Category Archives: Life Balance

career, Career choices, Career Success, Life Balance, Life Plan, life success, Success, success plan

888 is a fantasy – Go all in if you want to be successful!

It is 8 pm. I have had dinner with my family and helped clean up. After I post this article, I will walk with my wife. I’ll then do another hour or so working on my next book, “Yes For Success – How to clarify your future and create a plan that tells you exactly what to do to get there.”

Am I “working” when I write this article? Is it “work” when I edit my next chapter?

I don’t know. It isn’t how I view my time.

Am I producing? Yes, 100% I am.

Too many people, including young professionals entering the workforce, have been “sold” a false idea. The idea goes like this: Work eight hours, play eight hours, and sleep eight hours. I call it the “8 8 8 Philosophy”. This philosophy also suggests that when you get a job, demand your employer consider your life-balance requests and ensure you get paid for every minute of your work.

Continue reading 888 is a fantasy – Go all in if you want to be successful! →

career, career plan, Life Balance, Life Plan, life success, midlife crisis, personal plan for success, Personal Vision, Vision, yes for success

Change Perspective To Create Success

A member of the Yes For Success community shared his struggle with ‘getting the word out‘ about the great work his NGO was doing.

“How should an NGO get the word out so that people know about what we are doing?” he asked.

 Jock, an extremely successful consultant, author and illustrator who is one of the members of our community asked, “Michael, if you were a retail organisation, how would you approach this situation?“

“Oh! That’s easy. I’d use testimonials from happy customers, ask them to spread the word, use traditional advertising and social media to highlight these points, share ‘good news’ stories, invite key people and media to events…”

As it transpired I was able to learn that Michael had a view that because an NGO has limited financial resources it would be difficult for it to spread the word about what it does.

His mindset had blocked him from taking action because his mindset had predetermined what was possible and what wasn’t possible.

When Michael reviewed his answer to Jock’s question he was able to ‘see‘ that the majority of his suggestions, while requiring effort, didn’t need a lot of funds. A change in perspective enabled him to see his problem in a different light which opened up possibilities that had previously been impossible.

This is a major strategy that successful people use. When you are stuck, find a way to see your issue from a different perspective. Look at what that perspective suggests and carry out what you can.

If you struggle to imagine a different perspective because you are so close to your own issue, then find people who genuinely want to help and are ready to propose a different perspective. Ask them what they think. Their answers could be worth their weight in ‘gold‘.

How are you accessing different perspectives? Visit our community to see how you can join an ever-growing community of like-minded people who are all striving to create their own version of Life Balance and Personal Success.

Gary Ryan enables organisations, leaders and talented people to move Beyond Being Good.
Career Success, Life Balance, OTM Plan For Personal Success, Personal Development, Personal Vision, Professional Development, yes for success

Key Steps When Planning Personal Success

Last week I surpassed 5,800 participants of the OTM Plan for Personal Success® program. The program enables participants to identify exactly what they want out of life and how they are going to create that life.

plan for personal success, Gary Ryan, Organisations That Matter, Yes For Success

The program covers:

  • One Core Concept
  • Background Research – on yourself
  • Five Principles for Personal Success and Life Balance
  • Six Vital Strategic Areas for Success

The planning process always follows these four steps:

  1. Identify what you want to do
  2. Clarify your starting point
  3. Brainstorm the strategies/actions that will move you from where you are to where you want to be
  4. Prioritise those strategies/actions so that you identify their order and/or key strategies/actions that have the highest leverage for achieving your desired outcomes

You might wonder why you don’t start with Step 2 first?

No matter what planning you are doing whether it be for your organisation, your team or yourself, you should always start with what you want to achieve. If you start with where you are then you are at significant risk of being ‘blinded’ by your current circumstances. For example if you are in a job that you don’t like because it isn’t fulfilling, you aren’t challenged and not recognised for the value that you are providing, then this will make it hard for you to create a plan to achieve what you do want from a career if your starting point for your plan is your current situation. Quite simply your current situation will have very clear examples of why you can’t have what you want out of a career.

