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The HaBO Village Podcast

How to Tell if You're a Workaholic or a Hard Worker [Podcast]

Episode 146: Michael and Kathryn discuss the differences between being a true workaholic and being a hard worker. Discover the most common signs of workaholism and what you can do to avoid reaching burnout. If you are in a leadership position, and think you might be slipping from a 'hard work' mindset into 'workaholic' territory, give this episode a listen.

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In This Episode You Will...

  • Discover why fear and compulsion are often the root causes of workaholism.

  • Find out how Michael and Kathryn strategically deal with clients in order to avoid burnout.

  • Get tips on how to self-assess to determine if you might be moving away from a harder worker mindset and into workaholism territory.

“Don't just focus in and sacrifice everything for a period of time at work to make enough money to get the life you really want. It doesn't work that way. It's a deception to believe that can happen. There's too many dead bodies along that path." 

-Michael K. Redman

 

Resiliency Quiz

References:

BE 2.0 (BEYOND ENTREPRENEURSHIP 2.0) by Jim Collins

The 4 Stages of Burnout that Business Leaders Need to Know (Podcast episode)

Fulfilled: The Passion & Provision Strategy for Building a Business with Profit, Purpose & Legacy by Kathryn & Michael K. Redman

 

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Michael:
              Hello everyone and welcome to the HaBO Village podcast. I'm Michael Redman.


Kathryn:
               And I'm Kathryn Redman.


Michael:
              This is the podcast to work with business leaders like you, who are wanting to build companies that are full of passion and provision. They're financially successful and emotionally fulfilling, and they are full of profit, purpose and legacy.


Kathryn:
               Woot. Woot.


Michael:
              And this is here ... We're here to encourage you, give you some hope, give you some spurring on when things are hard, give you some teaching and some tips and some training, and just expose you to some information that maybe is either brand new to you or a reminder, because it is no trouble at all for us to remind you of the good things you're doing. All right. So today we're going to talk about ...


Kathryn:
               So I'm going to contextualize what we're going to talk about.


Michael:
              Before you tell them?


Kathryn:
               Before ... Well-


Michael:
              Well, they already know because they clicked on the link and read the title.


Kathryn:
               True. True.


Michael:
              Okay.


Kathryn:
               Okay. So we are just coming off a week of holiday in Maui, which was brilliant, right? Just-


Michael:
              Oh, good. It was good.


Kathryn:
               It was good. I could play some ocean waves for you on my phone, but I won't bother. And one of the things that happened while we were there is we actually got to settle in and relax and rest, and it was just a really, really good gift, but we also observed others that really just couldn't put the work away. And there's no condemnation there. I mean, sometimes you have to pick up stuff while you're on vacation.


Michael:
              Yeah, you do.


Kathryn:
               But it caused me to be thinking about that question of, when do you let it go? And how do you know if somebody is just working hard or they're a workaholic? So that was a little bit of context and then-


Michael:
              Yeah. And then workaholics and I realize it's an extreme term.


Kathryn:
               It is an extreme term.


Michael:
              I mean, really it's ... All right. And let's soften it a little bit for a moment for those of you who are going, "I don't want to hear the workaholic word." Which you're going to hear a few times in this podcast, but you're working hard or overworking.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. And then just to, you know, bring more context to it. I'm in the midst of reading Jim Collins' latest book, which is BE 2.0 which is super fun.


Michael:
              I am enjoying it also.


Kathryn:
               Yep, it's really-


Michael:
              I'm in the middle of it too.


Kathryn:
               You are.


Michael:
              I'm earlier on than you.


Kathryn:
               I'm more in the middle than you are. You're more in the early part. Anyway, there's this just tiny little section in the leadership chapter on hard work. And really what Jim Collins was saying is there's no getting around the need for hard work. It's a given, right? I mean, you have to work hard. And if you're a leader, you really do have to work hard. And there's a lot to it.


Michael:
              And if you're running your own company, especially a small business or medium business, it's ... I mean, there's a lot of work to keep that rock moving.


Kathryn:
               There is a lot of work. However, he says, and I'm just going to read this. There's a big difference between hard work and workaholism. You work hard to get something done. A workaholic on the other hand works out of compulsion, a fear of some sort. Workaholism is unhealthy and destructive. Hard work is healthy, invigorating, and can be practiced up until the day you die. Whereas workaholism leads to burnout.


