Why Work/Life Harmony Is Better Than Work/Life Balance

Jeffro (00:01.123)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, I’m joined by Matt Bonelli, a business coach and entrepreneur who helps real estate agents and other driven professionals build lives full of purpose and balance through relationship driven businesses. Matt’s insights into achieving this harmony between work and life, connecting deeply with your clients and the impact of personal well-being on business success will be invaluable for you guys. So pay attention, especially if you’re navigating feelings of burnout. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt (00:26.641)
Thanks so much, Jeffro, for having me. I’m excited for this.

Jeffro (00:29.592)
Yeah, me too. I think it’s important that we talk about this sometimes because we talk so much about strategies and tactics that we sometimes forget that we got to work on ourselves, make sure we’re in a good place to actually execute on those tactics and everything.

Matt (00:41.435)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, everybody who started a business or even works as an independent contractor got into it because they had a dream life that they had. And a lot of times people end up being driven by the business more so than their lifestyle and they burn out, right? And that’s what we try to avoid.

Jeffro (00:49.057)
Yeah.

Jeffro (00:56.172)
Yeah. Well, and we hear that term work-life balance a lot, but you prefer the term work-life harmony. Can you tell us a little bit about the difference there?

Matt (01:02.543)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. mean, so I kind of came across work life balance early on in my career when I was working on Wall Street and everybody was talking about gotta have balance. Now I was, I was young, didn’t have kids and everything at the time. And so it was like work hard on the weekdays and then party hard on the weekends, or sometimes just party hard at night and work hard during the day, even if it is a Saturday.

And at some point I got out of finance, got into real estate and was still kind of had that mindset of work on work on the weekdays, enjoy the weekends and just look for balance. And one day I figured like, Hey, I got it. But like, I’m super stressed at trying to keep balance. And so I started consuming a lot of entrepreneurial content, people like Gary V. Right. And people would ask them all the time, like, how do you balance your work in your life? And no one ever seemed to have a really good answer. And what I recognized is it’s not about balance. It’s about.

creating something bigger than that, which I’m calling harmony and some other people do as well, because if you picture your life and your work as a sheet of music, right, very balanced music is kind of boring, but harmonized music that has, you know, all of these crescendos and descendos and all these different things that happen in it is a lot more exciting and more fun. And it’s okay to recognize that sometimes you got to be all in on your business, but we also want to make sure we’re all in on life at some point, because ultimately,

This thing called life includes our business too, right? Life is life. Work fits in there. So if you think you’re doing more work than life, then your life is work. And so if we can figure out the harmony, then life will come first and the work will get built into it.

Jeffro (02:40.343)
So let’s say kind of once we make this shift and once you had this realization, how did that impact the way you approach sales and client relationships and how you spend your time?

Matt (02:50.779)
I’d love to say it was like this aha and like a switch flipped and then everything changed from there, but it was more like this very slow slog through the mud for me to really figure it out. But it started to put me in the path of asking better questions and determining, okay, how do I want to weave in a sales business with life? Because, know, sales is kind of integrated into life. And even if you’re in a service business, everybody…

should probably hone their sales skills because you’re selling either your own service or yourself or your abilities at some point. And particularly with real estate, which is where I work is like a lot of the relationships that drive business are also some of those relationships we have in life. And so I uncovered different trainings and things like that and started to say, okay, how can we build the lifestyle first and then map the business to it? And so it.

Took many years and I’m still, you know, working on these things for myself as my businesses grow as well. But it’s like, how do I surround myself with the people that I enjoy and then integrate that into the business? Because the people that I have fun with could also be clients. They could also be mentors. They could also be business partners. And that’s actually, I’m grateful that two of my, my two of my businesses, my business partners are actually friends. And that’s kind of how we got into it, which is great. So it just kind of cued me up to say, Hey, ask better questions.

look for the next thing, if it doesn’t feel right for you as a system, then it may not be right. And there’s something else and there is something out there for everyone.

