590 | How to Achieve Work-Life Balance with Zig Ziglar’s Wheel of Life

Introduction (00:00:00)

If your life isn't meeting your expectations, I bet you can use a better plan. That is coming up next.

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, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are. Today we are diving into the concept of work life balance, and we are using the fabulous Zig Ziglar's wheel of life.

Now, two pieces here. One, work life balance. It is something that is being crammed down a lot of people's throats lately and without great understanding.

Understanding True Work-Life Balance (00:00:59)

So that's what we're going to kind of get into today and kind of explain this and help you to see what this looks like. Because in reality, there is incredibly little work life, by definition, balance. You don't balance perfectly.

The amount of time you spend at work with the amount of time you spend in life. It just doesn't happen that way, especially if you're an entrepreneur. It just doesn't look like that.

In fact, you spend more time at work than you do pretty much anywhere else. Right. So what does that look like?

We need to understand how to have some level of work life balance, not by traditional definition of balance, but instead more by, you know, balancing priorities and things.

And the great thing is, is we are using Zig Ziglar's Wheel of Life. Anybody who's been through Next-Level Life knows that we have used Zig's Wheel of Life for, gosh, so long, so incredibly long.

It was a fantastic thing that they put together back in the, gosh, I'm going to mess this up probably in the eighties or so. But, you know, Zig was just a phenomenal guy.

His son Tom is doing such an incredible job with everything that he's doing and his books and stuff. So just love the Ziglars. Fabulous family.

So we're going to explore how true balance isn't about being perfectly balanced in every moment, but instead it's by achieving a harmonious life over the long term.

Now, you may have just heard me use a buzzword, harmonious. You're hearing that a lot nowadays.

And again, it's important to understand, if you're hearing somebody tell you that your personal life has to equate to or surpass your work life, then you might want to turn that person off.

Why did I say that? Because this all depends on your current situation at the current time. Now, one thing you will never hear me say. In fact, you've heard me say a thousand times. The, the opposite.

I do not believe that the hustle lifestyle is a proper lifestyle for any long term, you know, person in anybody's life for any length of time.

I think that's a ridiculous mindset, that the thing that's keeping you from being successful in life is you don't hustle, you know, enough by having to be up at 03:00 in the morning and going to bed at 11:00 at night and doing 14 different jobs during the day.

There's a difference in if you are in trouble, spending every waking hour you possibly can to get yourself out of that situation, that's one thing, but that's not what the hustle lifestyle is about.

The hustle lifestyle is more about. It's. It's funny, it sounds a lot like an abundance mindset, but, you know, it kind of also resembles a scarcity mindset.

You know, you don't have enough time in the day to get all the things that you want in life, so you've got to work even harder and spend more time and do more hours.

Listen, if that's where you are in life, things must be really jacked up or you don't have quality perspective on how your life is, right. You should be focusing on the important things in life.

And I can tell you, becoming, you know, incredibly rich is not one of them. It shouldn't be one of them. That shouldn't be your biggest priority. Right? I have no problem with you being wealthy.

I have no problem with you making lots of money. What I'm saying is, is that if you lose life and you lose relationship and can't remember the names of your kids, but you've got a big bank account, well, that wasn't worth it.

So it's all about prioritizing.

So if you can make lots of money and, and not have a rich attitude, but instead be very generous and, you know, be very smart with your decision making, and you've got incredible family time and all that kind of stuff, great. Fantastic.

But if the only way you see your life working out is that you work 20 hours a day and your family doesn't get raised by you, your kids don't get raised by you, and your spouse doesn't get to see you, I think it's ridiculous.

So there you go. There's my little rant on this. So once again, like I said, there is no perfect balance. It just doesn't exist in the short term.

And life is constantly changing, and it requires us to consistently rebalance ourselves. So there are seasons, you know, where there are there are job tasks that might demand more time and.

And, you know, how do we intentionally balance our time with that season and the other areas of our life, you know, when. When the season changes? Well, I will tell you, this is where priority comes in.

Now, there are times I'm - Right now, my wife and I are busting it. We got a lot of stuff going on.

We are trying to create this - this place that we feel like God has led us into and move our business to a different place and just all kinds of stuff that's going on, and it requires a lot.

But as hard as we are running during our work time, and I'm somebody who my work time used to be from, you know, 07:00 in the morning until 910 o'clock at night, you know, most days of the week, I don't do that anymore.

