New Year, New You? Is Your Life as Balanced as You Think It Is?

Brett Trainor (00:01.706)
Welcome back to another episode of the Corporate Escapee podcast where we help GenXers find their what's next. Today we're going solo again and I thought this was a perfect time as this is being released in late December 2023 and you know most of us are have some downtime in the holidays so I thought now would be a perfect time to talk about what's next, what's your next. In order to do that it really starts you know with you.

Episode is new year new you right? I think the key thing is to figure out is your life is balanced as you think it is and more importantly Where do you want it to be? Too often we rush off into the next thing. I think back in my corporate career was you know climbing the corporate ladder It was clear where I wanted to go didn't have to be in that same organization Right. It was the next promotion. It was the next job title. It was the next level of responsibility

Obviously money comes with that. And it was what we knew, it was what we were taught to do. It wasn't until about four years ago that I figured out that, you know, there's more to this career than just, you know, the corporate, the corporate path, right? We would find a lack control going that direction. And there's never been a better time to find and start a different path. As you guys know, I talk a lot about.

Gen X and helping them escape corporate. And I'm really focused on helping, how do you monetize that experience and that expertise? So a lot of folks with not a lot of experience that are building seven figure businesses. So with your 20 to 30 years of experience, can you imagine what you can do? But before we get to that aspect of it and what does that business look like? What are the revenue streams?

I thought I'd take a step back and give you a couple of tools and frameworks to help you think through where you're at, what's really important to you. And so this is going to be broken into three pieces. The first one is finding your light balance score. I couldn't think of a better title for it, so we just called it what it is. And you know, it's going to help you put into perspective, you know, where you're at today, what's important to you.

Brett Trainor (02:25.654)
And quite honestly, where your priorities lie. So this is gonna be a great baseline to figure out where you're at today. Step two is your time allocation. Where are you spending the majority of your time? We'll get into that back in my corporate days. Way too much time was spent in the corporate. But again, it helps to actually see these numbers. I call them black and white, but they're estimates. But you can see how much of your week, month and year.

is going towards your job versus family hobbies etc. So we'll talk about that. And last but not least and I think really the most important piece of this is to think about and identify what you really want. Too often we just again go through life chasing that promotion wanting to make more money. I want us to get to the Gen X speaking for myself. You know empty

Brett Trainor (03:21.346)
you know, for the most part, I'm looking at what's the next phase. Uh, so my wife and I really sat down to define what do we really want in the next, you know, three to five years and 20 years, right? With medicine and health, you know, we, we plan on being along around for a long time and does corporate fit into that for us, it absolutely did not. So anyway, we'll get into that, um, exercise as well. And just for reference, I have PDF versions of all of these. So just email me at.

Brett Trainer or BT at Brett Trainer.com or connect with me on LinkedIn and message me. However, you want to connect with me, just let me know and I'm more than happy to send over the PDF versions of these. All right, so step one is life balance scorecard. And I'd say over the last six months, I've modified this a bit. It started with the three. It was just financial flexibility and freedom.

but I realized there was more aspects of my life that were important that I wanted to measure and to make sure that I was balanced, one to as many as seven, but settled on five. I thought five makes sense. It won't be a priority to all of you, but it makes it a little bit easier, right? Five, 10 point scale, you got 50 points total, see where your score is. All right, so the first.

The first area is control, right? I used to think about flexibility and freedom. In the corporate, you don't have a ton of that. Your schedule is kind of mandated around the corporate job, your vacations, you're requesting the time off. I think work from home from the pandemic, post pandemic, gave us a little bit more flexibility. I don't know if it gave us freedom, but it definitely didn't give you control.

And maybe that's enough for you. And that's why it's important to say, hey, what is your score on a scale of one to 10? How much control do you have in your life right now? And part two of that is what is the ideal, right? All right, so once you got control, two is relationships. I look at this as family and friends. Maybe it's colleagues, business colleagues, if you would really enjoy that aspect of it. Again, think about your life today and where is it? Do you have enough time? Are you spending enough time with family and friends? Or do you want more? Give yourself a score.

Brett Trainor (05:41.026)
Three, this is an area that I always struggled with just because of timing is health. And I've expanded this more than just physical, but also mental, right? Are you able to work out every day? Are you eating right? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you stressed because of the job? Are you worried about layoffs? Right, so look at that score as an aggregate. And again, one to 10, one being the lowest, 10 being the highest, and figure out where you're at today and where you'd like to be.