Jeffro (04:17.109)
And I think it’s going to be different for everyone, obviously. There’s no answer to say, OK, this is the schedule you should have, and then you’ll have balance. Because every business is different, every person works differently, and you have different goals, different stages of life, whether you have kids or you’re married or single. And so I like the emphasis on asking the questions, because you do have to take a step back and figure out, how do I even want this to work for me? What is my ideal setup where I would feel balanced?

Matt (04:40.315)
Yeah. Yeah. I think like Jim Rohn had said at one point, like if you don’t design your own life plan, then you’re going to end up on someone else’s plan. And that’s where most people end up is like, well, you know, this is what works for Matt. So maybe that’s what I’ll apply in here. And it’s totally fine to go test and do things that other people do. But if you just try to mimic it, you soon realize like, wait, my goals don’t map the same way. And now I’m on this path that isn’t helping me achieve what I want, or I’m not figuring out the right ways to scale and let go of the certain things that

for some reason I’m holding onto that maybe I could let go, which can free me up over here and on the life side and help the business run better probably at the end of the day.

Jeffro (05:19.338)
Yeah, and I think you alluded to it earlier, but this didn’t happen overnight, right? And so that’s another thing. If you sit back and say, okay, I want to do the four hour work week, right? You can’t just start that tomorrow and expect to be making the same amount of money. You’re going to have some problems. So sure, you can make a plan to get there, but all right, what can you do now that’s a step in that direction? And then kind of iterate on that and make tweaks as you go and as you grow and as you get some of these changes in place.

Matt (05:33.809)
Yeah.

Matt (05:46.503)
Yeah, exactly. Your income per hour might go up dramatically if all of sudden you cut your working hours, but then your income might start to go down overall. One thing I, it took me a while to figure this one out because I was always on a track of setting like the next year’s goal, right? And so it just said, Hey, this is a goal I have for next year. What do need to do to accomplish it? Let’s deploy that and go after it. And that works for, you know, so many years. And then you have these life events like getting married or having kids that start to change your thought processes on life a little bit.

Jeffro (05:49.939)
Yeah.

Matt (06:16.283)
And I was like, well, how does that change the larger vision? Because if we actually start by thinking long-term, thinking 10, 15, sometimes even 25 or more years out of what do you want that life to look like? Then start to walk yourself back to today to figure out, okay, what is a step that I can take then in this next year so that this next year isn’t some ultimate goal that I’m going to achieve. It’s just the next level. And then…

I can work on this like playing a video game, right? Everybody’s excited to get to the next level and maybe even get to the end. Although there’s some games that are endless life is one of those. Like it is basically an endless game until obviously someday we’re not all going to get out of this alive, but the next year is not the end of it. It’s just a stepping stone. So if we can map the next year to our longer-term goals, it’s going to be a lot easier to see the forest through the trees, so to speak.

Jeffro (07:08.043)
Yeah, and I think it’s important to recognize we don’t always know what the next level looks like. Like we might have some vague idea of what it’d be like to make X amount of money, but we don’t think about, okay, well, that means I’d be running a company that’s doing this much revenue with this size team, and I’d need to be able to handle this, this and this. Right. And so you’ve got to get really detailed and break it down to work backwards if you ever going to achieve that. Right.

Matt (07:32.859)
Yeah, that’s a great point, you because we don’t always know and there’s the unexpected things of like, cool, I’m a solopreneur, I’m running this company and maybe you’re handling sales and deploying the service at the same time. And then now all of sudden you got to hire people and it’s not working. Why is this not working? It’s like, well, do I want to be a leader? Do I want to manage people or do I know how to? Because everybody can, but you get to decide, hey,

wait, those things, I didn’t see that coming here where I hired somebody and they stole from me as an example, or they hired from me and they just weren’t really as good as they said they were. What do I do now? And then all of a sudden that’s just a bump in the road and we think, man, I missed my year target because of this thing that happened. It’s like, it’s okay, we learned something and then we’re gonna grow from that. That’s why these one year settings, I think, you we overestimate what we can do in one year, but we grossly underestimate what we can do in five. And so it’s like, okay.

Let’s just use those years of stepping stones and learning experiences to get to these bigger goals that we have.

