Learn Easy Ways to Prioritize Personal Time Even for a Busy CEO

It's very hard for business owners to prioritize their personal care. They think of their businesses as a baby and as the most important thing.?

I recently did a live with fellow neurocoach and busy CEO, Maria Traino where we spoke about this topic of how you can prioritize personal time as a busy CEO, and these are our top tips to help you improve both your personal and professional life.

1. Schedule it first thing!

Once the business day starts it can be easy to get taken off the path and bombarded with a million things so our number one tip is to make sure that you schedule your personal time first thing. Whether that looks like a walk, going to gym or just being still with your favorite cup of coffee for 20 minutes completely undisturbed. Make sure that you give yourself time where you are not constantly giving, giving, giving.?

2. Celebrate with personal time!

One of my favorite ways to put in personal care is when I have a celebration. So if I hit one of my goals, or if something great happens, as a way to celebrate I book in personal time. Whether it'd be a massage or extra time off work, I find that when I tie it to celebrations it gives me that little extra boost and helps to solidify new habits because I am rewiring my brain to understand that there is a reward for doing new and different things.?

3. Don’t buy into the myth of work-life balance

When we buy into the myth of work-life balance we can feel so guilty when we spend too much time at work or/and when we have time off.?

Here’s the thing, there is no such thing as work life balance, because that takes our life, the totality of who we are as complex beings, and breaks up into only two sections, work and life. And work is work and life is everything else, personal care, family relationships, fun sleep, - how can you cram all that into just half of your life?

A great way to reframe this all is that we are all different, all unique and you version of balance will not be the same as someone else’s. A better way to look at things is to accept that this is the whole of our lives and the most important thing is to be able to fill up your personal cup, however that looks.

Because when you are able to fill up your personal cup, when you're able to have strong, healthy relationships, to take care of your personal, spiritual and energetic health, then the way that we show up at work is the kind of person that is going to achieve and grow and motivate and lead and vice versa.?

Another great way to look at this is to think of a marble. If we think about a marble and all of its swirling different colors, we can visualize each of the colors as a different area of our lives. When you turn the marble, sometimes one color might look bigger than the other and then you turn it again and then a different color might be bigger than the other.?

If we imagine our lives as that marble, we can see that all the areas swirl together there, they are mixed together. But at the end of the day, it's perfect. It's perfectly round. It's perfectly whole. And we get to just keep on rolling no matter what comes up.?

4. Pick your priorities?

In these times of Covid? the idea of balance has come more and more into play because work has come into a lot of our homes and has intertwined even more with our family life and domestic chores so we feel constantly bombarded with a never ending list of things to do.?

If you feel this way then the best thing to do is to pick priorities in each area. What are the top three things you need to do in your business?? What are the top three things that are going to make my relationship with my children extra special? What are the top three things I need to do for my personal health every single day?

And then just accept that if nothing else got done that day except for those top priorities that it will be ok and everything else will fall into place.

5. Create containers of time

One of the reasons that we can feel that we don’t have time for us is because we are thinking about a million things at the same time. By creating containers you can help get over this feeling.?

So when you go into work or into your home office, make sure that container, that time is just for work and you’re not going to think about the laundry and dishes that need doing. When you finish work then make sure that is the case and you’re not looking at stuff over dinner, after dinner if you have promised that time to doing something else like spending time with your family or washing up. Stay focused on the task at hand.

6. Hold yourself accountable

A big part of making time for personal care is acknowledging that it is necessary. You need it to feel recharged and ready to be able to carry on supporting your clients, your family and everyone else around you.?

A great little visual game to play with yourself in order to keep yourself accountable is to take a little red Solo cup, and little post it notes. Every time you do a personal care item, write it down on the post note and stick it in the cup. That way you can see how well you are literally filling your own cup!

If you keep it somewhere you can see it every day it also serves as a reminder. When you walk by like, ‘Oh, I haven't done anything for myself today’ you’ll be reminded to take that 20 minute walk for you, or 10 minutes to read a book or go order your favorite coffee.?

7. Get your spouse on board

The other thing I like to advise my clients to do is have a conversation with your spouse about the fact that you want to start putting more personal time into your day. Don’t be surprised at how supportive your spouse will be on this and encourage you to follow through because they understand that when your cup is full then you’re more likely to be more engaged and a better partner.?

Don’t forget that as well as being a leader at work, you can be a leader at home as well and really act as your own advocate for your personal care.?

When we are so passionate and driven about our businesses it can be easy to forget to be just as passionate about our family, our personal care and ourselves. It can seem counterintuitive to think that if you took that break from work and put more energy into your personal life that could actually help you move ahead further. We think that if we step away or out of our business, or delegate, or just stop doing something, then we're going to let our business fail, we're going lose money and it's all gonna come crumbling down.?

But really the opposite is true.?

When we fill our own cups, we're able to give more, we're able to achieve more faster, like we can bend space and time when we're at our optimal energy level. And we're all human. So we can't forget about all this personal stuff.