Struggling to find a work-life balance can really take its toll on your wellbeing. You can feel like your choosing between corporate wellness and family wellness, and you’ve seen one to many teen-angst films to know what forgoing the latter might do. So, how about those who are higher up on the career ladder? Surely big-time entrepreneurs find it even more difficult to find family time, right?
Martin Bjergegaard is one such entrepreneur, but has learned the secret of the work-life balance. From his experience of a co-founding Rainmaking (which is responsible for eight startups with a total of £33m in annual revenue and 100 employees with offices in Copenhagen, London and Munich) and helping to raise six-year-old daughter Mynte, he’s written new book Winning Without Losing: 66 strategies for succeeding in business while living a happy and balanced life.
Bjergegaard, whose father was also an entrepreneur, laughs, ‘You could also say that I wrote this book to prove my dad wrong…There was probably a lot of that miscommunication between us, plus he is from a previous generation and he felt he was doing me a favour to prepare me for a harsh world.’ Bjergegaard explains, ‘In some ways, I am the opposite of him, but in some ways I’m similar. Yet I still wanted to show him that being successful didn’t mean you couldn’t have a good life too.’
So what does Bjergegaard think you need to be happy? He comments, ‘we are so afraid to have a failure or lose some money – and so often it keeps us away from what we really want to do. Disaster isn’t as dangerous as we think it is. In many ways, we have not evolved beyond fear of being eaten by a lion… When there’s something you want to do that you are putting off until later, because you feel that you need to do something else first – it’s wrong. You have to take responsibility for now; you can’t keep imagining that things will be different in the future.’
He adds that the workplace is too often a toxic environment, but his book argues that the macho and the martyr have both gone out of fashion. ‘To push ourselves and actively reduce our overall effectiveness resulting in feeling bad – well that’s just plain stupid,’ Bjergegaard argues. ‘If you work like a maniac you probably won’t enjoy it, and it’ll make you ill. Even in our company where we don’t put that kind of pressure on people, we have two people away with stress. This is a big problem for workplaces and individuals. Anda
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