Michael:
              Yeah.


Kathryn:
               So, that was just something, as I was listening to the book on Audible, and he said that it was like, "Yeah, how do we articulate the difference or even warn about when we're tending towards a work that isn't a healthy work?" And I think what struck me about what he was saying is this concept of workaholism is working out of fear. It's working out of compulsion. So that's what spurred me to want to have this conversation and talk about that with our friends who are listening.


Michael:
              Nice.


Kathryn:
               [crosstalk 00:03:36] context.


Michael:
              No, I think it's good. I mean, as we talk about this, we talk about it a lot because being entrepreneurs and being folks that have started two companies, and we raised our daughter through the first company, through Half a Bubble Out, and now she works for the company at 25 years old. And those are a lot of opportunities to think through. I was even thinking through this morning, as we were prepping for the podcast, reflecting over the last 20 years and those moments where I'd have to be up sometimes working until 10:00 or 11:00 at night to ... because we had a deadline for, especially one of those early large projects, but a lot of projects in the early days and trying to figure out, how do you do it? How do you manage it?


Michael:
              And I realized that there was a certain amount of grace as you're getting older, that you realize that part of this workaholic thing is you can end up working hard, too hard and not have balance because you're still learning. You're still trying to figure out. So it's not a, have I arrived or not, or have I failed or not? You've got to continue to grow as a leader. We've talked about that forever on this podcast and in our consulting. But there's a sense in which I realized, I probably did work too much and didn't have a good ... I overworked. Let's just put it that way to start with. I overworked. And probably we both did at times, because we were still learning, trying to figure out things like, when do you make a deadline? How do you make a promise to a client? Do you make a promise to a client that is too soon, too late? Are you learning to estimate? All of a sudden you're in a place where you need to deliver.


Michael:
              And for those of you who've been listening to podcasts, well you know that we live in an agricultural community, too. We live in a college town out in the middle of a lot of major farmland in California. And what happens ... the reason I say that is because we have harvest. Every year we have harvest. And we have a couple of different crops that are very significant out here. One's rice and one's almonds or almonds for the rest of you in the world.


Kathryn:
               But you're pronouncing it wrong. It's really almonds.


Michael:
              Almonds. Because you knocked the hell out of him when, in the old days when you were harvesting. So when harvest comes, you've got to get the fruit off the trees. You've got to pick up stuff. You've got to ... or it's going to overripe and then it rots, it ruins on the trees. And the rice, the same way. It'll rot. So if you're not careful ... So when harvest comes, this ebb and flow of, man, you might have 15 hour days during harvest. That's not because of the amount of hours you're working isn't necessarily a good sign on whether it's overworking or not, because there's a timeframe there. And I was thinking about that.


Michael:
              In harvest, you can't pick the timeframe. I mean, the fruit is ripe when the fruit is ripe, it's usually ripe around a month or two. Sometimes we say harvest came early. Sometimes we say harvest came late. Usually we're talking within 60 days. So for us, we're looking at those things, which made me think of the first question of, how many times do we, as leaders, actually think that we're working on a deadline that we got backed into reactively and not proactively and we weren't learning how to set deadlines well for projects that we actually had control over that? At least some control over it.


Kathryn:
               Sure. Well, and I was thinking about, cause the other ... one of the things that comes into this conversation is the ability to manage your time. Right? So part of the reason people can overwork, even if we're not workaholics, we can overwork because we're not managing our time well. It's a different conversation in some ways. But I can remember back when I was working in the software industry and everything we did was deadline driven, right? So RFPs, I mean, it's a deadline and it's a hard one. That thing arrives an hour after its deadline, forget about it.


Michael:
              Well, which is one of the reasons I hate corporate America so often is because companies are so often poorly setting deadlines and forcing everybody so often to work into a 60 to 80 hour week.


Kathryn:
               Right. But I would say, and you're not wrong about that. But I would say that in my experience, responding to RFPs and really large projects, part of the reason that I ended up having to pull all nighters, which you remember, I did many, many, many times is because I wasn't managing my time during the day well enough, right? So I would discover .. and this is partly personality is that I have a hard time really sometimes focusing until the deadline is looming. Right? Yeah. So those are things that I've had to continue to work on so that I'm not having to overwork in order to meet a deadline.


