In her book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware shares stories of her life and those of her dying patients, she heard these five regrets the most:
- Courage to live true to myself – Last week’s post linked here
- Don’t work too hard
- Courage to express my feelings
- Stay in touch with friends
- Choose happiness
In the book, Bronnie Ware tells the story of a 90-year old man who wishes he would have listened to his wife and retired earlier. He explains that he feared they didn’t have enough money yet. She tried to convince him they could sell their big house, he wouldn’t agree. In hindsight he realizes he should have retired and sold the big house; he liked the status that came with his job too but then he regrets missing so much of his life while he was working so much.
It’s easy to say, I’m not going to work too hard or more to the gist or essence of the regret: I’m not going to work so much (and have more balance) but then how do you actually carry that out without getting fired or going broke (if you own the business)?
Brave Choices
It starts with choices, like the man in the book, do I really want to keep doing this work in order to afford this big house and keep the status it brings me? I actually did this exact thing five and a half years ago. It was early in my entrepreneur life and I was doing some contract work for a prior employer, they asked if I wanted to come back as an employee. I thought about it and realized it was only because of my mortgage payment that I even considered it (I had never really valued the status so for me that was not a factor).
If I put myself on my death-bed and looked back I’d regret giving up on my business and taking that job, so I sold the house and downsized to a condominium. Now, it sounds like it was an easy choice and in hindsight it’s clear that it was the right choice. At the time, though, I was full of doubts and fear. It was not an easy choice, it was a brave choice.
Last summer, I went on an epic road trip in an RV from Arizona to Alaska for 43 days. There are all kinds of assumptions you can make about my ability to do this: oh she must be independently wealthy (I wish), oh she must have so much great work lined up afterward that she can afford to do that (I wish even more), or on the negative side: she must not care that much about her work or she has a “significant other” paying her bills (I don’t wish for either of those).
Let me assure you, none of those assumptions are true. What is true is that I took my laptop with me and did some work from the road. I love that some of my work is mobile! And I didn’t have that much work, so it was possible to do it from the road. It’s also true that I wish I had more work, as a professional coach/facilitator/consultant, it can be very scary when you have a lot of white space on the calendar (and those bills don’t stop). After over seven years in this entrepreneurial world, I’ve learned to shift that fear, that can grow with too much time and too little work, to energy better spent in doing work on my business (like creating new content or a new website) or learning new valuable tools for my clients that will attract more work or by taking more time to enjoy life, knowing that the work will come later.
And it was still a brave choice to go on such a big trip with no guarantees of work coming later, those pesky fears never completely go away, I just do it anyway, that’s why it was a brave choice. If there were no fears it would be an easy choice.
In the last couple years of my corporate job, I made better/braver choices about how much I worked. Instead of continuing to work on the “never-done-always-something” to-do list till 7PM (after starting at 7AM) each day, as I did regularly earlier in my career, I started making a commitment to myself that I had to go on a hike or meet a friend for dinner or some other appointment that got me out of the office by no later than 6PM. I used to say to myself, if I had and appointment/commitment then I’d have to leave, I have a commitment to myself to leave.
My quality of work improved. This is what I explain to clients who have this challenge with big fears that if you stop working so hard your work will suffer, this belief is not based in truth, it’s a myth. There is a point of diminishing returns in working too hard or too much; your quality goes down in both your work and personal life. Of course not everyone has this challenge or belief, I’m not talking about them, they won’t have this regret!
It takes practice, faith and letting go of things to make these brave choices. Practice to do it, see the evidence that it all worked out for the best and faith to believe that it will all work out for the best, and letting go of things that I don’t need (like that bigger house). If I let my fears (or desires driven by good marketing for bigger or more things) do the driving, my internalGPS® never would have let me leave my corporate job years ago or let me go on that epic trip and this blog/website would not exist, let alone the unforgettable experience of covering over 10,400 miles, a dozen national parks plus several canadian provincial parks, walking on a glacier for the first time, and meeting my 14-month old great-niece at her home in Alaska.
If you want more evidence, I found this great conversation between two very successful woman (see their backgrounds below) balancing work and life and taking time off in their careers, Click here to read more, an excerpt:
“Lisen: From the research, I found there are three paths (for taking a pause in your career). There were the cruisers, people who downshifted but never left the paid workforce. They typically work part-time, stayed in their industry, even stayed in their jobs, and just cruised along.
Then, you have the boomerangs, who left the paid workforce, but then relaunched into the same industry, in some cases the same job.
The third group are the pivoters—like you—who took that time and got to that place of who am I? What’s my legacy in the world? They ended up becoming all kinds of things. One woman went from business to nutritional science. We as a culture don’t give enough time to that quiet space, because we’re so go, go, go.
Sarah: I would argue that there’s fear associated with taking the pause: “My career is over. The phone isn’t going to ring anymore.” Don’t be scared. For me, it’s because I’d been fired a couple of times.
Lisen Stromberg is a culture innovation consultant, award-winning independent journalist, and the author of Work Pause Thrive: How to Pause for Parenthood Without Killing Your Career. Sarah Robb O’Hagan is an executive, activist, and fitness enthusiast who has served in leadership roles with global brands such as Equinox, Gatorade, Virgin, and Nike.
In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown writes of two guideposts (there are ten in total) for living wholeheartedly that this regret of overworking made me think of: “Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark” and “Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self Worth.” In the spirit of not working too much (ha!) I’m going to end this post here, read the book for more, it was life changing for me and I refer to it often with clients.
How will you avoid this regret of looking back from your death-bed and saying, “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard?”