Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
One of the age old questions we talk about a lot in [00:01:00] entrepreneurial or productivity circles is the idea of work life balance. How do we run a successful business while also achieving personal fulfillment?
Or how do we achieve personal fulfillment while also doing really well at our jobs, the job that we go to every day? How do we find that work life balance? Well, there's a lot to say on this topic, but I think the most important thing to say That is probably a little bit of a deviation from what most people in productivity circles would say is that work life in balance and personal fulfillment, it's actually all nonsensical in the sense that personal fulfillment has nothing to do with your work.
Or your business or any of that. When we talk about work life balance and we talk about personal fulfillment, I think one of the most important things to say upfront, That might deviate a little [00:02:00] bit from most people in productivity circles is that your personal fulfillment has no tether to your business or work life whatsoever. So the idea of work life balance is a bit of a nonsensical idea in the first place
because your personal fulfillment really shouldn't have any tie to your external world. Your personal fulfillment is something that's found within. If you're relying on the external world, all the things that are happening out here in the world to provide you or to rob you of personal fulfillment, Then you're going to experience a lot of suffering in your life
because life is full of volatility. Every single day being a human being is volatile from waking up in the morning and having a really great routine to getting stuck in traffic and being so frustrated that you're going to be late to work to getting to work. And having a really great day where you're just crushing it to coming home and your partner didn't have a great day.
And now you're in a fight about it. That's really bringing your energy back down. Life [00:03:00] is full of volatility. And if you're pinning your personal fulfillment, To anything external, it's going to increase your ultimate level of suffering. And so there really is no such thing as work life balance. There's simply the internal you and how fulfilled you feel in your version of the human experience.
And that's entirely dependent on you and the work that you're doing to really find that joy, that purpose, that meaning that exists inside of you.
By default, we have a reason to be super excited and joyous every single day that we wake up. The chances of being born a human being are about 1 in 400 trillion. No matter what happens in the external world, we can live our lives every day, knowing that we have been given the gift of human life, which is invaluable.
And actually want to get even more specific around that because I think it actually is a very valid [00:04:00] question to ask, why should we be so joyous? Just simply because we were born human, we could be joyous and be born to anything, a dolphin, a cricket, all kinds of things that have sentient life.
And I would posit that the gift of being human. It's not necessarily that we just have more resources or the ability to control the outcomes of our lives way more than any species of animal out there, like by a tremendous amount. It's also that we are the only species that has the awareness of human life.
We have the awareness that we're having a human experience. We have the ability as human beings to be introspective, to look at our lives and realize that we're simply living an experience. That's something that no other animal, as far as we know, really has the The ability to do those dolphins, for example, they don't really understand that they're living a dolphin experience.
They're essentially really [00:05:00] sophisticated algorithms that go through their lives in some form of default mode. For the most part, even the most sophisticated animals don't have the ability to introspect and understand why they are the way that they are, what really controls their thoughts, their feelings, their emotions.
They're simply reacting to the stimuli that is the world around them. They live their lives through the external stimuli and the external variables that are thrown at them.
And some of them do it very, very, very well. Some of them are incredibly intelligent at how they react and interact with that stimuli. But we are the only species that understands that this is all just an experience and that we have full control over that experience by way of the meaning that we ascribe to all those external factors. What we say that they mean to us is what controls our human experience. So in every aspect of our lives, and this goes very, very [00:06:00] deep, our human experience is entirely dependent on the meaning that we ascribe to everything that's happening in the external world.
And so I would argue that even though it's probably a one in 400 trillion chance of being born a blue J, we have a much deeper gift being born human beings because we have a much greater level of control over our human experience.
Nearly all of what we experience as human beings is dictated by the meaning that we ascribe to the things that are happening in our world. So when we find positivity or joy, it's because we've ascribed joyous and positive meanings to the things that we're experiencing in that time.
When we find trauma. Or depression or fear or something really horrible is because we've ascribed those meanings to those things in our external world. And we have the ability to change the meaning that we ascribe to those things and to control our human experience.
A [00:07:00] really great example of this is our own feeling of success and happiness.
The level of success that we feel as human beings is entirely dictated by the world around us. very much. And this is like down to every tiny little geographic area in the world. What I feel as success sitting in this position in this chair right now is going to feel totally different than somebody living halfway across the world with an entirely different community and way of life success is absolutely not a binary definition.
It's totally dependent on the meaning that we ascribe to it. But we tend to cause ourselves a lot of stress and a lot of frustration, a lot of suffering because we don't feel successful enough. That's what I'm talking about.
When I mentioned our ability to control our human experience, we ascribe meanings to things. And those meanings are not the same across the board. They're heavily influenced by our environment.
And so when we talk about work [00:08:00] life balance and personal fulfillment, just understand that if you're not fulfilled in your personal life, it probably has nothing to do with work or business or anything.
It has everything to do with the meaning that you're ascribing to those things.
Our work life is probably the best example of this. If we're not fulfilled in our work life, there's really no amount of work life balance that's ever going to make us more fulfilled.
If you fundamentally hate what you do for a living, there's only one of two reasons, or maybe both. It's that you're doing the wrong work, something that you're really not passionate about, and you never will be. And so every day that you spend doing that work is going to cause you more suffering, or you're ascribing the wrong meaning.