Jeffro (08:30.324)
Yeah, and this is the perfect reason to have a mentor, right? Because they’ve been ahead of you several years maybe. They’ve seen what it’s like. And so they can set you up to move in that direction and help you hit those milestones or make those tweaks that need to get you where you want to go.

Matt (08:46.685)
a hundred percent. think everybody should be seeking knowledge from others. mean, who we surround ourself with is really kind of how we’re going to evolve over time. And so one, you got to audit the people around you, but find those people that you want to be like. And it doesn’t have to be someone who’s already at the top, right? Because it might be one, it might be tough to access that person. And two, they’re in a different, they’re playing a different game at that point. It’s we want who’s

who’s a few steps ahead of you that you want to be like, and you can kind of ride together a little bit. Because you can also add value upward in those mentor mentee relationships as well, which is really cool.

Jeffro (09:23.562)
That’s true. And that requires knowing the value you bring, which is, I think, hard for some people, especially if you have someone you look up to. You’re like, what would they need from me? I know I can help my clients because I got my service, but what does this guy need? He’s already telling me what I need to do because he’s done it. how do you help someone even feel like they can provide that in that mentor-mentee relationship?

Matt (09:26.959)
Yeah.

Matt (09:48.807)
Yeah, there’s a lot of mindset stuff there. I’m sure you’ve been there too of like, how do we figure out my own value and understand it and believe in it? And then there’s like, okay, well, if I’m working on that and maybe I don’t understand the value, let me just go figure out what value is there to be needed. So ask questions because the reason why people who are at the top or where we see at certain levels,

The reason why they understand the value of others is because they’ve been there. They’ve needed that value. They’ve asked all the questions and have had the conversations with the customers to discover what value is needed. So the same thing can work in an upward direction, you know, and it’s, like building a relationship. Yeah. You’re not going to maybe ask a mentor like, Hey, what do you need to grow your business? Cause like, well, that’s what I’m here to help you with, but learn about who they are as a person. Cause the value doesn’t have to come in the business. Maybe it is helping them with something else. Maybe.

Your mentor is working on getting fit and you happen to be passionate and know a lot about it. And you kind of through conversation be like, Hey, why don’t you try this or this with your nutrition? And all of a sudden it changes their life. They’re going be like, man, this is an incredible relationship to have. then, then they kind of pull you along even faster when that value gets deployed. And so it’s, it’s asking the asking questions, not even the right questions, just asking plenty of questions. So you can think of like, Hey, what’s the value that this person needs? And is there a way that I can provide it or connect it?

in some form, some form.

Jeffro (11:14.088)
So is just asking more questions the way to get towards asking better questions? Or is there some kind of framework that you go through with your clients to help them ask the right questions of themselves or of their mentor or whatever as they go through the process?

Matt (11:29.307)
Yeah, I think there’s, there’s a lot of kind of prescribed questions given a certain scenario, but it, but starting with practice makes perfect. If we never even try to ask questions. Cause I asked a lot of questions where I figured out, what are the right questions to ask? Cause sometimes you ask questions and you’re getting just yes, no answers. Right. And so asking questions more in a conversational way, or if you need a yes, no, then have what’s the question that follows up a yes, no, so that you can get more information. I think when it’s.

Relationship building, you know, there’s four categories that people really focus in on, on their own selves, right? They’re, they talk about their family and their friends. They know about that. They know what they do for work and are interested hopefully in what they do. They have things that they enjoy to do outside of work for recreation, and then they have big dreams. So if you take those four categories, some will call it Ford, family, occupation, recreation, and dreams. Those are the categories that are probably easier to ask questions in to learn more about someone. And from there.

you can then just see where the conversation goes. And if there’s anything that seems interesting or there’s more behind it, one of the best questions is, or it’s not even a question, it’s a statement. like, tell me more about that. Or how did that make you feel? Or, you know, what did that lead to? Some type of question that just invites them to continue the conversation because people love to share their story.

Jeffro (12:49.252)
I mean, that’s really helpful and I like the Ford acronym. What about the questions that you have to ask when you’re trying to find that balance? Because you’re not necessarily talking to somebody else. You might be sitting at home talking to yourself, laying in beds, during at the ceiling. So what about those questions?

