Innovate Your Day. Align With Your Values
I’ve experienced a work-life balance breakthrough this month by inserting art into my day daily vs. reserving it for my weekends. I’ve returned to a memoir I started writing, “Round Trip Tickets Are For Sissies.” (I’d not touched the manuscript for a year.) I feel less rushed entering appointments, more serene and less reactive. I’ve even seen health breakthroughs. Last week, I gained from my doctor a perfect high blood pressure score after months of it staying high. What’s going on?
I’m no work-life balance guru; but, I’ve found that applying the mental fitness tool of innovation, specifically to how I manage my time, has yielded huge and surprising results. By innovating the flow of my day, i.e. the order in which I go about things, I’ve found more space and less stress.
In this week’s Medium post, I’m exploring how innovating and staying creative with our day can add in more things we love, which then aligns us better with our values. (You can listen to these musings instead, if you like, in this week’s Sage Sayers podcast episode.)
Explore Why (and How) Wellbeing Matters
This idea sparked from the Gallup State of the Workplace report which offered some grim results of engagement in the workplace. While only 32% of U.S. employees claim to feel engaged, Gallup’s Exceptional Workplace Award winners average 70% employee engagement. These companies which value harmony:
- Use organizational culture and values to guide business decisions
- Embrace flexible work environments while developing plans for the future of work
- Focus on employee wellbeing and acknowledge the whole person
If we apply these concepts to our own schedule, I find I’m less less stressed, more productive, efficient, and more focused, too. Here’s how.
Use values to guide any business decisions
By knowing my values, I can better decide how to organize my day, routine, and even what work I say yes or no to. For instance, I place a premium on kindness, creativity, nature, independence, productivity, and focus.
For this reason, I’ve blocked off my Wednesday afternoons to visit the lake, walk, do yoga, paint, call friends, and do other things that restore me, even if it’s just thinking. While the resistance ties to losing money — and I do — I’ve found I can only sustain 45+ coaching individual sessions most weeks by taking this vital time to restore. Placing a premium on self care, nutrition, health, and wellness also inspires me to:
- Take proper lunch breaks in which I walk outside and do yoga
- Resist working evenings and weekends
- Notice how I feel when I falter on the above and…
- Pivot accordingly. A recent workshop I hosted meant working on my slides over the weekend. I felt anxious, overwhelmed, and even insomniac. I knew: Until my workload changes, no more workshops, for now. My mind (and body) needs rest.
Embrace flexible work environments
I love reading this quality within the Gallup report because I too have found when embracing flexibility on where and how I work, I’m more centered, calm, and enjoying my work, too. I’m sharing some ways I’ve embraced flexibility with my work, especially because of business growth and feeling a pull to stay fluid vs. rigid:
- Working from a remote office at least half of my day. (I find delightful rooms for free at my local library.) Two vs. one offices helps me detach from home and with that honor my values of freedom and independence. When I return, I feel more gratitude for my home and family and can better separate from my work, once it’s done.
- Changing up my morning routine before I coach. My day starts early because I run a household and have two teens in school. By flipping my entire routine, doing the thing I did last first — so, going Z-A vs. A-Z, I became 10 minutes quicker.
- Doing what I love first. This new flow means making my bed first, getting myself presentable and my office ready, greeting my family downstairs, doing the most vital domestic things to help, leaving the rest, and sustaining hunger.
- Learning from the flexible change. Given that I’m ten minutes ahead of time with this new flow and never rushed, I suspect the prior flow pulled me into needless domestic tasks (which can easily wait) and a niggling fear of lateness and not being camera ready.
- Ensuring I’m always honoring my values. Making my bed first, beautifully and in a calm flow creates harmony as I’m honoring my love for beauty, aesthetics, and order. Less rush with my family aligns with my values of love, respect, and presence. Honoring professionalism, another value, and respect for my coachees pulled me towards making these changes.
Focus on wellbeing. Acknowledge the whole person
Like you, I’m happiest when I’m feeling whole. Therefore, I’ve also innovated my schedule to better protect my desire for leadership pieces because I feel happier, more satisfied, and creative when I do so.
When my coaching practice took off in January, I relinquished my podcast and Medium postings —which was a big mistake. I lost confidence from not podcasting and my head felt too “busy” with the pulse read on the world’s communication challenges I received. I realized: Thought leadership makes me happy. This work also offers shareable resources for my coachees, because everything’s fueled from the problems others come to me with and the patterns I sense and see.
For these reasons, I commit to at least one, sometimes two sharings each week. I also structure my day to allow for daily art vs. reserving art as a weekend treat. I get there using the WOOP technique, which I’ve written on here, and finding micro moments for painting or sketching, even if it’s five minutes between sessions and a small botanical study at night.
With that, you’ve three major ways I’ve innovated my schedule and how I work so I’m centered, calm, and feeling aligned with my values as I go about my day. I hope this sharing helps spark something in you so you can feel more happy, more fulfilled and permit yourself to make the changes you seek.
Debbi Gardiner McCullough coaches and trains immigrant leaders to become more confident, concise, and mentally fit communicators. From Wisconsin, she owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching and serves as a communication effectiveness fellow coach to leaders all over the globe with BetterUp.