Dave Hollis shares strategies he and Rachel Hollis use to 'stay centered,' make it work in chaotic world
“So, four kids, successful marriage, successful business, how do you do it all?”
Dave Hollis, who is married to motivational speaker and bestselling author Rachel Hollis, is out with his own book, "Get Out of Your Own Way."
In "Get Out of Your Own Way," Dave Hollis shares how he overcame some of the greatest personal challenges in his life, including a stagnating career, a growing drinking problem, marriage problems and insecurities about being a dad.
The father of four said he decided to stop letting these insecurities define him and changed his outlook and his life.
In the book, Hollis unpacks the lies he once believed to be true such as "I have to have it all together" and "I can achieve balance if I work hard enough" -- and reveals the tools that helped him become his best self.
The couple, who appeared on "GMA" on March 23 amid the novel coronavirus outbreak, said they are having more dinners as a family during this time of uncertainty and taking steps to support one another as partners.
"I will say this is definitely going to test but strengthen any and every relationship. If I can from my perspective say a mistake that I've definitely made in our relationship over time, it was assuming that I had a sense of what she needed during any individual season that she was going through, and that is a bad assumption, especially during a time when there's a lot of new in this new normal," Hollis said. "So, my best advice would be, be in regular, regular conversation about what your partner needs. What does it mean now that you're both here all the time, that the kids are here all the time, that schedules are upside down, having a conversation about what they maybe need in terms of pitching in, but what they might need emotionally. What questions or conversations could you dive into that would take whatever they're feeling inside and bring it out so it doesn't feel as isolating or alone."
In this excerpt for "Good Morning America," Hollis breaks down the lie, "I can achieve balance if I work hard enough" and explains how investing in his relationships has helped him and Rachel stay centered for whatever life throws at them. Read the excerpt below.
The Lie: I Can Achieve Balance If I Work Hard Enough
Bigfoot. Lochness monster. Balance. What do all three of these have in common? They’re all rumored to exist, have forever been tracked, have seemingly been captured for fleeting moments, and, alas, are fables. None of them exist, and the sooner you accept that balance is among the things you cannot actually attain or control in your life, the sooner you’ll find yourself in a more productive, peaceful, and reasonable state of mind. Be free.
When I’m on a panel, I always get questions about balance.
“So, four kids, successful marriage, successful business, how do you do it all?”
I always go back to a two-part answer.
The first thing is acknowledging that I do not do it all. My wife and I do not do it all. Nobody does, and someone on Instagram telling you otherwise is ridiculous.
Anyone who has ambition for this many spinning plates does it with a community of people, family, and friends as a support system. As taboo as it may be to talk about this in some circles, the only way Rachel and I can pursue the ambitious calling on our lives is with the help of a nanny and the occasional babysitter. We both have roles with the company and our various partners that sometimes pull us out of town, so we have help—and we are okay talking about it. We’re okay dealing with people, including our own families, who might judge the way we’ve decided to live our lives relative to how they might, because we do what’s right for our family and this mission, not theirs. Chasing the great passions of our life, delivering value to a broad audience, using our potential for impact? Those opportunities come with trade-offs. When you find yourself chasing this kind of work, you will need help.
The second and maybe more important part of the answer is that we’ve become comfortable with the reality that balance is not possible. Balance is something you strive for on the whole but, on any individual day, it doesn’t really show up. Some days our work is going to pull us further from the kind of quality time we wish for every day with each other. Other days work doesn’t do that, and it allows us to fully engage and be a part of every single one of all four kids’ needs and wants. Some days work gets sacrificed, because being in the front row of a fourth-grade production of “Moana” at 11:20 a.m. matters. It’s not necessarily normal to have consecutive weeks where life is the same way every day.
Because of this, achieving perfect balance is not a possibility. Instead, the goal is to stay centered to handle the variability of what life throws our way. So what do we do to help us juggle everything in a healthy way?
Front-Loading
The only way we can survive the pace and occasional chaos of our business and the ever-changing needs of our household is by being extraordinarily intentional in how we plan. We have to acknowledge in meticulous detail what’s coming in the days and weeks ahead. We prepare each other and each of our kids, as well as the members of our team, for what to expect before it happens. We call that front-loading.
For us, it’s a process that starts over every Sunday night when my wife and I sit down with our calendars and go day by day, hour by hour, and plan out what each of the kids has with school and sports, our meetings and travel, household responsibilities, and what personal goals we want to hit. Down to the minute. We look at our individual calendars and have a conversation about who is available to drive the kids to school on this day, or take one of the kids to practice on that day. We do this checking in because we are each as responsible as the other for raising our humans. My responsibility is 100 percent. My wife’s responsibility is 100 percent. We are equally responsible for raising these children, but doing it requires us to acknowledge that we’re not both going to be available to do it on an every-day or every-week basis.
To institute this practice, we have to find a time to have those conversations. We don’t wait until bedtime to determine who is going to be putting the kids to bed, or until it’s time to drive the kids to school to determine who’s going to take them. This is important, because if you wait to say, “Hey, do you mind taking Noah to the doctor today?” the person receiving that request last minute might hear it as, I value my time and my priorities on my calendar more than I value yours. I’m going to delegate the responsibility of caring for our kid to you because of that value assessment I’ve just made. This may not have been the intention, but it just might be the way it’s received. Planning the week’s schedule on a Sunday, when it’s not the day of, allows us to take some of the emotion out of that conversation.
