The Human Being Behind the Entrepreneur
By Zev Asch, BeMore Columnist
Edited by: Lennard Goetze & Daniel Root
We spend a great deal of time talking about entrepreneurs as founders, CEOs, business owners and leaders. We evaluate them by revenue, growth, market share, employees, acquisitions and exits. Those measures have their place. But there is something very important hidden underneath all those titles.
There is a human being.
Behind every business owner is someone who goes home at night. There may be a spouse or partner waiting. There may be children, parents, friends and people who depend upon that individual in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with quarterly revenue. There is also a person with a body that needs to remain healthy, relationships that require attention, interests outside the company and, hopefully, a life that continues to have meaning beyond the business.
That is why I describe my work as business transformation, rather than simply business coaching. Over many years of working with entrepreneurs, I have become increasingly convinced that transforming the business alone is not enough.
The human side is more complicated.
A business owner can build a successful organization while simultaneously creating an unsuccessful life. Revenue can increase while a marriage deteriorates. The company can acquire more customers while the founder loses contact with friends. An entrepreneur can become increasingly visible professionally while becoming increasingly absent personally.
That is not transformation. At least, it is not the kind of transformation that interests me.
There is a question I believe entrepreneurs should occasionally ask themselves when nobody else is around. Forget the boardroom. Forget LinkedIn. Forget the employees and customers for a moment. Look at yourself in the mirror and ask: Why am I doing this?
Then ask another question: Is what I am doing today leading toward a life I will someday be proud to have lived?
Those are very different questions from asking whether the company hit its numbers.
Most people want more than financial rewards. They want to look back and feel that they accomplished something worthwhile. They want to know that they affected people positively—their employees and customers, certainly, but also their families, friends and communities. We want to feel that our presence mattered.
That, to me, is fulfillment.
The phrase work-life balance sometimes creates the wrong image. It suggests that work belongs on one side of a scale and life belongs on the other, and our job is to keep them perfectly even. I am not convinced life works that way.
Entrepreneurship has seasons. There will be periods when the business requires extraordinary attention. There may be a launch, a crisis, an acquisition or a financial challenge. At other times, the greater priority may need to be family, health or simply recovering some personal space.
Balance, therefore, may be less about dividing hours equally and more about making sure that one part of our identity does not permanently consume all the others.
This requires something entrepreneurs are not always comfortable practicing: boundaries.
If the company cannot function without you for an evening, a weekend or a vacation, that may not be evidence of your importance. It may be evidence of an organizational weakness. Building a capable team, delegating responsibility and developing other leaders are not merely management practices. They can also protect the entrepreneur's life.
If your health suddenly removes you from the company for three months, does the organization continue functioning?
That is both a business question and a human question.
Perhaps the most important transformation occurs when entrepreneurs stop seeing themselves exclusively through the identity of their companies. You are not simply the person whose name appears on the incorporation documents. You are a spouse, parent, partner, friend, neighbor and individual. You have relationships to nurture and experiences still worth having.
The objective should not be to build a successful business at the expense of a successful life.
The objective is to build them together.
Because eventually every entrepreneur will have to answer a question that cannot be measured on a financial statement:
Did I build something meaningful—and did I remember to live while I was building it?
ACTION POINTS: A Human Audit for Entrepreneurs
2. Audit more than your business. Evaluate your business, relationships, health, friendships and personal fulfillment. Growth in one area should not continually require deterioration in another.
3. Identify what only you can do. Separate responsibilities that genuinely require you from those you continue doing because you have difficulty delegating.
4. Build a company that can survive your absence. Develop people, systems and leadership capacity so the organization does not depend entirely upon your constant presence.
5. Protect human appointments. Put family time, exercise, friendships, vacations and personal commitments on the calendar with the same seriousness you give business meetings.
6. Create a personal disaster-recovery plan. Ask what happens to your business and family if illness or another unexpected event removes you from day-to-day operations.
7. Measure impact, not simply income. Periodically ask whose life became better because of the company you are building—including the lives of the people closest to you.
8. Remember who owns whom. You created the business to serve a purpose in your life. Be careful that, somewhere along the journey, your life does not begin serving the business.
THE HUMAN REACH Building Genuine Relationships in an Age of Digital Noise By: Lennard M. Gettz, Ed.D / Bobbi Kline, MD - and Foreword by: Zev Asch  The Human Reach Workshop transforms these principles into an engaging educational experience, encouraging participants to examine how they connect, contribute, collaborate, and build stronger professional communities. Together, the books advance a distinctly human proposition: technology may expand our reach, but people give that reach meaning. |
WORK-LIFE BALANCE, PART 2
The Life Behind the Work
By Dr. Bobbi Kline
I have come to believe that these are important questions, but they are not the whole question. The deeper issue is not simply how we divide our time. It is how the life we are living is affecting the person we are becoming.
Medicine taught me discipline, responsibility and service. It also taught me how easily accomplished people can normalize exhaustion. We learn to function while tired, carry emotional weight without discussing it, postpone personal needs and remain productive even when something within us is asking for attention. The professional world often rewards this capacity. Eventually, however, the body, mind and spirit may begin keeping a different accounting.
That realization has influenced how I now think about balance.
Our bodies are not separate from our careers. Chronic stress, insufficient sleep, inadequate movement, poor nutrition and the absence of recovery do not remain neatly outside the workplace. Similarly, our minds cannot indefinitely absorb responsibility, uncertainty, conflict and information without requiring restoration. And there is another dimension that is less easily measured but equally important: the part of us that needs meaning, relationships, curiosity, joy and a sense that our lives are larger than our professional identities.
This is where my thinking about NOURISH becomes relevant.
A mind-body-soul approach to work-life balance therefore asks something more sophisticated than, Am I working too much? It asks: Is the way I am living sustainable for the whole human being?
For physicians, entrepreneurs, executives and other high-performing professionals, this question can be uncomfortable. We are accustomed to measuring success through outcomes: patients served, businesses built, publications completed, revenue generated, organizations led. Those measures matter. But they do not tell us whether the person producing those outcomes is thriving.
As I have evolved professionally, I have become increasingly interested in that distinction. Professional evolution should not require personal erosion. Achievement should expand a life rather than gradually consume it.
Perhaps the most useful measure of work-life balance, then, is not found on a calendar. It is found in the quality of the human being behind that calendar.
Are we healthy enough to enjoy what we have built? Are we present with the people who matter to us? Are we still curious? Are we still growing? Do we have space to think, feel, recover and imagine what comes next?
Those questions bring us back to nourishment—of mind, body and soul. Because ultimately, a successful career is only one part of a successful life.
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