Do You Have Margin In Your Life?

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Recently I was coaching a client who identified one of her core values as flexibility.

When I do work-life balance coaching, I focus a lot on values. I ask clients a series of questions about their chosen words. Those questions typically are:

1. What does this value mean to you?
2. How is it currently showing up in your life? How are you living this value now?
3. What do you need to do to get more of this value in your life going forward?

When I asked this particular client about how she currently demonstrates flexibility in her life, the first thing she thought of had to do with planning and scheduling. She said, “I schedule a meeting with my spouse to plan vacation days each year with a priority of taking trips in the summer.” She also schedules her kids’ basketball games, her golf lessons, and her Pilates classes into her weekly calendar.

My immediate thought was, Wait a minute… How is scheduling and planning related to flexibility?

When I initially think of the word flexibility, I think of fluidity, being spontaneous or flexible to change on a dime. And you might associate flexibility with these things too. So imagine my delight when my client was teaching me and reminding me something about true flexibility.

The core principle is this: the foundation of flexibility is structure.

It’s not just about being able to bend and twist when forces are applied.

Also, flexibility is about preserving margin.

What is margin?

I heard this great definition of margin from a book called Margin by Richard Swenson.

Swenson refers to margin as the space between our loads and our limits. Having margin is the opposite of being overloaded and overscheduled. The consequence of being at our capacity with no margin is a thought spiral that typically looks like:

• I should be able to handle all this.
• I don’t need any help.
• I should be grateful for all these opportunities.

And then you suck it up, withdraw, isolate, and double down. But at what cost? It’s only a matter of time before you either get physically ill or lash out at someone you love and have an unwanted conflict.

As humans, we are wired to live in tribes, to have help and to also have downtime. We are wired for rest, just like all animals.

We’re told to add more, do more, and say yes despite what might be a feeling in our guts. And after our professional training ends, we continue on in this vein. It becomes expected that we’ll add that extra patient into our schedule during lunch hour,ta sy for that extra case at the end of the day, etc.

Another coaching client is working on placing boundaries at work because she has a hard time saying no to things like adding patient visits to her already full days, or even requests during appointments by the patients themselves. How have we been dealing with these issues?

Through structure and organization.

She decluttered her office to make space for efficient charting and set the tone in her environment for efficiency. She moved around her time slots for patient visits such that it allows for processing time in the middle of the day when it’s not super busy in the clinic. And she’s working on scripts to say to patients or staff when she’s caught off guard with asks and wants to say no but doesn’t know how.

How I do margin for better work-life balance

I have personally built a lot of margin into my life. I work in a stressful environment (the hospital and particularly the OR), but I deliberately do it part-time. I know this is not an option for everyone, but it works really well for me because the cumulative stress of the OR adds up after repeated days. I start to feel it by Thursday or Friday of a given week. I love that after one week of working in the OR, I always have a significant amount of time off so I can recoup, and when I go back, I feel very energized again.

If you work in the OR or in a similar high energy work environment, you could experiment with getting at least two to three days off after a certain number of days. The specific number is going to be different for everyone, as you’ve got to figure out where your individual limit lies. Some questions to ask to find the limit: When do you start to feel unhealthy? Possible manifestations include worsening sleep quality, impaired digestion, feelings of heightened anxiety or sadness, or possible snappiness when interacting with family, friends, and coworkers.After how many days of work in a row or how many weeks of work without a break longer than a weekend do you start to see these things showing up for you?

The other way I preserve margin in my life is by making sure I don’t take on too many projects or roles at a given time. Now, it’s not like people are knocking down my doors with asks and I have all these opportunities to consider and say no to… But when I’m thinking of taking on something new, like speaking at an event or writing an article, contributing to someone else’s work, or even writing another book, I always consider margin.

When I’m faced with these situations, I think to myself, How is this going to fit into my life right now? What’s the timeline for this new endeavor? This is an important question because I’ll squeeze the margin a little bit for something that has a short timeline, Another question I ask myself is, What do I need to eliminate or relax if I’m going to add this thing in?

How you can increase margin

What are some low-hanging but practical things you can do to increase your margin? I have a few suggestions:

Spend time daily alone – for prayer, meditation, or reflection of some kind. Have you ever noticed or maybe heard other people say when they have a problem to solve at work or something that’s been weighing on their mind, they go and do nothing or they go take a walk or take a shower, and then suddenly the solution comes to them.

This is the power of building some stillness into your life on a regular basis. When you have a regular practice of this nature, your creativity and focus improve for other tasks and decisions that need to be made. If you need some help adopting a regular mindfulness practice, I’ve written some articles about it here and here.

Know your values and use them to decide how to spend your time. Do you know your core values? If not, you can get a free exercise by going to the main page or the Get In Touch page of this site and putting your email into the purple box. You can also find lists by searching “list of core values” on the internet.

Take a look at the words and ask yourself which words on the list speak to you. Which words matter most to you in your life? You can also ask questions like, Which words come to mind when I’m thinking of what I learned during significant points in my life? (These could be high points or low points.) What words represent things or people that I love or that inspire me? What gets me really fired up?

You’ll want to narrow down your core values to three to five words, and then use them to make decisions about how you spend your time. If you get an ask and it’s not a “hell yes,” learn how to say no. My book Lean Out has a whole section on this, but there are other resources if you search for that term online as well.

A good starting point for learning how to say no is to simply build in a waiting period of, say, one day before you ever say yes or no to anything that is asked of you.

Decrease distractions. Pick one social media platform, app, or entertainment channel you use regularly but can identify as a significant time suck… and try eliminating it.

For example, I do not watch TV. I watch a little Youtube many nights, and I might watch a short series over a very short period of time, but I don’t subscribe or really keep up to any of the shows that I see people talking about on social media. I also don’t watch sports events. Try this for 30 days and see how it goes, and if you really miss whatever it is you gave up, by all means add it back in. But maybe consider trying another elimination and see if that helps. We could all use less distraction in our lives at this point!

Schedule in your flexibility. Two recent guests on the Lean Out Podcast talked about using this tactic themselves. Maria Colon Gonzalez goes so far as to add read book or walk the dog onto her calendar, and I love that concept. Dr. Una uses scheduling to make sure she gets in her fun activities and balance activities because otherwise she knows herself and she has a tendency to overwork. I personally add to my calendar things like workouts, content creation, taking my daughter out on a little “date,” journaling, and even reminders to do self-care tasks like take supplements that I tend to forget.

I hope these tips were helpful to you today in thinking about margin.

Take a moment and think about your life right now.

Do you have margin, or are you overloaded and overscheduled?

Are you thinking that you’re “flexible,” but what you’re really doing is bending to fit everyone else’s expectations… or do your yeses and nos follow a simple structure?

Share your thoughts with me by leaving a comment below!