It's not a priority. I bust my butt with the time that I set aside for me to get things done in. But does that mean that we don't, you know, with stress and things like that, get a little overwhelmed? No, not at all.

In fact, I think I shared this recently that there was a time my wife came to me, and she's like, we are leaving for four days.

My mom's gonna take Reyna, she's gonna take our daughter, our youngest daughter, and we are leaving, and it's just you and me, and it's nobody else, and we're getting away for four days.

I looked at my wife, and I'm like, babe, can we do this in two months? She's like, nope, it's happening in two weeks. And I'm like, okay, well, if you could give me, like, two or three months.

I just got a whole lot going on that I've. That, you know, is time sensitive, that I've got to get done. She's like, nope, it's happening in two weeks.

And I'm like, okay, help me to understand because I'm gonna still come back to the time sensitive stuff. So four days, I'm gonna still be, you know, focused on what I have to get done.

It sounds like you're going to be de stressed, which is great, but help me to understand this. And she's like, Chris, we need this. I need this. We got to go on. Yes, done. We'll go.

And so we took off on a four day vacation up into the mountains, and, my gosh, I discovered my wife again. She showed up. It was great. It was great to see my wife de-stressed. It was great to see that time of just the two of us, you know, nobody else.

Because we love doing family vacations. We love, you know, we don't do a ton of just us time. We don't. We do. You know, our time is more in the mornings and in the evenings and stuff.

But when we do vacations and things, it's usually some sort of family vacation because we love that. But, oh, my gosh, do we need just a her and I vacation every year? Yes. Especially when my wife is stressed out.

So a fantastic thing came out of this. My wife de-stressing the woman I fell in love with showed up. It was great. There was aspects of her that's like, oh, my gosh, I remember this part of you, and I'm sure it was the same for me, too.

Now this is the woman that I can't get away from. We love, we hate being apart. We love being together. You know, even if we're just in the same building, it makes us happier.

But still, that stress can create, you know, areas in your life where you're not you anymore. You're not the authentic you.

And so that time, you know, prioritizing that time with my wife was way more important than the pressured, time sensitive things that I had on my plates. And it was fantastic, right.

And then coming back, I mean, it was, it's been great. Things were fantastic. It was nice to see my wife less distressed. I continued on with the, the time sensitive stuff, got those things wrapped up and was able to move on.

Seasons (00:10:09)

So seasons matter. There are times that you have to solve things. There are times that you, you balance things differently. So, like, sometimes you balance things over months or quarters or seasons.

And it's not daily. It takes time. Now, what do I mean by that? Sometimes you have to balance something out. Like, let's say you are in a debt situation that you've got to overcome.

Well, obviously, you're not going to get out of that overnight unless you found some amazing way to do so. So what does that look like, prioritizing getting out of debt over a period of time?

Maybe it's months, maybe it's years, but what does it look like to make that a priority, but not more of a priority than loving your family, than raising your children, then giving your spouse the time that they need to de stress from their life, giving you the time that you need to de stress from your life as well?

So when you're dealing with things like urgent issues, like what we call getting the ox out of the ditch. Well, the ox is in the ditch. Well, what do we do? It's all hands on deck. There is a problem. There is an issue.

We do everything we can, get the ox out of the ditch. Once the ox is out of the ditch, okay, we can get back to normal. But while the ox is in the ditch, we divert every resource possible to getting the ox out of the ditch.

What that may be is it may be that you've experienced a family emergency. You know, maybe there's a situation where somebody is in the hospital or hurt or whatever, and you divert everything you possibly can to solving that issue.

Maybe your business was doing perfectly fine, and then something just tanked it. And right now it requires you to spend as many hours as you possibly can in the business.

Solving the business, all hands on deck. That is a possibility. That may take you months. You know, that could take you a season. Who knows?

But the key is, is that it doesn't remain that way. It doesn't stay that way for life. You don't keep doing that forever. You don't do that for years and years or decades.

Instead, you deal with the urgent issues until the urgent issue is solved and you make sure that you put things in place so that it doesn't happen again.

What happens when you're done or what happens in the midst of it? To make sure that you keep relationship strong. Well, maybe there's time for family trips.

Maybe you try and nail down a four day weekend with your spouse. Maybe you try and nail down a time where you take the kids to the beach or take the kids to the mountains.

I don't know, whatever. Maybe you just force in a movie night from time to time.

Maybe you look for special ways to have a great experience that strengthens your relationship, whatever it is, something that would be smart is that you balance out solving, getting the ox out of the ditch, solving the emergency, solving the situation by also continuing to strengthen relationship.

