"This year, it’s going to be different! I’m not going to be a slave to my desk. I’m going to focus on me a little more.”

These words are famous every new year. And yet….. we always fall back into the same routine: work, work, work. Here’s the first step in the solution.

My good friend and Performance Psychologist, Phil Jauncey, explains that there are only four reasons we fail at anything:

1. We don’t know what to do
2. We don’t know how to do it
3. We don’t have the skills to do it
4. We don’t want to do it

Believe it or not, for most people, the biggest reason they forego ‘work-life balance’ for ‘work’ is down to reason number one: They don’t know what to do.

Put more simply, they haven’t really defined what it is they want.

The biggest reason work gets our attention is that the ‘What’ is incredibly well defined. We have budgets, sales targets, KPI’s…. the list is endless. And this is really appealing to our hardwiring – we see where we want to go, how far we’ve got to go, and we tend to focus on those things.

By contrast, let’s take a look at the other areas of our lives that constitute ‘work-life balance.’

1. Home and Relationships
2. Self

How clear is the ‘What’ for these things? Chances are it’s no well defined at all. But being clear on what you want in these two areas is the first step in being able to achieve work-life balance …… or more accurately ‘work-life performance.’

In my workshops and keynotes, we call these MIT’s or our Most Important Things. The reality is that if you don’t define what’s Most Important, then someone else will define it for you, and that’s where your attention will be focussed – often without you being conscious of it.

Take a look at the video to find out more and see some key exercises to make this work.