How do you ensure a balance between work and personal life, and what practices help you manage stress?
By: Eddy Goldberg | 4,280 Reads | 11 Shares
When I worked in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s reporting on the nascent personal computer industry, I heard a lot about how many hours a week people said they worked. (Okay, it was 99% men in their 20s and 30s.) As if spending more hours at work were a badge of honor. A few years later, long-distance interviewing a computer engineer in Germany, I was happily floored to hear him say, “Are Americans so inefficient that they have to work so many hours?” Yet, as you well know, for a multi-unit restaurant franchisee, balancing your work and personal lives is often more complicated than in most other professions. So, how many hours are you putting in at work?
Want more? In August, we posed the same question to more than a dozen multi-unit restaurant franchisees. Click here for their responses.
Franchisee Bytes: What is your biggest current or ongoing challenge?
HANNIBAL MYERS
Company: President & CEO, Global Restaurant Hospitality Group, LLC
Brands: Church’s Chicken (41) in Southern CA and Western AZ
Years in franchising: 32 (27.5 on the franchisor side, 4.5 as a franchisee)
In 1992, Hannibal Myers made the move from an IBM account executive to franchising, joining Taco Bell as Senior Team Leader—New Concepts. From there, he served in leadership and executive positions at Wendy’s, Church’s Chicken, and Shoney’s before moving into non-food concepts UFC Gym (President), Everybody Fights (President of Development and Franchising), and CYL Sauna Studio (President). In 2019, he founded his present company, focused on his Church’s locations.
Finding a balance between your work and personal lives and managing stress is a challenge that face many working adults in fast-moving, high-energy occupations. This is doubly true for entrepreneurs in franchising. For me, an added factor is the fact that my work as a franchisee aligns with my passion for being of service to people, helping people to live their best lives professionally and personally when I can, and spreading optimism that the best is yet to come. This makes work more like play and can tend to result in my getting lost in the time spent in pursuit of making it as impactful as possible.
To work toward achieving some aspect of balance with my family life, I try to set defined time blocks for my work tasks, with limiters for the inevitable instances of tasks bleeding over their allocated time allotments. Given how dynamically our lives as entrepreneurs can change from day to day based on the needs of our businesses, I try to allow myself some grace when my best-laid plans in this regard get sidetracked.
The combination of 1) working to increasingly hold myself on task in giving my time to others or to projects, no matter how impactful or rewarding the effort, and 2) being flexible in that pursuit when warranted helps me to alleviate the potential stress I might otherwise begin to feel when so many different pursuits are vying for my time.
Finally, perspective is also all-important for me. Balance does not mean a consistent 50/50 allocation of time or effort. Many times, achieving the desired professional or personal outcome requires devoting 100% of my time and energy toward a particular professional or personal goal for a defined period of time. Once the objective is accomplished, the pendulum may swing fully toward an objective in another sphere of life. Being careful to spend the time and energy where it’s needed, when it’s needed, and with full engagement, for me, has worked to keep the path through life fun, rewarding, and stimulating.
Professionally and personally, it’s always about the journey… and the journey is always heading toward the next bend in the road.
– Source: Franchising.com
– Source: Franchising.com