Again, this was a big one for me because like I said, I plan on living to 100, but active and healthy in order to do that, I'm going to have to be healthy. So I had to make that a priority in my life and part of the balance. And so I had to make sure that I freed up time for it. The fourth one is financial. Again, super important. One of the reasons is when I left corporate was I wanted to become financially independent, control my revenue.

Obviously had to make more money to cover the cost of some of the benefits and other pieces of it. Again, when I left corporate, this was the most important. It still is really important to me, but it's not the end all be all. I found a lot more balance with it. But financial independence, think about where you are. You might have some stability because of the corporate salary. Maybe you get a good bonus. Maybe they took the bonus away. The benefits are paid for.

and you've got some security. So again, look at financial, where you're at, where it needs to be. And fifth is purpose. This is one I didn't have on there to begin with because I thought work was just work. It's to get the paycheck, to pay the bills. But as I've gotten deeper into the solo business and helping and working with other corporate escapees, I get a lot of satisfaction from...

You know, if we can get one more person, create the awareness that the opportunities are out there. If you're unhappy or your life miserable, if however you want to put it in corporate, that if we can get you out, you know, I get a lot of satisfaction from being able to one kind of champion the message, but two, like I said, trying to help 10,000 Gen Xers get out. You know, we're going to do that one at a time. We'll figure out how to do it in a mass market, but you know, one at a time. So just to recap. So you've got, you know,

Brett Trainor (08:01.074)
One to 10, one being lowest, you got control, which is kind of flexibility and freedom. Do you have control of your life? Relationships, which are your friends and family. Three is health, both mental and physical. Four is financial. Are you financially independent? Or can you get there? Do you see that path forward? And last but not least is purpose. Are you finding the fulfillment in your career and in your life, right? I think that's what I find a lot of folks I work with.

is they're looking for that purpose now. So when I did this, if I was in corporate, I went back in data because obviously this is a tool I created a little bit later. You know, my corporate score would have been around 24 out of 50. Not ideal. There was a lot of gaps. A lot of things. I was way out of balance, especially earlier in my career. It was really out of balance. Missing kids, events, traveling when I didn't want to, etc. Just the things that we did. Now I do

Update my score on a quarterly basis just to make sure that I'm in balance and think about Where I want to be right now at the end of the year. I'm at 38 So much better place, but I still have some room for improvement and this is kind of where I start and set my goals Part two of this tied to The the balance aspect it is time allocation, right? This is a little more tactical

And what I want you to do is again, I can email and send you these PDFs if you message me. But it's going to be broken into four areas and time allocation is during, you know, week, on average week or you look at a month over the course of the year, however you want to look at it into four areas. There's work, family and friends, health and fitness and hobbies. So not quite the same as the balance. You could probably align them if you want.

I just found that the day to day of my time wasn't necessarily spent in those specific buckets. It was just more like I said in the search for that balance. So feel free to add a different or additional categories if there's other things that you do during the course of the week. But my guess is if you're still in corporate that work bucket is going to take a big chunk of it. I guess you could add sleep in there. So but the way I was looking at it is time allocation of your.

Brett Trainor (10:26.678)
you're waking hours. And yeah, I think work for me was probably at 1.80% or maybe not quite that high. But family and friends suffered. Obviously, the family took second or not second, but the second most amount of time health and fitness is when I could get into it. And hobbies, right, I had to take time off and work to get the hobbies done. So if that resonates with you, this one doesn't have to take a long time. But again, I like to see the baseline.

Where it is and at the end of the year, it's a good time to look back and think about where was your time? Allocated across those buckets and you know start to think about what is the ideal? Where is? That right mix of me spending my time that's gonna allow me to achieve that balance. All right So again, just a quick reminder its work family and friends health and fitness and hobbies And just think about it. You can break it down as a percentage or whatever works best for you

But again, use this as your baseline. And as you move forward, start to chart against it and say, hey, am I making progress? Am I spending more time on the things that I want to spend time on? So all right, so part three is one that I found my clients and the folks I work with. This is and can be really the most difficult one. And it's really, it's what do you really want? I put the really in there. You know, grammatically, they try to take that out and say, what do you want? But.

