I don’t know about you…

But I rarely miss an opportunity for a conversation. It has been my experience that some of the best moments in life are in learning about other people’s stories. If you aren’t someone who is curious about what other people have going on, I would encourage you to consider becoming more so.

Amy and I were in Indianapolis this week.

I had the opportunity to speak to a group of 50 managers about self-care, worry and stress, urgency vs importance, and how to climb the right mountains. I led an afternoon workshop so we had time to grab breakfast at the hotel and I enjoyed an excellent crab cake eggs benedict. Our server was Shanita but it was Randy who caught our attention.

We struck up a conversation…

Randy had done a little of everything and he was the guy you could tell had a million stories. Randy had all these stories because he had been there and done that. I always wonder how someone like this with all these big life experiences ends up as a breakfast server in Carmel, Indiana, so we talked for several minutes and laughed together.

He shared an experience from a bar in Germany…

I still don’t know why he was in Germany but that wasn’t the point. He was sitting at the bar and two women were speaking in broken German English and he asked a few questions. They both agreed they were exhausted because they had been working like Americans. Randy said that particular phrase hit him hard in a really busy time in his life.

It hit me like a ton of bricks…

Because it is true. Americans work at a pace that much of the rest of the world doesn’t understand. We don’t boundary our work very well. We don’t love ourselves very well. For some reason, we feel as if we need to be everything to everyone at every time of day. We go hard. At the same time we are also crazy distracted and don’t necessarily accomplish a lot. But we sure do work hard! Or maybe we just work a lot. Is it really much of a surprise that we suffer from overwhelm and burnout?

So who has it wrong?

Is it the rest of the world or us? Maybe a little of both. Here’s a couple questions we can ask ourselves-

1. Are we living to work or working to live? This is an honest question that needs an honest answer. Is you life centered around your job? Do you have some margin?
2. What boundaries have you set? Are you work-available 24/7 or do you get a chance to shut it off?
3. How well are you taking care of yourself? You can’t pour from any empty cup for any extended amount of time
4. Are you exhausted all the time or have you built in rest and margin?
5. What are your habits like? Are you doing things daily that are consistent with who you want to become?

Wherever you are…

It’s not too late to go to work developing a life you love. You don’t have to just work like an American. This is THE chance we get at life. I don’t know about you, but I don’t care to have my headstone say he sure worked a lot. I would much rather have it say he did the best he could and made a difference with his one shot at life. How about you? What do you want people to remember after you are gone? How hard you worked or how you made them feel? And if you need an example of how I screwed this up… check out this blog. I have done some research.