The keys to building better margins for your career, family and personal life.
By Pete Mercer
Adam Markel is out of balance. Or, at least, he was out of balance. Working as an attorney for almost 20 years put his personal life and priorities in a sort of tailspin that ultimately landed him in the hospital with what he assumed was a heart attack. When the doctor told him that he was actually suffering from a panic attack, he saw this as an opportunity to change his approach to his professional and personal life.
While his initial response to this setback was to double down and work harder, he eventually began to reexamine his life and adjust his priorities to hopefully prevent a life-altering health condition. Now, he owns and operates a company that is designed to help organizations embrace the changing hybrid work environments.
Repertoire Magazine recently spoke to Markel, keynote speaker and author of “Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life”, about the difference between balance and harmony, how to draw healthy boundaries in your professional life, and the role that mental and physical health plays in this equation. Markel also serves as the CEO and founder of WORKWELL Labs, a consulting firm that is focused on strengthening the wellbeing of leaders and building high-performing cultures.
Harmony versus balance
Since the pandemic, the issue of the work-life balance is at the forefront of any conversation about how we work and where we draw our personal and professional boundaries. It’s the subject of LinkedIn think pieces, op-eds in business magazines, and most certainly brought up in job interviews every day, regardless of the industry.
For Markel, there’s no such thing as balance. He said, “Work-life balance is a BS story. I don’t know who created that term – it sounds right, it sounds good, but it’s ridiculous. We will never have a one-to-one relationship between our work life and our personal life. We don’t salt and pepper our food in equal proportion, and we can’t create an equal proportion between our work life and our personal life.”
He is much more interested in finding harmony between the two worlds, allowing both to coexist equally, with some compromise to allow for a kind of give-and-take from each side when needed. He started to pursue this line of thinking as a solution for the disharmony in his own life, or as a way to “focus on well-being at a granular level.” With harmony as the goal, you can allow these two different parts of your life to work together.
“They’re both important to us and fluctuate. They bleed into each other – they’re both important; they’re not mutually exclusive. They don’t need to be balanced because they’re not in opposition to each other. There should be no conflict between them.”
For Markel, telling people that there should be this balance between your work life and your personal life creates a false expectation that can’t be met. It becomes one more thing to throw on the pile of things that people already feel inept about, which helps no one. “Ultimately, it’s about creating a very harmonious existence of those two things that are vitally important to us and making adjustments.”
The role of physical and mental health
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise, but our physical and mental health plays an enormous role in our ability to maintain harmony between the personal and professional. This is part of what WORKWELL Labs does, building programs backed by data collected from research and group studies.
“We like to think of it in terms of MEPS – mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. It’s the collection of those things, the four areas that create holistic resilience.”
According to Markel, the research conducted by WORKWELL shows that people neglect their physical well-being more than anything else. With heavy workloads and busy personal schedules, it’s easy to not make time to invest in your physical health.
“Lots of people don’t take time during the day to quiet their mind, so they’re constantly filling the space with busyness, multitasking, or interruptions and distractions. That’s often the result of our addiction to digital stimulus.”
These habits create a sort of perpetual, cyclical challenge for us, and it can be hard to pull out of it. These digital distractions lead to lowered productivity and efficiency levels, which can then impact quotas, bottom lines, and relationships with customers. By investing in your physical health, you will also be taking care of your mental health. The better you take care of the body, the better your mental state will be.
Markel and his team describe this lack of personal investment as an issue of margin. He said, “Margin is the space between our load and our limits. There’s just a lack of space between our load, which is what we carry every day in our work and familial responsibilities, and the limits of our capacity before we start to see diminishing returns. People use the word ‘burnout’ to describe diminishing returns, where you might not be able to think clearly or you’re feeling anxious or agitated.”
Drawing boundaries
One of the biggest challenges with working in sales is this unseen (and maybe even unspoken) pressure to always be available. It’s hard to shut things off when you’re trying to hit a quota, which is where the lines start to blur. The modern sales rep has to be better about defining boundaries with working hours, ensuring that there is time built in to recharge and recover.
According to Markel, it starts with communication. It’s hard to enforce a boundary if the other side doesn’t know it exists. Your customers can’t read your mind. Your boss certainly isn’t going to read your mind. It’s your responsibility to draw the boundary and then communicate that boundary to other people. Also, it might come down to just saying no to things.
“’No’ is a complete sentence,” he said. “Being able to say ‘no’ to something is important. Every time you say ‘yes’ to something, you’re effectively saying ‘no’ to something else, whether you know it or not. Are you saying no to your kids? Are you saying no to your wife? Are you saying no to your sleep or your health?”
The idea of drawing boundaries with work is antithetical to the mantra of the hustle and grind culture that is so prevalent amongst younger professionals. This is an ideal fit for influencers who are looking to capture your attention on social media, but it’s not sustainable for people who are just looking to work and provide for their families.
That culture is not compatible. with Markel’s ethos. He said, “The idea that we should work more and sleep less is utterly ridiculous. It’s a false premise that can prove harmful. It’s not the average person that can work without sleep for prolonged periods of time to iterate something, innovate something, or invent something. What is within the realm of predictability is that people
will become that much more depleted mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually, which will then make them more unhappy, more miserable, more sick, more tired, and more anxious. That’s the result of the hustle and grind culture.”
About
Adam Markel’s latest book, “Re-Culture: A Leadership Guide to Restore Connection, Collaboration, and Trust in Today’s Disconnected Workplace”, can be purchased on Amazon. Visit adammarkel.com or workwelllabs.com to learn more.
SIDEBAR
MEPS – Four areas that create holistic resilience
Mental – How you think, focus and make meaning of challenges. This includes your ability to reframe situations, stay clear-headed under pressure, and make intentional choices instead of reacting automatically.
Emotional – Your ability to regulate feelings like stress, frustration, anxiety, or excitement. Markel often connects this to emotional awareness and recovery – being able to process emotions instead of suppressing them.
Physical – Your body’s energy, health and recovery capacity. He points to sleep, movement, nutrition, and stress recovery as foundational to sustaining performance.
Spiritual – Your sense of purpose, values, and meaning. This isn’t necessarily religious; it’s about alignment with what matters most and feeling connected to something bigger than day-to-day stress.