Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart – “Intentionally Re-Balance Your Life”

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Transcript:

INTENTIONALLY RE-BALANCE YOUR LIFE

Doug McMillon One of the questions

I get asked a lot is about life balance, or work-life balance. No doubt, it’s a challenge for everybody. Everybody that I’ve ever met who’s pursuing a career has got that kind of re-balancing that we go through from time to time to try and get it right. I think your spirit and your faith are obviously a very important part of that equation. You know, your health and all of those things. Those dimensions of who we are as people need to be factored into the equation. In my case, it’s a real priority to me to have a strong relationship with my family. I have not been perfect in that area, but I’ve learned over the years that it’s important for me all the time to be pursuing my spouse, to be courting her. If you don’t, you can get off track. And to be pursuing my children and have strong relationships there. Those were priorities to me, and Walmart, my career, fulfilled a lot of other things that I wanted – competition, teamwork – those kinds of professional things that I was pursuing. And I didn’t need a lot more. You know, my family and my career have been important to me, along with my faith. Being intentional and deliberate is an important part of balancing your life. An important part of being who you want to be, and deliberately, choicefully giving things up that aren’t as important to you is something that all of us need to be thinking about. If you don’t, you’ll get distracted, spread too thin, and what’s most important will suffer. You will look up at some point and regret how you’ve invested yourself. For anyone, I think what you are in pursuit of is, “What’s the right mix for me? What are the things that are most important to me? What are the priorities that I have?” You will get off track, just like I do, and like everybody else does. Every once in a while you will need to re-balance, stop, and think about “How am I allocating my time? What am I pursuing? What am I thinking about?” So that when you look back in time, you feel good about the balance you created in your life.

[Special thanks to Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash for the cover photo]