Holiday Wellness 101: Reclaiming Life When Work Takes Over

What to Do When Your Calendar Has No Room for “Life”: Part 2 of 5 in Our Holiday Wellness Challenge for Leaders

Image from 16personalities.com

Want to experience this post as a podcast? Paying subscribers can find the audio at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!

You’re sitting at the holiday dinner table, surrounded by family, when your hand instinctively reaches for your phone. Just a quick check of work email, you tell yourself. Before you know it, you’ve missed your daughter’s story about school and your partner’s knowing sigh speaks volumes.

Sound familiar? For many leaders, this scene repeats itself not just during holiday gatherings, but throughout the year – a subtle but persistent reminder that somewhere along the way, “work-life balance” became just “work.”

Welcome to Day 2 of our Holiday Wellness Challenge, where we’re tackling one of leadership’s most insidious challenges: the gradual erosion of personal life in favor of professional demands.

Today, we’ll explore how to reconnect with the ‘life’ part of your work-life equation, starting with a counterintuitive approach that might just transform how you protect your personal time. Because contrary to popular belief, the solution isn’t necessarily about working less, but prioritizing differently.

As a quick reminder, here’s what you can expect throughout the 5-day Holiday Wellness Challenge:

• Day 1: Silence Your Inner Scrooge

• Day 2: Rebalance Work and Life (You Are Here)

• Day 3: Deck the Halls, Not Your To-Do List

• Day 4: Unwrap a Clearer Mind

• Day 5: Give (Yourself) the Gift of Gratitude

The Silent Surrender of Personal Time

It’s a trap that many high-performing leaders fall victim to – what we call the leadership equivalent of the boiling frog syndrome. The slow, imperceptible way your personal life gets squeezed out of existence starts innocently enough: a quick reply to an urgent email during dinner, a brief team check-in during your child’s soccer game, or postponing that gym session to handle an emerging crisis.

Before you know it, your workday has no clear boundaries, your hobbies are distant memories, and your relationships exist in the margins of your calendar. You feel connected and on top of things at work but disconnected from the rest of your life.

The question keeping so many leaders up at night: how did we get here, and more importantly, why does trying to reclaim personal time feel so...guilty?

Still a free subscriber? Upgrading to a premium subscription will give you access not only to this article but also to the full Holiday Wellness Challenge and the entire archive of articles published in Leadership by 16Personalities.