Prioritizing (00:13:34)

Now, with that being said, priority, priority, priority. If it is something so difficult, like somebody's, you know, in the hospital, solve that.

You're probably not going to unless you're in the hospital for very long periods of time, which I've been there, spent seven weeks with a loved one in Vanderbilt, and there were a couple of nights after probably four or five weeks in there, it's like, hey, you need to get away.

Just need to get out of this, this building. Go find a restaurant somewhere and just have some normalcy, right? Those things can happen. But prioritize that, right?

If you need to be able to love one side, you need to be to love one side. What if it's a business situation. You know, if the business is. If something is jacked up, the business. Do everything you possibly can.

But understand that your time is limited. You only have so many hours in a day that you can work on this stress issue.

And by the way, carrying that stress into the rest of your personal life is only going to stress out the rest of your family. It's only going to affect everybody around you.

So do what you can, but put boundaries around the time that you have. Listen to me, especially you entrepreneurs. If the ship is going down, then do not invest everything in your life to try and save this sucker.

If it needs to go, there is a season possibly, possibly that maybe you're not supposed to be doing what you're doing. Who knows?

Now, you didn't hear me say just let your business run amok. What you're hearing me say is, if the sacred cow needs to be shot, shoot the sucker.

If you've been holding on to something for way too long and it is. It is dilapidated. It is falling apart.

It is not working anymore. It was your baby. It was the thing that you created. There may be a time that you got to shoot that thing, kill it, get it over with, be done with it, move on.

The stress of trying to make something that is going downhill rapidly and doesn't have a halfway decent strategy of resolving allowing that thing to continue is just going to affect you in horrible ways.

Allowing that thing to continue is probably going to affect your family, too. So don't hold on to something like that for too long.

So I know this may sound a little bit depressing, but what I'm trying to tell you is, what does balance look like in this? Well, Chris, what do I do? It's the only thing I've ever done.

You will find a new way. It is much more important for you to strategize a change than it is to keep pouring every resource you have into a certain failing business or project.

Hopefully that makes sense. I hope you understand where my heart is on this, but what do you do in some of those seasons when you're working on things? Prioritize time.

Prioritize the amount of time you can spend on it. Prioritize not stressing out. Prioritize health when you're going through something difficult. Listen, cortisol is dumping into your gut. Drop down and do some push ups. Go for a sprint.

Do something because that. That cortisol is dumping into your stomach and it expects to get used up because you're stressing out. If you just sit there in it, then it just makes you even worse. Right?

It makes you stress even more. Burn that sucker. That's one thing that I have actually come to enjoy, is if I have a stressful situation and I feel my stomach filling up with cortisol, I go for a sprint.

I like to burn it off. I like to get my body to use it up, and then my attitude changes right out of the stress. So that's fantastic thing. So let's take a look at the wheel of life framework.

Zig Ziglar's Wheel of Life (00:17:45)

So, Zig Ziglar's Wheel of Life has seven different areas. Career, social, financial, family, physical, intellectual, and spiritual. So we've been using zigzag wheel of life forever. Uh, we'd make two slight adjustments.

One is, instead of intellectual, we say personal. Uh, we cover a lot of areas in that as well. And instead of spiritual, we say God specifically. Um, but here's the thing. What should you be doing?

You should be taking these seven areas, however you define these seven areas. Uh, career, social, financial, family, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, or personal and God, and focusing on how you can create balance.

When you have these seven areas, what's the most important thing that you balance your life in? Right. Where. How much effort should you be putting in each one of these areas?

So, to give you an example, what we discover a lot is that people will prioritize the things where they find the most worth. People will prioritize the things where they find the most joy.

They will prioritize the things where they find the most compliments in life.

So it's not uncommon to find if somebody goes to work and finds the greatest amount of worth at work instead of at home with their family, that their career area will be considered considerably healthier than their family life.

Yes. Let me say that again.

This is a common thing that we discover that if somebody is struggling with worth at home, maybe there's a controlling spouse, but they get to work and they get accolades, and they are accepted and approved of.

Then what you will find is that person will probably end up putting more effort into that work, that career, than they will the family, because they feel like the family area is just somewhere where they lose all the time.

Well, unfortunately, that subconscious act keeps you from recognizing you need to put a whole lot of work in your family. You need to divert some resources.

You need to focus heavily on what's wrong, what's holding you back, what's affecting you in negative ways. You need to spend time trying to increase the health of your family.

