Listening to the ABC this week, I heard a topic come up that has been taking over my mind quite a bit in the past few months. Anyone that has got me started on a tangent of the importance of de-stressing in the workplace would know that I have started to gather some amazing facts and figures around this. Well amazing or frightening, you decide. The question put forward was “how bad would you feel if you had to take time off to care for a relative that was having a ‘mental breakdown’ day compared with how you would feel if that same family member meant you had to take off to care for them if they had a broken leg?”. To put it into perspective, for my family, one of my children went through 12 months of being bullied, but rather than giving the support required and taking the time to find out what was happening and why, I kept working and hoped that school could deal with it. Luckily, we had access to an amazing social worker who did help them through this period. I ask though, if that child had broken her arm, how much time would be considered ok to take off. I can guarantee more than what I was offered for the issues she did have. Now, I ask, what do you do when you have too many personal pressures? I can tell you most of us keep dealing with them. Then we sit at work tired, upset and quite simply not enjoying life because we have too much stress going on outside of work. Then we get home and ignore the kids because “there is just too much to do”. Eventually, we will take time off. Maybe annual leave, where we book everything we can into that week that we need to take off to get all those things on your personal to-do list done. Or maybe we take a “sickie” and spend half our morning in the GP clinic trying to actually look sick so they’ll give us at least one day off, if we look bad enough we might get two. Then over time, the stress gets worse and we may end up going to counselling. But unfortunately we don’t let anyone know that quite simply we just have too much going on in our personal lives to take time out to rejuvenate. I can tell you that this story keeps going and it can end very badly. So, from reading this newsletter so far, if you have resonated with what I have been harping on about I have a challenge for you. My challenge is that I want you to talk to your workplace about what procedures can be put in place to help to deal with those mundane personal tasks that don’t take long, but there are so many of them, and they are so constant that eventually they cause you to take leave to deal with them rather than taking leave to rejuvenate. Of course, I would suggest an on-site concierge (bias to our service of course!). At Life Balance Essentials we are happy to come to your workplace and speak directly to you about how we can help. So, you want to know the top three reasons why using Life Balance Essentials will stop you saying ‘there is just too much to do’

• Reduce your to-do list: Take a look at the list you have on you today. Do you need to do everything on that list? If you could email your own “personal assistant” with half of that list, would that be a relief?
• Life admin is time consuming: Do you have that pile of paperwork sitting somewhere in your house? Mine is usually on the left hand side of my desk. Imagine someone taking care of that paperwork or even emails by putting dates in the calendar for; bills to be paid, events to attend, bookings to be made, etc. Imagine having someone that can speak to the NBN people for you and even wait at your house in that 4 hour timeslot they’re famous for.
• Do what you want to be doing on the weekends, not what you have to be doing! Do you ever hear yourself saying ‘I would love to go to the gym today but I just have so much paperwork to get through’ or ‘kids, I would love to go to the beach today but I’ve just go to much to do.’

Stop the guilt that we all feel when we haven’t achieved everything we should in a day and start asking for help.

Until next time, stay healthy, have fun and keep your life in balance!