will be way more intentional. You will be way more cognizant. You will be way more proud of yourself and you will be very happy with the amount of time and the stuff that you get from each one of these areas in your life. Hopefully this was helpful for you today. As always, take this information, change your leadership, Change Your Business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.
