Today a personal and quite pensive post, inspired by last week seeing a social media memory of a post from six years ago that made me think of lessons I learned around finding balance in life and work.
Over many years in Cayman, my work became progressively more and more international. With that, and despite being an early adopter of video meetings and remote work, often that did mean flying to meetings, conferences, to run retreats, strategy offsite for clients etc. This amount of travel was always pretty intense, but it ultimately grew to a level far beyond what felt balanced.
That social media chart above was for 2015. Over the course of about 330 days that year, I flew 115 times, covering 159,045 miles, crossed the Atlantic 20 times, spent over 16 days cumulatively in the air, and, perhaps the most telling, going through Miami airport a massive 90 times. In fact, on multiple occasions, I flew back from a long trip late in the evening only to turn around the next afternoon and fly back out again.
Though I was absolutely loving my work, to say my life was out of balance at that stage would be to understate things.
By the end of 2015, then, I was at a point where I knew things had to change so that I could consciously choose a life that would ultimately serve both me and the people I cared about for the longer term. Tough and radical though some of those changes were, I followed the Abraham Lincoln maxim: “the best way to predict the future is to create it” and instigated some major life and work changes such that by mid-2017 I had moved to London, leaving Cayman, my home for the past 27 years.
The transition was difficult and full of challenges as well as opportunities, but, as we come to the end of 2021, my life and my work feel much more balanced. I know I am content with the present I have created for myself, I hope and believe the same is true for those I also impacted through instigating those changes and that we are all now in a position to predict the future by creating it.
PS other than when limited by Covid, I still fly far more than the norm, but more and more it is simply to see family and friends across the Atlantic. My days of overnight turnarounds and a fully packed rolling bag always by the side of the bed are, thankfully, in the past.