“I’m spending 2 hours every evening on paperwork!”
“I’m sick of being stuck behind my laptop all weekend!”
“There’s just not enough time to plan my sessions, keep up on the research, figure out what materials to use, or have time to pee and shove my lunch down my throat!”
We’ve all been there.
And chances are we weren’t expecting this when we decided to be SLPs.
Many of us heard how rewarding this career can be (which it certainly is), but few were prepared for what lied ahead…
When I talk to the different SLPs I mentor, I usually hear the same things over and over again:
They want to be able to go to work confident and actually SEE their students making progress…
And they want to do it without sacrificing the rest of their life in the process.
“I want a work-life balance!”, they say.
But what if “work-life” balance doesn’t exist…at least in the way that we think it does?
And moreover, if it does exist… what if it isn’t actually what we really want?
Why work-life balance is a lie.
If you’ve ever wished you had more “balance” in your life, you probably meant that you want to feel more productive, more fulfilled, and more accomplished…
The problem is that if we apply the concept of “balance” literally, and if we go after it like most people are attempting to…we end up getting the OPPOSITE result.
Drained, distracted, and unmotivated to start working through that massive to-do list. And usually, we only get a fraction of the “to-dos” actually done.
If this sounds familiar, I want to introduce you to the “anti-work-life balance” mindset.
This concept is called “counterbalance”.
I first heard about it when I read “The ONE Thing” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.
Keller and Papasan make the argument that having a “balanced” life is a lie.
Being “balanced” means you’re devoting equal effort to multiple things, all the time. The “lie” is the idea that this can exist, and that it can actually make us happy.
The problem with that is that when you never fully devote our attention to one thing, you can’t possibly perform to your fullest potential on anything.
Ron Swanson said it best when he said, “Don’t half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”
When we attempt to live in this “balanced life” where we’re constantly doing multiple things at once, we lose massive amounts of cognitive focus and energy.
The sheer effort of transitioning from one activity to another causes us to exert unnecessary effort and lose focus.
It’s ironic that multi-tasking is glorified as a marketable skill, because it can have disastrous results (think about all the texting and driving that’s going on these days).
What Keller and Papasan propose we do is the opposite of what we commonly think of as “balance”.
That’s why it’s called “counterbalance.”
Instead of being partially committed to lots of things, they propose we be fully committed to fewer things at once.
What this allows us to do is perform at a level that would never be possible if we were to continue “half-assing” everything.
And in the process, it allows us to achieve more, while staying more focused, better rested, and overall happier in our lives.
The rules of counterbalance.
There are of course, some ground rules for applying counterbalance to your life.
I want to make it clear that “counterbalancing” does not mean you’re neglecting any area of your life in an irresponsible way.
It’s simply a way of prioritizing and letting go of being over-committed.
Ultimately, the goal is to make more time for the things that really matter, and eliminate the things that don’t.
Most people are surprised how much time they’re spending on things that don’t matter all that much.
Rule #1: Separate “work” from “life”.
First, you’re going to want to create separate buckets of goals for “work” and goals for “life”.
You want to have counterbalance for each of these things separately, which means you narrow your focus to just 1-2 key goals in life, and 1-2 key goals at work during a given time period.
This allows you to ensure that you’re not neglecting either area for the other.
Rule #2: Family and health are never ignored for work.
One of the biggest complaints I hear from SLPs is that they’re spending “family time” doing paperwork.
I’ve also seen some extremely career-driven people run their relationships and their health in to the ground for the sake of chasing their career ambition.
I want to make it clear here: An excessive focus on one thing that causes you to neglect other areas of your life in an adverse way is NOT counterbalance.
Counterbalance is supposed to help nurture your health and relationships, not destroy them.
And if you’re focusing too much on work not because of ambition, but because you don’t know else to get it done, adopting a counterbalance mindset at work can help alleviate some of that stress.
Rule #3: Intentionally be “out of balance.”
When you’re working towards a goal, you’re going to be “out of balance” on purpose, so you can spend enough time on a task long enough to get in to a “flow” and do it to your best ability.
