Balancing Family and Coaching

Balancing the Job You Love
With the Family You Love

 

Coaches, have you ever paused for a moment or taken the time to reflect on the balance you’re keeping between your family and coaching?  I know that can be a tough question to ask yourself, but there may not be a more important one to consider. In fact, take a moment right now and ask yourself two things:,

1. If things keep going the way they are now, when I’m done coaching will I consider myself successful?
2. If things keep going the way they are now, when I’m done coaching will my family consider me successful?

In all the busyness of coaching—the juggling of endless responsibilities, the pressure to perform, the people who are depending on us day in and day out—sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in simply trying to survive. Our coaching life ends up like Bill Murray’s character Phil from Groundhog Day. We go through the grind of each day, lay our head down at night, and wonder what we could have done better … only to wake up and do it all over again the next morning.

With this never-ending cycle, it can become easy to neglect the little things, or what seem to be the little things. However, if we don’t pay enough attention to those things, they will add up and become massive issues. Before we know it, our most prized possessions—our families, spouses, and/or children—are left standing in the background of our lives where they are hurting, left out, and forgotten.

The crazy thing is … WE NEVER MEANT FOR THAT TO HAPPEN.

All the pressure and responsibility continue to add up, and eventually it can take over our lives, whether we realize it or not. As coaches, we battle and try to survive, and all of a sudden what we should be valuing the most, finds its way to the bottom of the totem pole of our priorities. I’ve seen this scenario become all too common for many coaches. I hear about it all the time. And while it’s unfortunate, our coaching life doesn’t have to end up this way.

 

 

I have a simple challenge for us as coaches. I challenge each of us to take a timeout today. A timeout to pause and reflect on our own lives. As we take this timeout, there are three basic steps that we must honestly contemplate in order to evaluate our coaching/family balance.

 

1. Decide now how you want to look back at your life.

• What things do you envision bringing a smile to your face?
• What type of legacy would you like to leave?
• Who do you hope you will have had the most impact on?

 

2. Prioritize the most important things in your life first.

• Be intentional.
• Don’t plan your life around your job. Plan your life, and work your job.
• If you were to give away your time as your most precious gift, how would you divide it and give it away?

 

3. Do life together.

• Find ways to involve the ones you love in the things you love.
• What role(s) will your loved ones play in your coaching career?
• What role(s) will you play in supporting their hopes and dreams?

 

The way each of us chooses to implement these things into our own life may look different for each of us, and that’s just fine. The important part is pick something specific that you can do in each of these categories. It should be both intentional and measurable. Take the time to consistently evaluate (i.e. daily, weekly, monthly) how successful you were each of the three areas, and how you can improve in them as well.

While considering these three steps, it’s also important to visualize, and trust, in our desired outcome. Let’s live a life defined by victory and not failure. A life filled with love, happiness, and fulfillment. Lip service isn’t enough. Our families deserve our best. Just as Benjamin Franklin once reminded us, “Well done is better than well said.”

Let’s face it, winning as a coach is great, but those victories become so much sweeter when we experience them with the love and support of our families.

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