Settle Smart In Your Search For Work-Life Balance | Dana Look-Arimoto | episode 106

Work-life balance is a myth. It’s not about balancing work and all the rest of life. Work is a part of life and to separate it like that is disingenuous to you and your potential, not to mention your family. Pushing for balance stops us from enjoying our lives and from achieving our potential. Most importantly, it’s hurting our children. Executive and leadership coach Dana Look-Arimoto talks to Mighty Parenting podcast host Sandy Fowler about settling consciously so we stay in the driver’s seat of our lives. Dana shares the one thing we need to do as a New Year’s resolution and discusses ways to find happiness, health, and energy while helping our kids to do the same.

iheartradio | Castbox | Podchaser | Overcast

Support this podcast at MightyParenting.com/support

A Favorite Quote from the Show: 

“Teaching our children to blend the facets of life will keep them from feeling compartmentalized, bombarded, and pulled in too many directions.”

High Points of Our Conversation about Work-Life Balance:

When we live our life running like a gerbil on a wheel we end up depleted, running low on battery.

We struggle in our quest for work-life balance. We’re all settling but we do it unconsciously. When we do it consciously we are in the driver’s seat of our own life.

When we get too caught up in the career aspect of life it can impact our identity.

Regardless of gender, geography, or economic status we all have five facets to our life: career, family, friends, society, and vitality.

Settling is not a bad word but burnout is. If we refuse to settle in any part of our lives burnout is right around the corner.

Dana’s number one piece of advice for us and our kids in our quest for work-life balance: Do not join a company that expects constant, excessive work weeks.

Vitality (our total wellness and well-being) is important and yet self-care is the first thing to go when we get busy.

We all need to eat, sleep, and hydrate, even if vitality isn’t our main facet.

When it comes to work-life balance, we are so overrun by the things we’ve been told we should do that we don’t really know what we want anymore.

You only have 168 hours in a week. Where and how do you want to spend that time? Remember to allot 56 hours of that for sleep. Without sleep, the rest will not work. Sleep is actually performance enhancing. 

Parents struggle with taking care of themselves but we all need to practice Me Before We. We must take care of ourselves in order to have any energy for others.

When parents give and give without receiving they teach their children to do the same. Parents also send the message that they are not important and kids always come first. Is it any surprise when kids expect parents to meet their every need and bow to every whim?

For the New Year, Dana wants us to choose 1 hour a week to do something that fills us up.

We need to decide which facet is most important to us, which serves us best and brings us the most joy. We can focus on that facet of life and let the others sit on a shelf.

When you consciously choose where to focus your energy and where to settle, you end up in the driver’s seat of your life.

We can teach this to our teens. We need to lead by example. We can follow that up with open conversations about what they want and what brings them joy as well as how to integrate the facets.

Resources Mentioned in Show:

Stop Settling, Settle Smart: Rethinking Work-Life Balance, Redesign Your Busy Life

Settle Smart quiz https://www.settlesmart.com/quiz 

Our Guest Dana Look-Arimoto:

Dana Look-Arimoto is an author, coach, speaker, and founder of the leadership and executive coaching company Phoenix5th and settlesmart.com. She is also behind the mindset, method, and movement of Stop Settling®, which aims to end the myth of work-life balance by focusing on the integration of the various facets of life and conscious prioritization. With over 20 years of experience leading teams and corporations, Dana has accrued a wealth of knowledge and experience in understanding how people best work together and how teams that work well together make corporations successful. She is the author of Stop Settling, Settle Smart: Rethinking Work-life Balance, Redesign Your Busy Life and is currently working on her second book.

To learn more or connect with our guest visit https://www.settlesmart.com/ 

Photo credit: Aziz Acharki.  Person balance on rocks