All this means is that you’re devoting your undivided attention to ONE thing at a time, rather than dividing your focus.
You’re simply giving yourself permission to temporarily ignore other things for the sake of going “to the extremes”.
The “extreme” is what a lot of people call a “flow” state, where you really get in the zone and do your best work.
“Flow” just isn’t possible when you’re distracted.
Rule #4: Don’t stay out of balance too long.
Eventually you have to shift your goals so you can work on some the things you’ve been intentionally ignoring.
The point of getting out of balance is to allow yourself to get to a state that’s not possible when you’re multi-tasking, but you eventually need to shift your focus in order to avoid neglecting other things.
The difference is that you’re doing one thing at a time, versus juggling.
You could take this as literally as you want.
For example, when I’m in the middle of a writing session, I don’t allow myself to get up and stop for a certain period of time.
But eventually, I need to get up and eat, sleep, poop, whatever.
Other times, I need to shift my focus and have days where I don’t focus on writing at all, because my “one thing” that day might be something else.
Now finally, here’s where things get a bit sticky.
In order to actually know HOW to counterbalance when it comes to your job as an SLP, you have to have really solid SYSTEMS in place.
Think of it like this: How can you create a to-do list, or figure out how much time to allot to therapy planning when you aren’t even sure what needs to be done?
This is EXACTLY why so many SLPs are struggling to keep their heads above water despite the massive amounts of materials and resources out there.
There are simply TOO MANY options.
Many of the SLPs I mention in Language Therapy Advance are shocked at how much clutter they have in their therapy rooms (and lives) that they don’t need.
They’re also shocked at the long list of treatment techniques or tasks on their to-do list that are absolutely unnecessary.
When they’re finally able to streamline their process, they’ve finally able to seamlessly apply the concept of counterbalance to their lives…
So they can actually INCREASE their impact on their students’ lives and have more time than they’ve ever imagined to do other things.
Like take a nap…
Go to the gym…
Relax and enjoy their kids’ after-school activities…
Read a book…
Or work on things that can actually make them more money (getting an additional certification, taking on private clients, teaching a course, etc.).
This is all possible if you can figure out the ONE THING to focus on at a time.
Quite frequently, I’ll have SLPs come to work with me in Language Therapy Advance with a handful of challenges:
“I can’t get to all of these language goals in just 30 minutes a week!”
“I’m jumping around all over the place with these goals and my students aren’t making progress on any of them!”
“I’ve been working on reading comprehension and “wh” questions for ages and I’m still not seeing progress.”
They want to figure out how to get to it all.
But as they learn when they go through Language Therapy Advance, they don’t actually have to keep trying to “get to it all”, they just need to get to the skills that make the biggest impact.
This is exactly what we want to do when we “counterbalance”: Focus on one thing at a time.
When they work on a skill, they usually are integrating multiple language skills at a time, but there’s usually ONE key focus of the that’s the highest priority in that session, and in a given treatment cycle.
That “one thing” stays the main thing until it’s time to move on to the next area of focus.
This allows them to address the language skills their students’ need with enough depth that their students get it, rather than jumping around from skill to skill.
FEWER skills. More INTENSITY on those skills.
This results in:
Less time spent planning. Fewer materials to gather. Less stress. Easier data collection.
In my signature program, Language Therapy Advance, I help clinicians find the answers to these types of questions, so they can leverage their expertise and gain more confidence in their clinical skills, and break through therapy plateaus, especially when it comes to supporting language and literacy.
Some of the SLPs who have joined the program have been able to:
… Cut their to-do list in half, and get still get groundbreaking results with students.
… Leave work at a reasonable hour, get their nights and weekends back, and STILL see students thrive.
… Be seen as a “go-to” language expert instead of the “speech teacher”.
… Spend less time digging through materials and research, and more time focusing on helping students.
… Wake up recharged and 100% confident in their language therapy agenda on Monday morning.
You can learn more about how the system works here on our program enrollment page.