And I will tell you, there's a really good chance that the God factor is the piece that's affecting everything.

So the amount of time that you spend focused on your relationship with God is going to affect how well your family runs, right?

So if you've got struggles in your family, there's a really good chance that you're not spending enough time with God. And you're also probably not spending enough time learning how to place healthy boundaries in life.

So when you look at this wheel of life, you have to ask yourself, what needs focus?

What's doing really well? Where do I need to rebalance currently? If I am doing, you know, if I'm grading the health of my career on a scale of, you know, one to 100, and it's an 80, but my family is a 45, I probably need to rebalance right now.

I probably need to not spend so much time on my career, but instead spend a lot of time on my family.

The more that you do this, the more that you look over each one of these areas and rebalance them, refocus them, then what you're going to discover is that you're going to start to create quality habits in each one of the areas.

In every area, right? So if you are overdoing it at work, then a rebalance gets you not overdoing it at work. If you're under doing it at home, then a rebalance gets you properly focusing on the health of your family at home.

Right. If you are not spending much time with God, you're doing the 1 hour a week riding a pew somewhere and, you know, saying your 32nd prayer over a meal, then what you will discover is when you press that God button and you spend way more time with him, spend way more time in his word, spend way more time growing in relationship with him, spend way more time discovering how he wants you to live and, and, and how he wants you to follow his ways, then what you will see is everything in your life will get healthier.

Repurpose, reprioritize, rebalance (00:22:33)

So repurpose. Right? Reprioritize. Make sure you're putting focus in the right areas.

So that is something that we do is we help people to create these in Next-Level Life, we help people to create these- these action steps, these action plans of how they can focus on habit building rather than, you know, doing a one time task.

We don't want you to just do one thing to try and fix it. We don't want you to look at your, your life and go, oh, if I do this one time thing, this should solve things for a while. Nope. You need habits.

My wife and I have created the habit of spending time alone together so that we don't end up in a place where we desperately have to leave. We have to go somewhere just by ourselves, which is great, that there's nothing wrong with that.

That's fantastic. We do that anyways. We, that is another habit that we've put in our lives is that we spend time alone. We did a great event with some clients out west and we spent multiple days, just the two of us.

We put added extra time on and we just spent, you know, I think it was three days, two or three days where it was just the two of us alone, having fun, had a great time with the clients, phenomenal time with the clients.

But we know that we need that time. And so when we spend our time correctly, when we prioritize correctly, then we put the things in place that create health, we put the things in place that create the habits of so that we keep ourselves healthy.

You will find it is incredibly difficult to get into our mornings. My wife and I were usually waking up around 5, 5:30 in the morning.

And we spend time together. We spend time together as a couple. We spend time together. In God's word, we spend time together. You will find it is extremely rare that anybody gets in that time, right? Right.

There has to be something going on. Us traveling somewhere, doing something, but that's our time. That habit keeps the two of us well connected. Right?

The time that we spend with family, the time that we spend at work, the time that we spend on our farm, all of these things are balanced.

And if they get out of balance, then we literally start pushing on each other. Hey, what do we need to do to change this? What do we need to do to fix or do we need to spend more focus time?

Sometimes rebalancing means that we decide, hey, we need to put a lot of our resources in this area to get this thing done, get it knocked out. If we can do that, fantastic.

That's what we help people do in Next-Level Life, is to focus on the habit building action steps so that this isn't something that they just try and solve one time. Here, there.

Folks, if you've been listening to me for any length of time, then you know the number one issue when it comes to business, when it comes to family, when it comes to friendships, is having a lack of high quality communication to make sure that you are absolutely winning in every aspect of your life.

It all starts with having great communication.

The best way to get that communication is to understand your personality style and to understand the personality style of the folks that you're spending the most time with, whether it be at work, whether it be at home.

The best way to do that is to go to chrislocurto.com/store and get your personality profile and personality profiles for your team today. Get it for your family members today.

As you go through that profile, you will begin to see the greatest ways to communicate.

Go to chrislocurto.com/store today.

Support and Accountability (00:26:34)

So another great aspect to this is making sure that you have support and accountability. Now, I have a big caveat in here.

My big caveat is, is that these are at least decently, at the bare minimum, decently healthy people, right? So if you're going to get support and accountability, please don't put your controlling family member as your accountability partner.

Please don't put your narcissistic friend as your accountability partner. This isn't going to work out.