Michael:
              So is there a number to overworking, do you think?


Kathryn:
               I mean, I think that the issue at stake, especially when we're talking about this concept of passion and provision, I think the issue at stake is what causes you, what puts you in a position where you're neglecting your family, social responsibilities, life, essentially for the job.


Michael:
              Okay.


Kathryn:
               So, I don't think there's a number.


Michael:
              Yeah. I think that's what happens sometimes in this conversation is you get into this place where you're saying, "Oh, 41 hours is overworking." or 50 or 70 or 90. Now, there is a point at which those are gray areas. I don't know anybody who would say 90 hours a week is not ... Well, I was going to say nobody I know who's healthy would ever say 90 hours a week should be normal. But living in the California area within the outer radius of Silicon Valley, we're three hours from Silicon Valley, but it's amazing how much it pervades all of our thinking in California, especially in Northern California. And when we're talking about that, all you have to do is read the newspaper, the chronicle, or yes, I still glance at a newspaper, but my mother reads it regularly so she informs me of anything I missed.


Michael:
              But all you have to do is look at the media and see that it's glorified. Like, "Oh, isn't this wonderful. Look, these people have beds underneath their desks." And they're so committed and it's so wonderful or it's so amazing or this is what it takes. And they're not healthy. It's not healthy situations, but it gets glorified. And there's no way you can have a rest of your life.


Michael:
              Now, what they're doing is they're looking for a lot of people who are young, who don't have a family, who don't have any kind of serious relationship and they're creating a culture, like Google has ... In the early days, Google did this. Google is not nearly as much like this from what I understand now, because you have so many people that have said, "Well, I've got a family. I've got to go home. I've got to do this."


Kathryn:
               Yeah. But they became really self-contained like dry cleaners are here. The food is here. Everything is here. You can shower here. You can sleep here. You never actually have to leave.


Michael:
              And that's what they did in the early days. Now, they've become more of a mature company and they still have a lot of that culture, but there's still ... with the amount of employees they have, there are more people now going home and not staying at the office 70 hours a week. But then you have the technology tether. And with that, we're holding onto things so that we can be on vacation and we can do a bunch of work on our phone. And I wrestle with how much this idea of going away on vacation and like, "Honey, we're in ..."


Michael:
              I remember dreaming, wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to stay home for that one hour conversation and we could be away on a weekend or we could be away for a week or on vacation or something and I could just pull away and have a one hour conversation. And I didn't have to be back at the office or even back at the hotel room on a phone having that call or that meeting. And then the rest of my time was free?" And now I just, over the last, I don't know, six, seven, eight, nine years, I resent that. I don't like that most of the time. Because-


Kathryn:
               Well, part of it is because it pulls you into a different mode.


Michael:
              Oh, it totally does.


Kathryn:
               And so your mindset, like you've been resting and then suddenly you're completely sucked back in, and it's not just that hour. It's that hour plus thinking about the hour leading up to it, plus the decompression afterwards and all the tasks that come out of it. And then how you reenter rest is no simple thing.


Michael:
              Okay. So for those of us that struggle with this and are challenged with it, they say admitting you have a problem is the first step. But there's a question formulating in my mind that I'm trying to get out. Let's start talking about this whole idea of, okay, how do we know if we're just hard workers or we're working too hard. And I'm going to suggest that we are not either or. I'm going to suggests that sometimes we're hard workers and sometimes we overwork and then you have this problem that goes even farther up, somebody who overworks too much is a workaholic, because it is damaging all of the other stuff. And I liked the way Collins ... I think Collins put it that way, but you're reacting and working out of a fear.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. Out of compulsion or fear of some sort. And even-


Michael:
              And how do you know if you're actually working out of a fear compulsion? Because we've counseled a lot of people where they finally come to the place where they realize they're afraid of something, but it takes a long time to get them to the idea where they're self-aware enough that they even know that what they're doing is out of a fear.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. Well, it's interesting. When you look at even basic Wikipedia, right? And you look at the concept of workaholism, they'll even say that the causes of it are things like anxiety, low self-esteem and intimacy issues. And so the idea that I would rather be at work than at home-


Michael:
              I am not an alcoholic. Sorry.