Matt (13:03.547)
Yeah. mean, one question, what do I, what do I really want? You know, why did I start or it’s kind of like where I began was what do they really want out of this? And why did I get into this in the first place? It was to have a better life, but it seems like I’m just doing this, doing the same routine, but in a different industry. So that’s the first question. And then the next question I would ask is like, how am I actually using my time to help me get to where I want to go? And this, this gets into a whole time audit where you’re looking at. Okay.

Jeffro (13:11.432)
Mm-hmm.

Matt (13:32.347)
What’s on my calendar? What was on my calendar? How am I using my time? Is it effective? And do I actually have my priorities on my calendar? I mean, this would be a fun exercise for everybody to do right now. Pull out your calendar and ask yourself, are the three things that make you happiest in life on your calendar? You know, if you love working out, you, if you enjoy like waking up and getting a morning workout or working out in the afternoon, is that actually on the calendar? If you love spending time with your friends, if you love playing video games,

Is that on your calendar? Because it could be. And then you actually have a purposeful intention of doing the things that you enjoy, which is going to allow you to fit work around it and also make sure work doesn’t consume it. And those would be the foundational things that I would ask to make sure that you’re actually directing yourself before you get into the big dream questions of like, well, where am I living in 25 years? What does my lifestyle look like? And those kinds of things.

Jeffro (14:26.696)
Yeah, and I think through that you have to start setting some priorities and getting better at saying no. You’re not going to be able to say no if you don’t know your priorities. But once you’ve done that analysis and said, you know what, I looked at my calendar, I say family is more important, but I’m only getting like two hours in the evening and the rest is all work. You know, is that what I want? And so that can be helpful to say no to things.

Matt (14:48.559)
Yeah, definitely knows a is a is a great word. And if you don’t have your stuff on your calendar, you never know what you are saying no to when you say yes to something else. You look at your calendar like, I white space. I’ll say yes to this. And meanwhile, you might be saying no to that extra time at home with the family without even knowing it because you just didn’t map it out.

If you map it out, now you know, hey, is it worthy to say yes to this thing and say no to this over here? Because sometimes it could be. Sometimes something could come up and you’re like, this is a hell yes thing that I need to do. And I’m okay with saying no to this. And that’s a great decision to make, but you want to do it informed and your calendar is going to help you do that.

Jeffro (15:27.004)
Yeah, it was a few months ago and you know, I would always, I like working out, going for a run now and then I used to play sports and things, but with business and having kids, you know, it gets busy and it kind of fades to the background if you don’t prioritize it. And so even though I said, yeah, I keep, need to exercise more. Like I wasn’t, you know, I do it here and there, but it wasn’t until I started putting blocks on my calendar for like workouts that I could actually make it happen. And you know, I, I adjusted the calendar to meet.

what I am saying my priorities were, and then I benefited because of that. You my energy levels were better. I was able to focus more throughout the day and get more done because I prioritized working out.

Matt (16:07.473)
That’s so important. And like, I’m sure that didn’t also happen overnight. Like how long did it take you to figure out, Hey, this is now the rhythm and how many different iterations of your calendar did you have to go through to make that work?

Jeffro (16:19.08)
Yeah, there are always little tweaks, but there was a moment where I was like, you know what? This is now a non-negotiable. Like I’m tired of saying, like, I’ll make this happen. You know, like I’ll just, I need to do it. So I adjusted when I could take meetings. You know, everybody’s got their online calendar. So I just don’t let people schedule during the time where I’m supposed to work out, right? That way, that’s what I do. No one else can steal that time from me. I’m not going to give that time to someone else. I’m saving it for me. And so yes, I

Yes, I tweaked it here and there, but it actually didn’t take that long to tweak it and get it to something that worked pretty well.

Matt (16:54.757)
Because you notice that, particularly with online calendaring, it’s like, wait, all I have to do is block this off, and now nobody can compete with me in this space anymore. This is great.

Jeffro (17:03.194)
Right. And you just have to get past the fact that, but what if someone really needed to meet with me about this one thing right at that time? well, like it’s usually not that urgent or important. If it actually is, maybe they’ll call you. You can do it. But like that’s a rare, you know, once in a blue moon type thing, you don’t need to organize around that what if scenario, just optimize for the regular day to day where nothing crazy is happening and you’ll get a big benefit from that.

