Winning the Week (eBook)

Introduction

It’s 6:15 on a Friday night, and you’re coming home at the end of a hard week…

Not the kind of week where all the lights turned green and everyone laughed at your jokes, but sadly a regular kind of week, where you tried to spin all the plates and some of them crashed to the floor. You’ve been through the wringer, and let’s be honest: it shows. Trudging through the front door, you drop your bags and toss your keys onto that little shelf with a mirror (technically, it’s called the foyer mirror). You can’t help but catch a glimpse of yourself in that mirror, with tired eyes but bravely holding it together. Then you swiftly move on because it’s Friday night, damn it, and you’re determined to get as much “happy time” as possible. Bring on the Chardonnay!

But wait. Something happened there, and you missed it. Rewind the tape.

That glance into the mirror was the critical dividing line between your work life and your personal life. Let’s pause right here and give this moment its due. What did you see when you looked at yourself in the mirror? It’s natural to look a little haggard because the week was a battle. But did you feel like you were the winner of that battle, lending your struggle dignity and purpose? Or were you the loser, returning home under a cloud of shame and self-doubt?

I playfully call this the Foyer Mirror Test. That moment when you enter through the door and set down your keys, you are at a critical fork in the road: This is where you decide whether you won the week or lost it.

For most people this happens unconsciously, but this tiny decision has monumental ramifications. If you decide that you were victorious, you go on to treat yourself like a hero returning from a glorious battle. Putting your phone on its charger, you eagerly embrace home life. You change into comfy clothes and blast your favorite playlist. Pouring a glass of wine, you toast to yourself, and that first sip is pure celebration. Despite the exhaustion (or maybe because of it), there’s a sense of accomplishment and pride. If you think about work at all, it’s to exult in your victory and possibly brag to your partner. Feeling genuine closure on the week, you give yourself permission to become a person again, not just some employee on the eighteenth floor. This is the best version of yourself at the end of a week, and if this were how we all felt on Friday, the world would be a much better place.

Sadly, this isn’t the way this story goes most of the time. There’s a “defeated version” that goes more like this:

That moment you look in the foyer mirror, you unconsciously decide that you lost the week. You can’t put your finger on it, but a faint cloud of guilt and anxiety follows you around. You keep replaying scenes from the week in your mind—your brain’s way of trying to get closure. But it’s not working. Despite your best attempts to shake it off, you can’t stop thinking about work—which is ironic because at work you couldn’t focus on the task at hand for wanting to think about anything else. Now back at home, you’re stuck in “work mode.” You begin cooking dinner as if it’s yet another problem to be solved, another obstacle to overcome. In fact, all of your interactions at home just seem like more problems, sucking the joy out of moments that should have been savored. Pouring your second glass of wine, you realize that you can’t remember drinking the first one, much less enjoying it.

As a productivity coach, I have heard variations on this same story thousands of times. In the “victorious version” of the story, a person comes home, gets closure on work, and proceeds to enjoy their life. They genuinely feel restored after a weekend like this, and come Monday they’re chomping at the bit to get back to work and tackle big problems.

But I’m sure you can guess that, more often than not, I hear the defeated version of this story. The version in which the person can’t get closure on work, so they can’t allow themselves to relax. Stuck in zombie mode, they feel the weekend slip by too fast. In the best-case scenario, they are able to force a smile and make a good show of it, but their heart isn’t really in it. In the worst cases, these are the weekends when they wish they had a do-over. Either way, come Monday, they are exhausted. It doesn’t take long to burn out when you’re having week after week like this.

Having coached so many people on the front lines of their productivity battle, I’ve come to believe this is a nearly universal phenomenon. Every person has a moment, whether they detect it or not, when they decide whether they won their week or they lost it. And that decision determines whether they allow themselves to release the past and come fully into the present to enjoy their life.

The Conqueror’s Curse

Last year I was having lunch with a friend who was visiting me in Medellín, Colombia. Surrounded by oversized greenery, tropical flowers, and bird calls, my friend conceded, “You’ve got a pretty good life down here. But…isn’t it draining to be constantly working with underachievers and burnouts?” I almost choked, then burst out laughing. Are my clients underachievers? A bunch of low-performing burnouts?

Quite the opposite. Most of my clients have stunning résumés, and they operate successful brands and growing businesses. They include executives at top tech companies and even famous Hollywood actors—people who have climbed to the heights of their profession.

No, people don’t seek me out because they lack success. They seek me out because they aren’t enjoying their success. In some cases, they are straining under the weight of success. These people have been winning big for the majority of their adult lives, but that’s precisely the problem. Life has a way of loading you down as you climb to the top. We just collect more responsibilities: marriages, homes, kids, volunteer and work commitments. And a big life can weigh a lot. At the same time, we steadily lose the energy—and even the passion—that we once had—just when we need it the most!

This phenomenon is what I call the Conqueror’s Curse: winning life’s battles when you’re young loads you down with more territory you have to defend as you get older. You’re spread thin and fighting on multiple fronts, even as the energy you once had for the fight diminishes. If you knew how driven and independent my clients were, you’d understand what a bitter pill that is for them to swallow.

Some clients come to me because their progress in life has slowed to a halt. They know they have the potential to do more, but they are so loaded down with responsibilities, they can’t seem to move an inch. In fact, they start to sense that the tide of the battle is shifting against them. Often the best they can do is mount a brave defense, keeping the enemy at bay to maintain their position for as long as possible. But any victories they have are quickly eclipsed by the sense that they are nevertheless (slowly) losing the war. Without that forward momentum, their valiant efforts just give way to frustration and defeatism.

Other clients come to me in denial that the tide had turned against them. They don’t want to see that they are losing more weeks than they are winning. But deep down, they still feel it—that creeping sense of dread, the permanent low-grade anxiety—which means that, more often than not, they deny themselves permission to live their life to its fullest. This makes a twisted kind of sense because it’s impossible to relax when it seems like the enemy is at your gates.

Worst by far are the clients I call “grinders.” These are highly motivated individuals used to putting their head down and doing hard work. Their entire life, their superpower has been ignoring pain and just “getting the work done,” but all the things they stuffed away in youth are now exploding like a volcano in midlife. I’ve seen the results firsthand, and it can be an ugly reckoning.

Let me ask you: Is this ringing any bells? Do you give it “your all” at work, but still feel like you’re falling behind? Or do you feel trapped beneath your potential while all your energy is devoted to keeping your head above water? And because of that, are you denying yourself permission to enjoy your life?

Nearly Working Myself to Death

It sure rings bells for me, because I lived that life too.

In July of 2010, I was in the prime of my career. I had just been promoted and was now one of the youngest senior equity analysts on Wall Street. I was making regular television appearances on financial news networks like CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and Fox Business.

But instead of flying high, I was flat on my back (literally), recovering from surgery in a hospital bed. This was my second surgery to battle the runaway effects of an intense but mysterious autoimmune disorder. I’ll spare you the gruesome details of how my digestive system went awry, but it wasn’t pretty. I had tried hard to ignore it for as long as I could, hoping it would go away. But now it was affecting my work, taking me out for days or weeks at a stretch.

I wasn’t a hotshot—I was a hot mess!

My doctors were puzzled by someone so young suddenly starting to see critical system failure. As happens so often in the case of autoimmune diseases, the doctors couldn’t agree on a diagnosis. And the treatments they had tried weren’t working. Finally, one doctor thought to ask me, “How many hours are you working, by the way?”

“Never less than eighty hours a...