Kathryn:
               But just avoiding, right? So you're pushing back and you're using work as the excuse to do that.


Michael:
              Yes.


Kathryn:
               Right? Well, you know what? I'm just busy. I just have a lot on my plate. I can't do that social thing. I can't be with my family. I can't whatever. And there's a pushing back to this concept of it's out of a fear of some sort of anxiety, low self-esteem. I think sometimes this self-conception of, I want people to see me as somebody who goes over and above all the time.


Michael:
              Well, some of us do.


Kathryn:
               Yeah.


Michael:
              Yeah. And I remember ... So you're talking and I'm remembering the early days where we were hungry for customer. We were hungry for clients.


Kathryn:
               We were hungry.


Michael:
              And we were ... I don't know if I was ever really hungry, but we were nervous. We were scared. You and I were both all in on the company. We stepped away from the safety net completely. I mean, we had one in the beginning and then we knew that we needed to step away from that and did that. We were true to what we knew was right for us. And yet, I'm like, "Okay, where's that going to come?" And you want to make sure that you're treating this customer amazingly well, so that hopefully you'll get the next review. You'll get the next referral. You'll get people talking about you. You'll build that critical mass of your reputation and go from there.


Michael:
              But there's this sense in which it's like, "Okay. I'm trying to be good at customer service. And the experience I've had is I have customers coming to me. I have a good reputation, but when we tell ourselves we're going above and beyond, but what we're doing is we're interrupting the rest of our life. And the people around us have to suffer for that because, "Oh, I always have to be on. I always have to be available." That's amazing customer service.


Michael:
              One of the things I learned is I was afraid to tell clients no. Okay. One of my biggest pet peeves, right, in business and it started because I grew up with it around in Chico having a lot of small business leader friends of our family, working for small businesses, and then eventually working for my dad. The saying that was, the customer is always right. The customer is not always right.


Kathryn:
               They are not.


Michael:
              Sometimes customers are idiots. Sometimes they're overly demanding. What they want is they want the best quality for the cheapest price and they want it faster than anybody can have. And you can't have all three. And one of the conversations that most mature businesses have with their clients regularly is dealing with the tension that they want all three, and they can have two, but being afraid to charge. That's one thing that we're afraid to say no to a client of like being able to say, "Okay. I'm raising my rates." Well, if we raise our rates, we did it with rabbit hole hay. What if we just lose a bunch of customers because we have to raise our rates? Well, we're not profitable enough to stay in business so they're not going to even get our "Hey, if we go out of business."


Michael:
              Second, if we had clients where it's like, okay, well ... we actually we're being told early on we were worth more than we had, but we didn't have a context of what our value was on the open market. And we were way under charging. And we were afraid to charge too much because we were like, "Oh no, nobody will pay that. We're not worth that." There's that fear of discovery type of thing that goes on for us as business people. And we're growing through all these different curves of self-awareness and self-value and those concerns. But what happens when you get to that place where it's like you sit back and your peers are looking at you and you're going, "You work too much." And you're like, "No, this is ..." You find yourself justifying, "No, this is just what good customer services is." Is it?


Michael:
              Did you really have to take that call? I realize you made an extra five grand last week. Bully for you. That was amazing. And you did it in probably three or four hours on the phone, maybe five from vacation, but would you have made the five grand next week when you got back from vacation? And how horrible would it have been if you didn't make the five grand? If they actually just walked away and said, "Oh no, you're on vacation. I'm sorry. You've got to work for me now or not." Because a lot of times we're afraid to put that conversation out for people of like, "This is what we can do. I'm not going to interrupt my family. I'm not going to interrupt my vacation."


Michael:
              What we do at the company is I can be very protective. I'm learning more and more ... I'm learning that it's actually part of my ... this personality trait that shows up on a test, right? I'm extremely protective of the people around me. And I'm really protective of our staff. It happened in a meeting this week. I'm very nervous about somebody who wants to hire us because ... or is interested in hiring us because I'm afraid that they won't treat our staff well. Do I say no or do I say yes and put up with something, a potential problem or anything else, do we say yes or no? And all those things ... I mean, you may be listening, going, "Redman, what does this have to do with this topic of workaholism?" But really, it does.