Matt (17:28.049)
Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Totally agree.

Jeffro (17:32.678)
So let’s see, could you talk about some other practical ways that you’ve seen your clients kind of integrate personal health routines like this or are things that help them improve their overall balance or harmony, sorry, with their work and life? Yeah.

Matt (17:45.189)
Yeah. Yeah. And really, you know, the, difference of the words comes down to like, how do you perceive those definitions for yourself? Like one person’s balance might be another person’s harmony, but, I find like morning routines are a big one, right? Figuring out like, what is the right morning routine for you? And if you go and Google morning routines, you’re to have everybody telling you, this is the right one. This is do miracle morning, do this, do this. And sentence. I’m like, Hey, what are the things that are going to fuel you up? Cause some people are best to like get right into work in the morning.

Jeffro (17:52.869)
Mm-hmm.

Matt (18:14.503)
It’s like, okay, cool. Well, what is then your routine to get out of bed and get right into work? What do you need to happen perfectly for that? And so identifying when your key areas of energy are so that you can deploy that in the right space. But in the morning, there’s a, there’s a handful of things I think anybody can do that’s helpful for good, positive mental energy, whether you’re going to go work out or go to work, which is get up and share some gratitude with yourself. And if you can share it with others, because it’s going to put you in a state of positive energy and attraction versus.

waking up and looking at your phone and being like, gosh, know, John texted me again. I wish that problem would go away. It’s like, no, let’s start with what’s great about your life. What are you happy with? That’s going to change some energy. I’d say getting something positively input into yourself in the morning, whether that’s, you know, reading something or listening to some good music, whatever is good that you like to consume in the morning. Some people will do prayer or devotional or things like that. and then water, get water in water is a big thing that a lot of people miss.

Not just from a health perspective, but a cognitive performance perspective. Cause even just the slightest bit of dehydration, our cognitive performance declines, not noticeably where you’re like, I can’t think of the words to say, or I can’t do math, but your decisions get slower. And then you start to say yes to those things that maybe you should say no to. so gratitude, positive input, hydrate, those are some key things that will definitely help you start to open the door to seeing, okay, how do I create the harmony?

The next thing is, is getting your personal stuff on the calendar first, just like you did with your health and prioritizing that. And then stacking together your business activities where you’re most productive. So like, if you find yourself doing calls, you know, five days a week, let’s say at all different times and their customer service calls, could you just align those all to happen on one day back to back to back? Kind of like, I’m not sure if you do this with your podcasting, but it’s like, wait, why don’t we just do our podcast one right after the other, because we’re in the studio. We’re in the mode.

Those are the things that are gonna help you then be more productive in your business and save more time for life. So those are some things that I would deploy, anybody could deploy immediately and see results from.

Jeffro (20:23.897)
Yeah, no, I like that. And the task switching one is huge. If you can batch tasks together, it does help a lot. But I also wanted to ask because, you know, lot of things we’re talking about, people have heard this before, right? They’ve read books, they see people post about it online. Every new year, you know, there’s resolutions, right? People are like, all right, I’m finally going to do it this year. And maybe they start doing it for a couple of weeks or a month. But then something happens. Maybe they get sick or, you know, they got called in for something that was not on the schedule, and then they never do it again.

So how do you help people make this a long-term change and not just one that they get hyped up about and then it kind of fades away?

Matt (21:01.649)
So when we’re working with our coaching clients, because there’s a customized process for everybody. But the first thing that I always like to do is start with, well, who is the person that you are and that you want to be? Because if we can clearly identify your core values, your mission, and it doesn’t have to be like, we’re identifying this in some way where there’s some snappy mission statement that’s going to get people to do business with us or anything. It’s just identifying what are the things that you

really care about that you don’t want to let go of throughout your life. Because I heard Dan Martel say this, which is, you know, on your tombstone, there’s going to be a date when you were born, a dash, and then a date when you left this earth. And then if you’re lucky, maybe there’s some quote. He’s like, but that dash is the most important thing. And what do you want to make of it? So if we can identify that, then we can then set some goals and map to it. And when we go through goal setting, a lot of the times, the reason why people get off track is they’ll set a goal.