You know, it's, it's what do you really want? I never really sat down and thought about this since maybe my early days, post college, when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, you know, maybe there was a brief moment when, you know, I was still in corporate before I went into management consulting thinking, you know, what is it, what I want to do now, right? At 50, is it going to be more in corporate? What works for me? I've got a short attention span.

And where's my skill set? It's in go to market. So consulting made sense to me, but I only looked at it from my career and not from my life. I didn't sit back and think about what's really important to me, what do I want? What are my goals? Three years, five years, 15, 20 years. Again, if I'm gonna live to 100, so let's say I even live to 80, I've got 30 years, right, that I need to.

Brett Trainor (12:50.434)
prepare and how do I want to live those 30 years? You know, I think about it in, again, I'd like more 80-20 rule, right? The 20% will give you 80% of the return. So think about it this way. But when you start to really write down what you want, and I would include or encourage you to include, you know, your spouse, partner, family.

to include what they want out of the next 20 to 30 years. Because if you're fighting down two different paths, it's going to be really, really difficult. But again, use the buckets that we talked about before. But this time, instead of, yes, I want more freedom and flexibility, or I want more fulfillment, start to put real ideas and goals into those place. For example, financially, maybe you want to make a half a million dollars in revenue a year.

Maybe it's a million dollars. Maybe it's only two hundred thousand, but you got to think about that revenue target to achieve your other goals Right. So from the freedom and flexibility standpoint, maybe you only want to work, you know Two days a week you want to do it remotely and you want The ability to do it from anywhere in the world because you're gonna travel So you got to start tying these together so the financial goals can help you achieve the freedom and the flexibility goals

and then also include the fitness, the family and friends. You wanna spend three days a week with the grandkids, maybe more, maybe less. You wanna move to where they are. You wanna beach house in Florida. You wanna lake house up in Wisconsin. Really start to think about what do you want these next 30 years to look like? Because I found if you don't do that, you just keep going and chasing the day to day.

But when you've got concrete goals, it's a whole lot easier to work towards. And like I said, the feedback I get from folks that have gone through these exercises, that this one takes a while. Because again, they've never thought about what they really want and what are their goals and what do they get wanna get out of the next 20 to 30 years. And if you don't wanna even think that far, not a problem. But I just find this exercise super helpful in starting to align.

Brett Trainor (15:09.822)
right, the type of work that you can do. I probably should have done this version of the newsletter and the podcast before the four paths you could take from your career stay in corporate, et cetera. I'll recap that later. But I just thought this was really important and a good time to kind of set that benchmark and the groundwork to see where am I at today? Where do I want to be?

and then start working towards it. I guarantee you, once you start doing this and start working towards those goals, you're gonna see where the biggest disconnects are in your life and starting to figure out how to connect them. Too often I have folks that say they're in corporate and they wanna go straight to, I'm gonna become a fractional, which is great. I think every one of us, right, that's been 20 plus years in corporate could go down that path, but does that make the most sense for...

the other goals that you're trying to achieve. The one thing that I spend a lot of time and focus with folks is the biggest thing is we've got multiple ways we can monetize our expertise. So let's figure out how to do that, where we leverage and hit your other targets. Like I said, you could work 100 hours a week, make a ton of money, but you're probably gonna sacrifice a lot in the different areas. So I wanted to use this podcast just to

um, level set and lay a foundation for what you can do in the future. I think the next podcast, I'll go deeper into what those different revenue streams are and how people are monetizing their expertise. But like I said, I highly encourage you to spend some time going through this process, especially if you're not working or you got some downtime between Christmas, new year or the early start of the year before things really start ramping up. So.

Again, just to recap the three things, find your balance, what's your scorecard, what's your score look like today. Go through the time allocation. Again, hopefully it's probably going to be in line with where your scorecard is or where you want it to be. And then lastly, really map out what you want and be super specific about it. Again, there's no wrong answers with any of these. I just find when you're in alignment with what your goals are, what you want from balance and your time.

Brett Trainor (17:35.082)
it's a whole lot easier to get where you're going versus just, you know, winging it. I've always been a fan of winging it, but once I start to put some structure in process, ironically, it actually gave me more free time to do the things that I want to do because I did put in some of that structure. So again, email me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to share the PDFs. And if you're interested in, in some custom coaching, I do take on a few

clients from time to time to help you through that journey. If you want somebody to go with you through that. Let's talk. Appreciate your time. Happy holidays. Happy New Year to everyone. And we'll catch up with you next year.