Michael:
              I promise you, it all ties together, because the reason we work too much and the reason some people ... and we have workaholism problems is they are complex psychological things going on. It's not a simple one answer. It's not as simple one problem. It's not as simple one solution. It is a, you've got to mature and grow and you've got a ... and we talk about this as leaders. We've got to grow as leaders and mature or we're actually not going to deal with the root problems. Because the workaholism isn't a root, it's a symptom.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I think that this concept that if I just work 80, 90 hours a week, I'm going to grow my company. I'm going to do better. It's going to be great. Well, you know what? It's going to lead to burn out. So we talk about that in the book and burnout is a bad, bad place to go.


Michael:
              Burnout is bad.


Kathryn:
               Burnout, very bad. Right?


Michael:
              Okay. Refresh everybody really quick. Two minutes on burnout if they haven't heard our ... We have a burnout podcast episode on that. You can go look at that on the website, but what is burnout?


Kathryn:
               Well, so the first thing that people need to understand is there's four stages of burnout, right? So it's not just a "I'm not burnt out today and tomorrow I'm burnt out." So in this four stages, the first stage is just that you're tired and most of the time you're in denial, you're not going to own it. You're just like, "Yep, I'm just tired. It's all good. I'm going to get through it." And I don't have these memorized. So second stage, you end up in a place where it's starting to wear on you. There's starting to be some slight physical symptoms. Maybe your immune system is getting a little compromised. You're catching more often, that kind of thing. And still most of the time when somebody says, "Hey, do you need to slow down?" "No, no, no. I'm good. I'm good. I'm just going to keep moving forward. It's going to be fine." Right? Well then you start to get to stage three, and stage three is-


Michael:
              And you start getting really tired.


Kathryn:
               Yes, super tired.


Michael:
              You're not recovering as quickly as ... You can recover but it takes longer to recover. We start to blame it on age, which there's some truth to that. You've got to slow down, but at the same time, you start going, "Oh well." or "It's just a season." And you also start struggling with sleep. You start struggling with being awake and alert. You start struggling with memory. You start seeing some of these things that are starting to touch. They're intermittent. And again, you have this ... from one to three, you have a decrease of energy. You're more and more tired. And so people are looking at you and you're like you're just pushing through. I mean, a lot of us are really good at just leaning forward and making sure our foot's out there to catch us. And we joke about that a lot.


Michael:
              I just as long as my foot's there, I won't hit the ground. And yet all of a sudden somebody goes, "That spark in your eye, it's not there anymore." Your weekends are not enough for you to recover. And what it is is not only are you working too much, but there's a lifestyle, a pacing that's happening because you can't get recovered from ... especially in stage three, vacation doesn't recover you. It's actually a symptom of the pattern that's happening every week.


Kathryn:
               Right. And then you hit stage four and stage four is you flat out cannot get out of bed. And we've had friends where they've actually reached the stage where one morning they just could not get out of bed. And that was a six-


Michael:
              It's a cliff.


Kathryn:
               It is a cliff. And it was like a six month recovery. Like just [crosstalk 00:22:44]


Michael:
              Well, and we've seen we've had friends at six months to a year. And if they don't pay attention to it, which usually their body is saying, you don't have a choice. You don't want to go to stage four because stage four involves you not being able to tell your body what to do because it's not listening anymore. Stage four involves a lot of tears. Stage four involves a fair amount of depression, and stage four involves just physically ... you feel sick all the time with the lack of energy and everything else, because you have overworked your adrenal system, and your adrenal system basically has crashed. And there's no way for it to come back. Well, there is a way for it to come back. It's just a very, very, very long process. And it usually involves ... If you're going to do it well and successfully, it involves a fair amount of counseling. And at that point, you're just trying to dig yourself out of a deep hole and wishing somebody would just give you a ladder so you could crawl out and there's no ladder.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. So the implications of burnout are super, super intense. And we would-


Michael:
              Well and as a society, we flirt with this all the time.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly there are stories of people who are workaholics who literally have worked themselves to death. They literally like ... They talk about this guy. Yeah. I think it was in 2012. There's a Bank of America intern in London who worked for 72 hours straight and literally dropped dead.