The things that work in the external world, maybe the people that you're working with and your relationships with them, maybe your sense of fulfillment, the outcome that you're achieving isn't satisfying to you. Maybe it's little things like the commute to work every single day. And you can ascribe a different meaning to that commute, by the way, and you could put things in place to have a much more fulfilling commute as [00:09:00] well.
So I would encourage you to introspect on that a little bit and understand if you're really not passionate about your work at all, or if you're ascribing the wrong meetings to things in the external world that involve your work,
and that's going to prompt you to ask yourself some challenging questions. For example, what would need to be true at work for you to find more fulfillment? Is it this person would need to get out of your way?
This person would stop needing to micromanage you. We would have to drive half as far to work every single day or are there no answers? Are you truly never going to be fulfilled? And if that's the case, then great. You can change your work might not be easy, but it is possible. If there are scenarios in which you would be fulfilled at work, then you're simply ascribing negativity to the other aspects of your work that you're unhappy with.
And you can either ascribe a new meaning or you can change those aspects. And then when those aspects change, you'll be a lot more fulfilled at work. You'll find personal fulfillment. At work, not outside of work. [00:10:00] It's not something that is either or you don't have work and then life you're alive while you're at work.
And I would hope that you find fulfillment in what you do.
But this goes a lot deeper than just personal fulfillment at work or work life balance. I've noticed that one of the reasons that we have such difficulty finding what we call work life balance or really achieving personal fulfillment is because we tend to get so exhausted by our work lives.
That in our time away from work in our personal lives, we tend to avoid doing things that would probably be truly fulfilling if we were really doing them. What I mean by that is every one of us has a list of things that we want to accomplish things that we want to do, whether it's just read more books, take that trip, learn a new language, join a certain community, have a deeper relationship with a certain person.
We all have things that we want to achieve in this life. And when I say achieve, I don't mean [00:11:00] massive ambitious goals. I mean, things in our life that we wish existed or wish were a different way or things that would really bring us joy and fulfillment.
We all have a standard amount of work we're doing. Let's just say it's Monday through Friday, nine to five or whatever it is. And we tend to spend the time away from work, not doing the things that are truly fulfilling to us because we're tired.
Or we don't have the energy, or it's not the right time to start, or it's something that's challenging me. And I know the payoff would be great, but I'm a little bit uncomfortable. We get off at five, we get home at six, let's just say, and all we really want to do is eat, sit in front of the TV, decompress, decompress is a word we use a lot.
And by then it's time to wrap it up and, and, and start over. And where's the personal fulfillment in that? The reality is if we weren't so tired from work all the time, if we were finding more fulfillment in what it is that we [00:12:00] did. Not only will it be more fulfilled overall,
we'd probably want to use our free time in ways that fulfilled us even more. We would want to pick up that phone and call that person we've been meaning to call. We would want to pick up that book and learn about that thing we've been dying to learn about. We would want to take that trip. We would want to go on that hike.
We would want to exercise more. We would want to do all of those things if work wasn't bumming us out so much. But that is the thing about being human is we have the ability to control how fulfilled we are at our work. We have the ability to either change work, what we do, or we have the ability to ascribe new meaning to the things that drain us.
We have the ability to change our mindset around our work. And find joy and purpose and fulfillment in it every single day, even when it's hard, even when we're not doing exactly what we would prefer to be doing. We control that.
That's the beauty [00:13:00] of that one in 400 trillion chance of being human. If you're truly miserable with what you do. I would suggest you change what you do if you're really miserable, but you're not really miserable with what you do. You're just miserable with the circumstances. I would challenge you to ascribe new meaning to those circumstances.
And what I think that you'll find is that we tend to come from a place of lack of fulfillment because we allow ourselves to be so emotionally drained every day with our work that we just let the time away from work, slide away from us. We spend time decompressing, we spend time just hanging out, we spend time relaxing, we feel like we just need a rest from work a lot of times.
And in that period where we're resting our whole life, the things that we want to be doing, the things that on a personal level, we really want to accomplish the things that would bring us real joy and fulfillment. And time just gets away because we're so exhausted from work, but what if we [00:14:00] weren't exhausted?
What if we carried that idea of personal fulfillment into our work every day? What if we ascribed new meanings to the things that really twisted us off about work? You're a human being. You absolutely have that power within you. You have that control right now. You have the ability to change and ascribe new meaning.
To the relationship with the manager that you have a lot of tension with, you have the ability to change and ascribe new meaning to the blessing that is that 90 minute commute each morning, because what a great time to turn on your favorite podcast and learn something. We have the ability to ascribe meaning to anything we want in our world.
It is our power as human beings. And it's what gives us unique ability to have the experience that we want to have, no matter what external variables are out there. Use that power. You are a 1 in 400 trillion gift in this world, and you have the ability to live your life in a fulfilled way every single day.
There's no such thing as work [00:15:00] life balance. There's just life, and you're living it right now. And you have the power to choose how you're living it right now. I would love to hear what you're doing to ascribe new meaning to the things that exhaust you about your work life and how that's bringing you a greater sense of personal fulfillment.
Drop a comment below, get in touch with me. I really appreciate you watching another episode and I look forward to talking to you soon.