Your current situation often provides motivation for you to move away from it, but when you create your plan you must focus on getting as clear as you possibly can about what success really looks and feels like. You must focus on the outcome you want first.

What would a fulfilling career look like? What would your relationships with your colleagues look like? Would you be working more on your own, as part of a team or a mixture of both? What would ‘respect’ look and feel like up, down and across the hierarchy of your ideal organisation? Would you be travelling a lot or not all? What would your income be?

For each of your answers to these types of questions you must ask yourself why you want what you want and picture it as clearly as possible. “But what if I don’t know exactly what I want?”, I hear you ask.

If you don’t ‘know‘ exactly what you want then I urge you to find the questions that you would like answered. If you think about it, what you actually want is to have discovered the answers to your own questions. So discovering and exploring the answers to your own questions become the focus of your strategies and actions in Steps 3 & 4 of this process.

Fortunately we humans are amazing explorers. I’d argue that the world we have created has resulted largely from our ability to explore and discover the answer to our own questions, such as a famous question asked by Isaac Newton, ‘How can electricity give light?’.

When planning follow the four steps above, they are powerful and they work.

The OTM Plan for Personal Success® has just been launched on an online platform called Yes For Success so that anyone can now access this powerful process for creating the success and life balance that you want.

Gary Ryan enables organisations, leaders and talented people to move Beyond Being Good.
energy for success, Life Balance, Life Plan, OTM Plan For Personal Success, Personal Development, personal energy, Personal Success, Personal Vision, yes for success

Addressing The Challenges Of Going Back To University

The Australasian Survey of Student Engagement identified that 27% – 34% of university students intend to drop out of university prior to completing their degrees.

Reasons for dropping out include:

  • Stress
  • Workload difficulties
  • Preference for current employment over study
  • Boredom

I know what it is like to have the strong desire to drop out. I took 7.5 years to complete my first degree which was supposed to take 4 years. The last 3 years of my program seemed to drag on forever. Every semester I would seriously consider quitting. My partner (now wife) kept urging me to stay course. “You won’t regret it!” she urged.

Truth be known I wasn’t the greatest student back in those days!  ‘P for pass’ was my mantra. Hardly a mantra for success!

When I finally graduated I did two things:

  1. I swore I would never go back to university; and
  2. Got a job in a field related to my studies because there weren’t any jobs available and unemployment had reached 11%.

The fact that I had completed my degree definitely mattered when it came to getting my first job because I was competing with other folk who also had degrees. My part-time work experience in the fitness industry also mattered.

It was this experience that taught me that my partner was right. Completing my degree did matter even if I didn’t get a job as a teacher. I learned that, to a large degree, my qualification was like a bus ticket. There are certain buses that you just can’t get on if you don’t have the ticket.

For a number of years I continued to swear that I would never go back to university. However as they say, you should never say, “Never!”.

Toward the late 1990s my career had taken off and I had reached the senior levels of the organisation for whom I worked. But I had hit the glass ceiling. Unless I continued my education and gathered some more tickets then my career options would be limited. At the end of 1999 I decided to enrol into my first post-graduate program and commenced that program in July 2000. As a Distant Education student who was working full time it was a real challenge. Balancing work, play and study was difficult. To add to my challenges I had become a first time father in January 2000. I had bitten off a lot! Maybe this story resonates with you?

However between graduating from my teaching degree and commencing my first postgraduate studies I had become a student of leadership. I had been doing a lot of reading about leadership and success and had discovered that I had far more control over my success than I had realised. And I put what I had learned into practice throughout my postgraduate studies. After graduating from my Graduate Diploma in Human Resource Management I immediately enrolled into a Master of Management program. My grades averaged a High Distinction and I loved the learning experience. All the while I was working full time and by the time I completed my Masters program we were about to have our third child (I now have five children!).

I understand what it takes to complete a degree when working full time and having significant family commitments. I also understand how managing your energy contributes to your ability to ‘manage’ when you have competing demands on your time. Which is why I want to share my ebook “Energy For Success – Seven Steps For Generating The Energy You Need For Success.” with you.