Michael:
              An intern at 72 hours?


Kathryn:
               Yep. You've got to assume he's an intern. He's probably not 55. He's probably ...


Michael:
              No, he's probably 25.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. So you can imagine that that working 72 hours was probably not ... that was probably the culmination, right? Of having done multiple hours.


Michael:
              So, what I'm hearing you say and I hadn't thought about it until just now is the workaholism isn't age dependent, and the older ... because it's oftentimes older folks that are ... people in their 40s and 50s who get blamed for it a lot. But it happens in your 20s and 30s.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. It can. Definitely. It's interesting because there's-


Michael:
              Well, and I think about it. My dad was like that in his 30s.


Kathryn:
               Yep.


Michael:
              Yeah.


Kathryn:
               Yeah.


Michael:
              And he ended up in the hospital with colitis multiple times.


Kathryn:
               And there are societies, right? So Japan tends to be targeted as a place where workaholism is a really big deal. There's just all sorts of struggles with it. And part of it is that push towards high output, right? So just driving people long hours. You got to keep doing, you just got to keep producing without the realization that the longer that happens, you get this inverse return on your investment, essentially, right? You cross that place where you can't be productive anymore. You start ... Sleeplessness creates cognitive deficits. You can't think. Well. You're not making good decisions. All of those things start to go awry if you're in this place where you are workaholic or ... So why this today?


Kathryn:
               I mean, there's just this sense of we need to stop, I think sometimes and take stock and just go, "Where am I in this? Am I working healthy? Is the work that I'm doing invigorating? Because hard work is invigorating. It's actually life-giving and it's something you can keep doing. But if you are working out of fear, if you're working out of anxiety, if you have super massive insecurity stuff that you're dealing with, self-esteem issues, and it's causing you to work to try to overcome that or mask it, those are the kinds of issues that as a leader will cause you to ultimately crash.


Michael:
              So, the term that's floating around that we haven't said yet out loud on purpose is work-life balance. And a lot of people talk about it, and I'm not a big fan of it for multiple reasons. But I did hear a term recently that I really liked, and it was not work-life balance. They said we're not talking about work-life balance, talking about work-life integration. Now, I wrestle with the words, you know this, because work is part of life. So it's not like I have my life and I have to work. That's one of the biggest problems that has occurred in this idea between labor and toil and the idea that you can't have ... Your work can't be part of your fulfillment in life.


Michael:
              Your work can't be part of your thing because we're not saying, "No, walk away from that." We're saying actually with passion and provision, I mean, we wrote a whole book on the idea that you can have a healthy marriage. You can have healthy relationships with your children. You can have healthy relationships with your extended friends and family. You can have an invigorating business and a job that is labor, that is tiring and does wear on you, but it's a good day's work. And that more than half of it really fits who you are. And it's not all going to fit. There was a personality test that we gave our staff recently, the Colby and it's on how you solve problems and how you work.


Michael:
              And one of the staff is realizing that the gifts they have and the ideal things they have somebody with that kind of a profile usually doesn't get to walk in that kind of profile until later in life, because it takes a while for them to move into that phase where they have the experience and credibility, where what they're designed for is actually comes into its sweet spot. And it's frustrating because you want to be in your sweet spot at every age of your life. And sometimes what you're doing is you're working in things that are good for you and important, and they have purpose and meaning, but you're waiting for a better, a sweeter time, a thing that happens. And I had to do the same thing because I was one of those folks. It's like I had opportunities to learn, but I wasn't the senior guy until my 30s and that's because we started our own company. But a lot of people in senior roles are they're in their late 30s if they're ahead of schedule, their 40s and 50s.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. Unless they're the young entrepreneur who ends up on the front of Inc. Magazine at 21, who blows the world away.


Michael:
              Right. And they're the rare of the rare of the rare.


Kathryn:
               Yeah.


Michael:
              And the thing is, is they have to have a senior staff. Even Facebook with what's his name.


Kathryn:
               Come on.


Michael:
              That kid.


Kathryn:
               That kid.