Front-loading. Creating equilibrium in an imbalanced, chaotic world. Remember, the only time anyone gets upset is when they’re surprised by something. It’s especially true when you’re trying to have an exceptional relationship with your partner.
Self-Care
Even though the first step in staying centered is managing expectations, self-care is just as, or more, important.
As a recovering codependent dad and husband, I used to connect my wife’s or kids’ happiness to my happiness. That meant I felt guilty for taking time away for myself, usually so much that I sacrificed it for what I thought catered to what they needed. As a result, I didn’t work out as often, didn’t take as many mental-health breaks, didn’t invest in time with friends, and the net was a weaker version of me. A dad with no energy. A husband with no pep. It wasn’t until we came to see how important health is as a foundation for unlocking everything else we want to do for each other that we forced it front and center and made it a focal point, ensuring our calendar was a reflection of how we might refuel for everyone who was counting on us.Same Sunday routine: When are you, Dave, going to the gym? When are you, Rachel, going on a run? What are we eating every single night?
To start every week, we meal plan for every single day and talk about what days and what times we are working out. It creates accountability, but it also makes sure we stick to our belief that if we aren’t showing up for ourselves and pouring into our health, I cannot be the husband Rachel deserves or the father my kids need, and the same for Rachel as a wife and mother.
Rachel and I talk often of the mid-twentieth-century military adage “Hope is not a strategy.”
You have to plan how you’re going to be healthy, how you’re going to care for yourself. You can’t simply hope that you’re going to make healthy choices in the midst of a chaotic day with four kids. It will not just happen. Don’t hope that you’re going to find time to refuel; plan for when that time is going to be.
Relationship Investment
Once you set your intentions with front-loading and have properly focused on self-care, how else can you remain centered in the middle of, well, life? By actively pursuing your most critical relationships. This means intentionally investing in your partner, spending quality time with your kids, and building deeper connections with a few meaningful friends.
When our oldest was maybe a year old, Rachel and I realized that if we didn’t have a regular date night, we were going to be inconsistent in how we connected. Intimacy isn’t just what happens in the bedroom. Intimacy is what happens when you pause living life for others and pursue life for you as a couple. Rachel and I do date night every single Thursday night. This means we have arranged sitters for Thursday nights between now and the end of time and have conditioned our kids to expect us to go out then. Are there times when our kids are like, “Man, you’re going on a date?” Of course. Frankly, it’s not even a conversation any longer, because the answer is always, “You’re darn right, we’re going on a date, because we love each other and the only way we can be the best parents for you is if we are as strong as we can be as a couple.”
Rachel and I are modeling for these four human beings the way we hope they show up as adults. This includes the practice of dating your spouse, the practice of intentionally putting yourself in an environment that says “Put on your fancy underwear” on a regular basis, the practice of going out and doing things that are an adventure of some kind and maybe disrupt your routine. Those are things we want our kids to do and model for their kids when they are in relationships.
We also take two trips a year. We take one trip with our whole family, and then we take a vacation without the kids. As I wrote this, our kids knew we had our December family trip planned, as well as an adults-only getaway scheduled for just after the New Year. Family trips are not necessarily relaxing trips for the parents who are manning four kids on the road with suitcases, and diapers, and everything else. It doesn’t mean we don’t have fun. Of course we have a great time, play games, give the kids one-on-one attention, and do all the fun things. But when it comes to the other trip, it’s not a trip. It’s a vacation. It’s where Rachel and I say goodbye to the small human beings. We’re going to refuel so we can come back and be the kind of parents they all deserve, because we love each other.
When we take the time to intentionally invest in our relationships, we can find that elusive sense of peace in the middle of life’s craziness. Even if true balance is not something we can ever attain in this life, we can still find a more productive, reasonable state of mind by prioritizing and putting some simple habits into practice.
Things That Helped Me
I got over guilt. Guilt, a lot of times, is informed by the opinion of someone you’ve given power to. Your guilt isn’t even necessarily a thing that you feel. It’s a thing you were taught to feel. So if you feel guilty about leaving your kids at home to go to work, it might be because of the passive-aggressive comments your mother-in-law makes. You’re deciding to let her tell you how to raise them. In our family, it starts with this idea that if you’re not in this house raising these kids with us, respectfully, you don’t get a say in how we do it. Thank you for offering your opinion, but we’re going to do what we think is best for our kids. So whenever I start feeling guilty about something, I go to that first question: Where is the guilt coming from, and should I be giving that source power over me?
I created milestones to look forward to. Because life is chaotic, my family had to have things to look forward to so, in the times when it felt overwhelming or hard, we could couch those feelings against a time in the future when we’d be pausing life to refuel our batteries. These didn’t need to be big things, but by making sure our calendar was a reflection of the kind of marriage Rachel and I wanted to have, or the kind of quality family moments we knew could create memories, we always had things to keep us going.
I committed to nonnegotiables. To find a healthier way to juggle the chaos of time, I had to put down some hard rules and boundaries to live by. We eat dinner as a family at the dinner table every night at 6:30 p.m. If there’s a meeting that evening, that meeting has to end in time to get us around the table.
I also committed to moving my body every single day. Every. Single. Day. The only way I’ll be able to have the stamina to show up well for the people in my imbalanced life is if I start with a foundation of feeling well myself.
The list goes on, but the point is to set the nonnegotiables and then commit to them doggedly.
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