My complimentary ebook walks you through a simple seven step process where you will be able to quickly identify the key elements that generate energy for you, and which elements in your life drain your energy. You will then be able to create a re-enforcing cycle for energy that will enable you to have the energy to be a success throughout your postgraduate program.

One of those steps involves identifying the times in your life when you have felt full of energy and been able to perform at your best. What factors were present when you felt like that? What was it about those factors that seemed to really matter?

For me, I know that feeling fit and healthy gives me the sense of being able to tackle any task, no matter how big or small it is. When I don’t feel fit and healthy it is amazing how challenging even the smallest task can seem. So, it would seem that being fit and healthy is a key factor for my energy. And it is. What are your examples?

Once identified these factor often relate to each and provide you with amazing insights about what you should and shouldn’t do to ensure that you have the energy to complete your program.

If you’d like to learn more and be able to create your own cycle for generating your Energy For Success simply click this link and follow the prompts.

Gary Ryan helps individuals, teams and organisations move Beyond Being Good.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Balance, Leaders, Leadership Development, Life Balance, Management

Is life balance for managers a joke?

You are a manager. You get paid ‘The Big Bucks’. You get paid to get the job done. But do you get paid to give up Life Balance?

Doing long hours is often held as a ‘Badge of Honour’. People who aren’t seen to be ‘doing the long hours’ are seen as people who are effectively cheating the system. In other words, not doing long hours is frowned upon.

My work brings me into contact with people in management roles. The vast majority of them work very long hours.  They make a lot of sacrifices for their work. Some don’t take holidays for fear that work will get out of control while they are away. Others take on extra roles when organisational restructures occur. In fact I recently had a friend who is a senior manager at one of Australia’s largest organisations inform me that he was now doing the role of three senior managers due to two of his colleagues having had accepted redundancies. He expressed his frustration that his normal management practice of maintaining strong relationships with his direct reports had been negatively impacted because he simply had too many direct reports as a result of the re-organisation and he couldn’t keep up with what needed to be done, let alone effectively communicate at an individual level with his team members. The amount of work that he had to do, which included getting his head around what each of the two additional roles required was immeasurable. He was originally requested to take on the extra roles for a month. He was into his fourth month of the new arrangement when he spoke with me. Oh, and hadn’t received any extra compensation either. What impact do you think this was having on his home life?

Sound familiar?

People say, “Well, that’s just the way it is. If you want to be successful then that is the sacrifice you have to make. If you get paid the big bucks then your company ‘owns’ you. If you don’t like it, then get out.”

I find this perspective interesting. What if the organisation actually wants the talent that the person is bringing to their role? What if they want their talent fully utilised? Also, who decides what is in a job and what isn’t? It seems to me that the amount of work that goes into a management role is simply made up. If the manager speaks up about being over-worked then they are seen as being soft or not a hard worker. So, from my experience, managers just put up with it. And make huge life balance sacrifices along the way. They do longer and longer hours in the office and then, when they are home do even more hours trying to ‘catch up’.

I have recently been to two funerals of friends and colleagues. One was 58 years old and the other was 46 years old. Both men were highly successful from a work perspective. What struck me at their funerals was despite their business and work success, very little was mentioned about their work lives. In other words, these two men were far more than their work titles. It was their character, their love of family and community and their deeds of helping other people that were mentioned.

These two men were also very proactive to take charge of life balance for themselves. They didn’t seek permission from employers to spend time with their families. They just did it. They worked hard too and produced results. But they did not let their employers ‘own’ them.

If you are a manager, is the concept of life balance a joke? If so, why? What can be done about it?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
business success, Career Success, Dalai Lama, Dr Robert Emmons, Happiness, Life Balance, Life Plan, OTM Plan For Personal Success, Personal Success, Personal Vision, Thanksgiving, University of California, Vision

Be Grateful – A Strategy For Creating Success

Thanksgiving is just around the corner and while it is not something we formally celebrate in Australia, my twin brother and his family live in the USA so I have become more and more familiar with the concept over time.