Michael:
              Zuckerberg. He didn't know how to run a large company. He didn't know how to go public. He needed a board. He needed a senior leadership team. He needed experienced people because he just didn't have the business experience and the life experience. Now, he was on the fast track and learning hard the whole way on that curve. That was like buckle in, your cheeks are shaken from the G-forces and it takes a toll on you at multiple places. But there's this idea of passion and provision is a real deal. And we're continuing to talk about it on this podcast, but there a limit where you can go too far. And when we talk about work-life integration, we're saying sometimes ... As a farmer, you may live on the farm.


Michael:
              Well, your house is at work. Your family works oftentimes, especially in older times, but in today's world, we still see generations, multiple generations of one family working on the ranch, working on the farm. And so you have to figure out how ... You can't just say work is over here and my family life is over here. That's an artificial construct for most human beings, I believe. So, how do you integrate that? How do you integrate work? How do you be able to say I'm going to allow myself extra time to go to the kids' gymnastic event, but I have to make that time up somewhere? I don't get to work 25 hours a week, most of the time.


Michael:
              And so we have to find that balance, but it's important not only that we know we're intentionally doing it that way, but we're also actually communicating to the people around us, because I'll tell you from experience, I think when our daughter, Jenna, was in school, she didn't see what we were doing during the day. And even though we showed up at the gymnastic event, things like that, what she would see at times is us working on a weekend or working in the evening. And she was too young to understand how to separate some of that out. And some of it was unhealthy and some of it was just us trying to make sure that we were keeping our business and able to pay the bills. And she was really not able to fully understand that at times. And so you've got to communicate well. You got to figure out how to communicate to your family.


Michael:
              But at some point, you've got to say, "I'm turning this off." Because here's what I think culminates all this. What captures your attention at the moment says something about who you are and what you value. And when it goes too far, and you're like, "Haven't you spent enough time working this week? Isn't it time to take a vacation? Isn't it ..." And you're spending all this extra time, and you're saying, "Okay, now we're going to take a vacation." You go on vacation and then you tell your family, "I'm actually going to not play on this game. I'm not going to go on this event that we all planned because I just have a couple of more things I've got to do." What you're saying is the work is more important than ... You couldn't schedule it. And that's something to take stock in.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. And so much of that is just learning to be brave enough to set expectations for your clients. Right?


Michael:
              Yeah.


Kathryn:
               So being willing to say, "Okay. It is the Friday before my vacation. And I just got 15 pages of website changes that you need. Can I be doing that after I get back from my vacation?" As opposed to some assumption that it has to happen right now.


Michael:
              Okay. I think there's three groups of people right now listening to us. First group is they're shaking their heads up and down. Yes.


Kathryn:
               It's a nod.


Michael:
              Yes.


Kathryn:
               Up and down.


Michael:
              Up and down nodding. "Yes, I absolutely ... What you guys are saying, I agree. I get. That makes sense. Uh-huh." The second group is going, "This is stupid." And they may not be listening to us or if they're like me, they may have held on really frustrated, just ranting, but still listening because they don't agree with us. And whether they don't agree with us and they have a good work-life integration. And we're saying that there are variations, this doesn't have an exact number of hours during the week. This doesn't have an exact anytime you work on a vacation, it means you're a workaholic. We're not saying that.


Kathryn:
               No, not at all.


Michael:
              So I want you to hear that that's not what we're saying. We're saying there's context. And this is a serious issue in America, actually in the world. It's a problem. And quite frankly, it's one of the reasons why there's a 90% failure rate in businesses. It's why 74 to 75% of American adults aren't fully engaged at work and don't love what they do. It is why the divorce rate contributes to the divorce rate being high. It contributes to just a whole lot of problems in our life. I just talked to a Disney exec recently. He's on his third marriage. I think he learned a lot of lessons that he's taking into his third marriage, and he corrected a lot of stuff.


Michael:
              But he talked about to me about how many mistakes he made in the first two marriages. And part of it had to do with all this. And then there's that third group. The third group is saying this. "Hmm, I wonder if there's something to what they're saying. I wonder if I'm ... Well, that's like. That ... Yeah. If I'm honest, ooh, I don't like that. What do they do?" If we've got somebody out there and it may just be one person, but they're saying right now ... You just said a bunch of stuff that resonates with me and this is the moment they can hear it. Where do they go next?