Instead, you've got to make sure that you have folks that support you, folks that are willing to hold your arms up when you're tired, folks that are willing to call you out, not destroy you, devastate you, but instead point out things that you're not doing that are causing you to be unhealthy.

Folks that are willing to motivate you in times when you're struggling. I have fantastic accountability around me. I have great conversations that I have, my wife, Joel, my leadership team at work.

I have great people that I can turn to and say, hey, help me look at this. What do you see here? Push on me. Feel free to call me out on this. What am I doing wrong? Whatever.

And sometimes I will be explaining to them something I'm stressed about or struggling with. And they do a great job encouraging me in the moment, motivating me in the moment.

I highly suggest that you look for healthy people in your life that you can surround yourself with that bring support, that bring quality accountability, not beating you up, not destroying you, but helping you to overcome, to push through whatever is needed at the time.

Good Routines and Habits (00:28:25)

Now, I also think that it's incredibly important for you to start creating beneficial routines.

I think. I think people just don't spend enough time in God's word. I think people don't spend enough time discussing life. I think people don't spend enough time in quality relationships.

I can just go on and on. There's so many things that people don't do that is beneficial to them.

I know so many of you entrepreneurs out there, especially you guys that don't have any personal life whatsoever, because business is everything to you.

I'm gonna tell you that's unhealthy, right? I'm not saying that you have to go out and find 25 friends, not at all. But you need at least one or two quasi deep relationships in your life. Right?

I used to do, and I haven't done this in forever, but one of the most powerful things I used to do when I was working, you know, 14, 16 hours a day, is that I would have, once a month, I'd have a guys night.

And I had a handful of guys, 9, 10 guys that would come over to my place and we would just spend time talking, enjoying the evening, throwing, you know, content out there for discussion.

It was just absolutely fabulous and powerful. And those guys would always tell me, every month, at least a couple of guys would say, man, I sure need this night. I'm so looking forward to this night.

It's just a powerful thing to spend time in relationship and growing each other. So I want you to work on some of the establishing of beneficial routines.

Two-Minute Rule (00:30:11)

Like, you know, there's an old two minute rule thing where you start a new habit by doing something that takes less than two minutes.

So you find something that takes you less than two minutes and begin that process and do it over and over and over again, and it makes it easier to begin and build momentum on it.

Right. If you can find something. I'm going to do this thing, this habit, or this exercise. You know, let's say exercise is a thing. Well, I've heard a study that there's a bunch of studies on this rebounder thing that you jump on, right?

It's a little mini trampoline that if you do it for two minutes, then it begins to drain your lymphatic system in your body, which is super healthy for you.

And then what happens is people will find that after two minutes, they will go for five minutes, and then they will go for ten minutes, and then they really enjoy it.

And then some people actually get out and start jogging or running or whatever, right? Find something that's a super easy habit to do for two minutes, start that process, and then keep doing it.

Keep scheduling it into your life and see where it takes you. It could be reading. Maybe you just read for two minutes a day and see where that leads you.

You know, find something that catches your attention. Focus on that. Read that thing for. I highly suggest you choose the Bible, but whatever it is, if you just don't read, start for two minutes a day and see what happens to.

So here's what I want you to do. I want you to check out this post on our website we have linked on there Zig Ziglar's Wheel of Life.

It is an easy way for you to take a look at each area and start distributing your time properly. Start changing the way you focus, start deciding on the places that you need to set goals.

I think you should look at every area of the Wheel of Life and recognize that you have a mission for each one of them. You know, what is your purpose for your family?

What is your purpose for your finances? What is your purpose for your career, your time with God? All of these things. What is your purpose for you? Right?

Put a mission together, set goals in these areas and then go tackle them like crazy.

Conclusion (00:32:27)

So folks, here's the deal. Achieving work life balance isn't about being perfectly balanced. You're not going to get there. You can't perfectly balance every moment.

Instead it's on working on this, this concept of harmony over a long time, right? What does it look like for things to work in balance? All areas to work in harmonious balance.

What does that look like? We again suggest that you use frameworks like Zig's Wheel of Life, focusing on habit formation. If you do that, then you can find balance on the macro while you're navigating the micro imbalances of daily life.

The more you focus on solving the daily things, the more you're going to discover you solve the big things. So start implementing these strategies today and see a big difference in your overall well being.

Well folks, that's all the time that we have for today. I hope this has helped you. I hope it's helped you immensely. I hope this helps you to really discover a great balance between the priorities in your life.

As always, we want you to take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.