If you are concerned about having a career that is unfulfilled or that the skills that you have will never be fully leveraged for success (amongst a whole list of concerns and worries about your future), then according to research from the University of California by Dr Robert Emmons, practicing being grateful for what you already have can both increase your happiness and increase your success.

Yes, that is correct. Being thankful for what you have increases your happiness and increases your success, which means that you increase your capacity to have more of what you want in your life.
Too often we focus only on what we want. This can increase our dissatisfaction with our present that reduces our happiness in the present.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama says that too many people spend too much of their time wanting what they don’t have which causes unimaginable suffering. Think about it. You buy a new car. For a short period of time you are feeling satisfied and grateful for your new car. Then you see someone else with the same model car as yourself, but it has some extra options that you don’t have on your car. “I wish I had those options.” you think to yourself. Suddenly your new car isn’t quite as good as your thought. So you start to suffer again.

Suffering obviously reduces happiness.

In this context is wanting what you don’t have bad for you? I don’t believe so. After all I facilitate the OTM Plan for Personal Success® Program which is all about identifying what you want and what you are going to do to create that future. But the program isn’t just about that.

It is also about recognising what you currently have in your life for which you are grateful and identifying what you need to do to keep what you are grateful for present in your life.
As an example I am now in my 17th year of marriage with my beautiful wife Michelle. I really do love her more than the day we married. I am extremely grateful to have her as my life partner and the mother of our five children. I practice making sure that I never forgot that I am grateful for who she is and what she does. I do this because I want Michelle to be in my life both now and in the future.
Many people forget this fact. There are many elements of our lives that have contributed to our current success that will also need to be present in our future if we want to continue our success and happiness.

This means that you must plan to take conscious actions to keep the very things that make you happy now continually present in your life.

One way to do that is to create a Grateful List. Simply create a list of the things for which you are truly grateful, place that list where you can see it everyday and then look at it every day. Once every 90 days update your list.

This simple, yet effective strategy can raise your consciousness of what makes you happy in the present, while also contributing to your future success and happiness.

For all of you around the world celebrating Thanksgiving, stay safe and have a wonderful time celebrating the things in your lives for which you are grateful.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Career Success, High Performance, Life Balance, Life Plan, OTM Plan For Personal Success, Secrets of Success, Success

Managing the vision-strategy challenge

A consistent challenge that people face creating their first plan for personal success is defining the future that they desire in terms of strategies rather than what they act actually want.

A common example relates to fitness and health. People will often say things like, “I want to lose 10 kilograms, this is the fitness and health future that I desire.”

Losing 10 kilograms is a strategic goal and while losing 10 kilograms is an outcome, it isn’t what should be focussed upon. It is the lifestyle that comes with being 10 kilograms lighter that is the real desired outcome upon which you should be focussed.

It is defining what they really want that people find difficult to do. Understanding why you want to be 10 kilograms lighter and why that is important to you are the keys to understanding what it is you really desire.

Focussing on the types of activities that you want to be able to do and visualising yourself doing them is far more powerful than focussing on a number. Dewitt Jones, acclaimed National Geographic photographer and an expert on the power of vision explains that the big visions in life shouldn’t be too focussed, too tight. Rather, they should be both clear enough, yet loose enough to leave open a thousand possibilities to bring them into reality.

In terms of a whole of life perspective focussing on losing 10 kilograms is too tight a vision. Focussing on being able to play with your children or grandchildren, being able to participate in a hiking holiday, or dance with your friends are loose visions that have a multitude of opportunities to bring them into reality.

Losing weight may be a strategy that is required to enable you to keep the possibilities alive for you to bring your vision into reality. It is at this point that focussing not only on losing weight but on creating a new lifestyle where you can maintain the weight loss becomes critical. At this level of personal planning you become more focussed on your goals and you take specific actions to achieve them. Such as engaging a personal trainer and training four times per week. These are what Dewitt calls ‘tactical visions’ and are more detailed and specific.

How do you know if the future you are focussing on is what you want or is a strategy to achieve what you want?

The easiest way to approach this question is to reflect on the content of your vision once it has been created. You will discover that you have a mixture of statements that reflect both what you want and the strategies regarding your approach to achieve them.