Kathryn:
               So I would think one of the first things to do is to have a conversation with somebody in your life who will tell you the truth.


Michael:
              Not the person working 70 hours next to you.


Kathryn:
               Not that person. And if you're a 70 hour leader, not the employee that you also forced to work 70 hours with you, which is another danger. But somebody who essentially is looking from the outside and is able to be honest with you. So hopefully you have a person in your life that's willing to tell you the truth if you ask. So that would be the very first thing is to assess like, "Am I working too much? Is this a current problem that could become a much bigger problem if I keep on the track I'm on?" So that would be the first thing I would suggest is find somebody to ask the questions of who will be brutally honest with you. It's got to be somebody that isn't at risk for telling you the truth.


Michael:
              We have a dear friend right now, who's going through a divorce, four kids. And he was totally taken off guard. He's a workaholic. He definitely is and he knows it now. And he's trying to figure out how to unwind. And one of the things he's doing is in the midst of his grief of losing a marriage he didn't realize was on the rocks, he's going to counseling. And that's something you could do too, is finding a counselor who can help you walk through and start to identify, because what you have to do is you have to understand, what are the things that are driving you from that perspective? What are the thought patterns and the beliefs you have that you think are actually really solid?


Kathryn:
               Like I just have a good work ethic, right?


Michael:
              Yeah. They're legitimate. And you've got to realize that they're not legitimate and they may be completely illegitimate or they may just be off a little bit and that's what's causing the problems. It's like they come from the right place and they go in the wrong direction.


Kathryn:
               Yeah. And I think the ability to really assess over a period of time, not like just one day, but over a period of several weeks, months, is the work that I'm doing invigorating? Is it work that I'm excited about? Am I optimistic? Am I hopeful? All of those things versus, do I just feel like I can never get stuff done and I'm completely overwhelmed and I just feel stressed all the time? Those are also just very good indicators that you're pushing in a dangerous direction.


Michael:
              Absolutely. So we hope that's been helpful today. I mean, it kind of heavy topic, but at the same time, this is life or death. We want you guys to make the long haul. We want you to really finish your career. We want you to finish whatever season you're in. We want you to get past the finish line. We want you to do it healthy and happy and with your relationships intact, and really to be able to say, "I have a great company. I have a great life. I've managed to mature and grow. And every day, every month, every year is better. And I've got the fruit to see it. I can see the fruit in my marriage. I can see the fruit in our bank account. I could see the fruit in my relationship with my kids, my friends, my family, and I can see the relationship with our clients, our employees, people, we work with, all those different areas, they're healthy, they're positive, they're encouraging."


Michael:
              And then from there, we want you to just be able to enjoy the fruits of that labor. That's really it. You do all this stuff so that you can enjoy all these things. And the idea, and we talk about it a lot, you don't want to just focus in and say, "I'm just going to sacrifice everything for a period of time at work, where we can make enough money to where then we can have the life we really want." It doesn't work that way and it's a deception to believe that can happen. And there are way too many dead bodies along that path. And too many bad testimonials from that of people who have said, "Don't come this way. This is not the way to go." But they've already sacrificed a whole lot. And then they can't recover from it.


Michael:
              We don't want that to happen to you. We want you to enjoy passion and provision in your company and in your life. And that's what this podcast is about. So we want to just say thank you for listening today. I hope this is helpful. If you're one of those people listening today that you just go, "I'm doing great. Thank you for sharing." But you know somebody who needs to hear this message, who needs to hear the talk today about whether anything we talk about on this podcast or today's message about workaholism and giving them food for thought, please share it with them. Hit subscribe, share our podcast with people you know in your network.


Michael:
              We would greatly appreciate it so that we can help change businesses, lives and reduce the business failure rate and increase the amount of people who actually love going to work. And that starts with the leaders of companies and then water runs downhill. It will affect the companies. If you build a passion provision company, you'll build passion provision lives around you. And it's powerful. So thank you for joining us today. This is the HaBO Village podcast. I'm Michael Redman.


Kathryn:
               And I'm Kathryn Redman.


Michael:
              Have a great week. Bye-bye.


Kathryn:
               Bye-bye.