identify the actions, deploy it into their calendar and go, but they forget about, wait, did I get my big rocks in there? Did I get all the personal stuff in there? Did I identify the resources I need? Did I identify standards? And then a big one for me too is, is did I identify roadblocks? A lot of people assume that everything’s going to go perfectly when they deploy their plan. if we like 2020 disrupted a lot of people’s plans and if you didn’t have a backup plan or just some tools in your toolkit to handle it, like

Zoom or things like that, then you feel like you’re stuck. And then all of a sudden life goes on hold and everything goes into the business. And sometimes those are unavoidable, but if you can pre-plan for certain roadblocks, just like if you’re going on a road trip, you’re going to carry like maybe a tire repair kit, a med kit and things in the trunk that you probably never will use. But if you do need them, they’re there and we should do the same thing when we’re setting goals. And so we actually break down.

We have like a whole worksheet to break down people’s one year goals into like those action items, standards, achieving milestones along the way and roadblocks that just kind of helps create that clarity. Cause then it’s easier to stay on track with those things. Cause you know exactly what you’re doing, why you’re doing and how it’s going to get you to your goal aligned with your core values. I know that’s a lot in one kind of thing there, but that’s kind of the framework that we use.

Jeffro (23:15.528)
Yeah. And if you can build into your schedule and process reviewing those goals on a regular basis, whether it’s weekly or quarterly or even daily, that becomes a self-correcting task, right? Because then that’s when you notice, hey, I said, you know, I want this goal, but I stopped doing this thing. I got to get back on that. Right. And so you catch it much sooner.

Matt (23:37.797)
Yeah. I mean, if you can identify where you’re falling down by using weekly planning sessions with yourself and seeing like, Hey, cause if you have a minimum standard of action, then it’s easy to understand, Hey, did I hit the number of calls? Did I hit the number of emails? Did I hit the number of face-to-face meetings that I was supposed to do this week? Did I, did I do my exercise? Did I get my water intake in? if you can see that, then you know where you’re falling down and where you need to get back up. Cause not every day is going to be perfect.

but hopefully we can align enough really good days that overall we have a really good month, really good quarter and a really good year. And I’m happy to share that worksheet that we use with anybody. They can just, you know, follow me on Instagram, hit me a DM, say that, hey, I saw you on Jeff Rose podcast. You know, give me that goal sheet. Just write goal in the comments or whatever and I’ll send it right over to anybody who wants it.

Jeffro (24:25.826)
would be really awesome. Thank you, Matt. Well, thank you for joining me today. We’re at end of our time. I love getting into this stuff. You know, it’s good to take a break from the tactics once in a while because, without, if you’re not in the right space, you’re not going to get very far even with the right tactics and everything. for those of you guys listening at home, if you’ve been feeling burned out, you’re not sure how to right the ship, take a look at the links in the show notes. Matt has a seven day free trial for his coaching program that you should take advantage of.

You can also DM him on Instagram to get that goals worksheet as well. So these are some resources that can help you do something about this guys. Make sure it’s not just another like New Year’s resolution type thing where you get fired up, but maybe think about it a little differently. know, go through these underlying priorities and figure out what you want to accomplish and how you’re going to actually get there long term. So Matt, one last question for you. What’s the one takeaway that you want our listeners to remember from this conversation?

Matt (25:21.415)
The one takeaway I love people to think about is focus. you re structure your language and say, Hey, if I can do life first and focus on harmony, then work’s going to fit in versus focusing on how do I do work first and then balance life in. just flip that equation around and think about harmony. That’s going to just start to lead you in the right direction and you’re going to find your path just fine.

Jeffro (25:45.11)
Awesome. I love that. Well, thanks again for being here, Matt. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you thought this was valuable, please leave a review for the show on Apple or Spotify. After that, take a step back, think about how you can improve your work-life harmony. Take care and we’ll see you next time.

Matt (25:57.873)
Thanks, Jeff Rowe.