For each statement in your vision statement ask yourself, “Why do I want this? What will this really look like once I have it? What will I be doing when I have this?” and keep asking this question for each answer that you arrive at, possibly up to five times in a row (this is known as the Five Whys Technique).

In a financial context people often suggest they they want to be rich or to have ‘x’ amount of dollars as part of their vision. Once again money is a strategy that enables you to do want you want to be able to do. Asking yourself, “Why do I want this money? What will I be doing with it?” can help to uncover what you really want and makes it so clear that taking the necessary steps to create the wealth you desire (legally, of course!) becomes more and more doable.

Why is it that people initially struggle with this challenge?
Having assisted more than 1,000 people establish their initial OTM Plan for Personal Success™ the facts are that less than 0.1% (that is less than ten) of those people had previously created a detailed or strategic plan plan for themselves. The reality for the vast majority of people is that creating a personal plan is something that they haven’t done before.

Like most things we do for the first time we are usually not very good at it the first time. This can be frustrating for adults because we like to think that we can quickly achieve an expert standard when we perform a new task, even though our experience has taught us that this isn’t really how we learn.

Learning to use iterative cycles when creating your plan for personal success enables you to more quickly establish a personal plan that both clearly articulates what you want and what you are going to do to achieve your vision. This means that you develop the skill to continually ask yourself, “Why do I want what I have just written? Why is that important to me?”

That said, having an initial plan is more powerful than not having one. David Ingvar’s ‘Memories of the Future’ research highlights the power of having a written plan. In this context having a plan is far more beneficial than not having one at all. If you create you plan and then become disciplined on reviewing it, say once every six to 12 months and also become disciplined at constantly challenging yourself to reflect on why you want what you want, you will, over time create plans that are even more powerful than your first plan. This is normal and part of the learning process that is associated with creating and living your plan for personal success.

Please visit here for more information on the options available for establishing an OTM Plan for Personal Success™.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Ben Cousins, Creating a Plan for Personal Success, Leaders, Leadership, Life Balance, Personal Vision, Personal-Plan

Ben Cousins’ documentary highlights the importance of balance

Irrespective what you think about the content of the Ben Cousins documentary, a powerful message that the program highlighted related to the importance of balance as it relates to success.

Our society often applauds people for ‘making it’; whether that be as an elite sportsperson, a rock star, a movie star or in achieving a senior position in an organisation.

Success is defined purely by career success. Yet as Ben’s documentary highlighted, career success doesn’t necessarily mean that all other aspects of life are in balance.

As the attached illustration highlights, balance consists of a number of elements:

* health & fitness
* career
* education
* establishing a clear plan for personal success
* having the financial capacity to live the life that you desire
* establishing and maintaining relationships for enduring success

If any one of these key elements for success are not addressed, the individual is at risk of becoming stuck; much like the person in the background of the attached illustration. The outward appearance of being successful can be undermined by not having had a truly balanced approach to life.

Balance, in this context does not mean that all the key elements for success are equal. Rather, it means that an appropriate amount of focus is being applied to each key element for overall balance in the context of the life stage that the individual is experiencing. For example, university students will have a much larger focus on their education elements than other people, while graduate employees will have a much larger focus on their career activities than other people when they commence their first job. Likewise elite sports people will also have a much larger emphasis on their career element than the average person.

Where people lose balance is that they tend to completely neglect some of the key elements for success. So, while their career element is being addressed, poor health habits, such as taking drugs as highlighted by Ben’s documentary, can undermine their life balance and ultimately, negatively affect their career. For some people it is a complete focus on their career that causes them to neglect the key relationships in their life, resulting in relationships breaking down.

If you are interested in finding out how to create a Plan for Personal Success that includes a personalised approach to Life Balance, please email Gary at info@orgsthatmatter.com .

Gary Ryan has assisted over 500 people in creating a Plan For Personal Success. Gary’s clients have included elites sports people and coaches including Troy Simmonds (Richmond Tigers), Kane Johnson (Richmond Tigers) and Darren Harris (Carlton Blues).

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com