Achieving Work Life Balance

How to Increase Life Worth While Balancing Net Worth

5 Tips from Former Businessman of the Year Gary Kunath

For anyone who isn’t getting enough out of life, especially workaholics, Gary Kunath – a business consultant who works with some of the world’s top corporations and schools – says it’s time to wake up!

“I’ve been on both sides of the wealth divide, so I know how important money is to those who don’t have it, but if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that money doesn’t make you rich,”

Says Kunath, a speaker at top U.S. business schools and corporations.

“Once you have money, however, the myth of how your life will be better with it is erased; money changes nothing about you – it just allows you to buy more things.”

Leading Corporations are Aware That Most Professionals Today – 70 Percent – Would Trade a Pay Raise for an Increase in Personal Wellness.

“But employers are struggling with that. A new American Psychological Association survey released in March found that 48 percent of employees say their employers don’t value a good work-life balance.”

More professionals are trying to find a path to life worth, rather than centering their behavior on net worth, Kunath says. He offers five ways career-minded individuals can achieve both:

• Look for signs you’re falling into the net-worth trap: For Kunath, those signs were clear. One day, he says, “it was like someone had smacked me on the head,” when his son, then 12, walked away in dismay after Kunath said he couldn’t play baseball with him. Actually, Kunath could spend the day with his son. So he did. The next occurrence included a mental and physical breakdown after Kunath pushed himself to make an unnecessary business trip while sick. After a 19-hour ordeal in a delayed flight to Spain, “…I knew in my bones that if I did not draw the line right there…I would ruin every part of my life that mattered to me.”
• Make yourself employable (because nobody is essential): Unless you are self-employed, you are always vulnerable to someone else controlling your professional destiny, and therefore, your life worth. But employees can empower themselves by diversifying their skills so that they can have more choices about where and for whom to work.
• Embrace adversity: No one enjoys the worst, most painful moments of their lives. Nonetheless, life events like getting fired, divorced or becoming seriously ill tend to define us to the core. These moments should not be repressed, forgotten or overlooked.
• Believe in something bigger than you: There will be times when you are utterly helpless, with no control over an outcome. All the money in the bank, all the authority at work will not do any good when it comes to, for instance, the death of a loved one. Believing in something bigger than you is an important part of having life worth; it helps you maintain your emotional health when you face life’s biggest challenges. Likewise, help your fellow man, because what is also bigger than any individual is the whole of humanity.
• Spend time on what matters most: As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” Our time on Earth is not very long. For every evening spent late in the office there are moments professionals miss out on – time with family, pursuing a passion or simply time with good friends after work. “We should actually enjoy the fruits of our labor,” Kunath says. “At the end of our lives, we don’t look back fondly on filing reports at 8 p.m.”

---