I read an article recently about lessons learned in that illusive work/life balance. I so enjoyed it i took the key themes and wrote some of my words around them.

You are as good as those you surround yourself with. I see too many people thinking only about themselves and i have fallen into that trap before. Hence i have learned over time that you can only be successful with the teams you surround yourself with. That goes for work and personal life. Work is about having a team built on mutual respect and trust and who can leave personal egos at the door and find value in working together.

In your personal life it is about surrounding yourself with truly close friends – it isn’t about the numbers but about the closeness of them.

The race is not a sprint but a marathon. Isn’t it always the case that we are in such a hurry for something to happen and sometimes we need to take a breath and enjoy the view and the journey we are on – it will be over before we know it and i want to look around rather than behind and wonder what i missed.

There are things we cannot change such as time – the day will always have 24 hours, the week will have 7 days – we need to accept that things will happen in their own time and for sometimes their own reasons. Take a deep breath and pace yourself.

Keep getting up after you are knocked down. I have had my fair share of falls both personally, career wise and financially. It sucks and you feel so low. For some reason i kept my head down and plowed forward when this happened and it felt really hard at the time. I am more proud of that than most things because it is sometimes too easy to give up.

Giving leads to receiving. Especially as i get older i have learned that giving is so much more fun than receiving and you really need to focus on that. We all have so much we can give, even on a daily basis, that we should always be focused on that. I also believe that if you continue to give then it will pay dividends later. I have also learned to spend more time with friends and family as time is the most precious thing we have to give and we need to ‘spend’ it wisely.

Take time to recovery. We drive ourselves sometimes too hard nowadays in our work and personal life. It seems to be constant running around and little time to actually sit still. I am craving more and more of that time to rest and recover and many of us (including me) will make excuses and not make that time. We need physical breaks (rest in a training schedule is part of the schedule) and mental breaks. The physical ones allow our bodies to recover stronger than before and our mental ones can do the same and free our minds to think wider and freer.

Reading these kinds of articles makes me think and inspires me to look at things differently.