Better Consultant

On work-life balancing

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Hi friends,

When people talk about lifestyle in consulting, they do it with a nervous chuckle.

Everybody knows that it’s next to horrid.

Not for everybody, though. Or not to the same extent.

The reality is that there are things that you can do to make it better, and that’s what this letter is about - a practical piece of advice about how to achieve better work-life balance in consulting.

You’ll hear lots of advice about this once you start in consulting.

Your mentors will suggest things. Your colleagues as well.

But the reality is that most of the advice you will receive is tactical. For example, align with your manager on the output they expect from you at the start of each day…

Tactical advice is not a game changer.

Something deeper is needed, and that’s what I want to focus on.

Two things, actually.

One

Something super simple yet challenging to arrive at - clarity.

The first thing you need to do as you enter consulting is to agree with yourself on what is your goal:

Do you want to be a consultant for life?

Stay until you make Manager and then look for some executive role in the industry?

Stay for 2 years to have the brand name and the toolkit and move on?

The reality is that, depending on the vision you settle for, you should have a different approach to your career in consulting.

For instance, if you’re in it for the short term, e.g., 2-3 years, accelerating and sacrificing your lifestyle for fast-track promotions so you look like a superstar might be worth it. It will help with your value proposition and make you more attractive to potential employers.

However, if you accelerate while keeping in mind the long-term Partner track, you’re likely to burn out and crash rather soon. Nobody can sustain an intense pace forever. Most Partners, you’ll soon find out, are people who managed to find a way of making the consulting life sustainable for them. They survived in this ecosystem for long enough to make it through to the next level. Whether for some it took ten years or thirteen, in the big scheme of things, it absolutely doesn’t matter.

So, the first thing is to go in with clarity of purpose and an associated plan.

Two

What I learned in my second year in consulting is that people have horrible lifestyles because they don’t say no.

They always see themselves as victims.

They are afraid that if they say no, they’ll get bad feedback from their manager, their promotion might get delayed, and some colleagues might not like them.

So they say yes, hesitantly, to everything that crosses their path.

Gradually, they become overwhelmed and bitter, their performance drops, and they burn out and leave.

Like with many things in life, if you try to make everybody happy or act out of fear, you will most often act at your own expense.

Having a decent lifestyle in consulting and finding sustainability comes down to strategically saying no, aware that this might make people unhappy.

I only found the courage to start doing this in my second or third year.

But that’s also when my lifestyle changed dramatically.

I started saying no to side requests that were thrown at me, other times, I negotiated, pushed back, etc.

And I did so knowing that the people I refused wouldn’t be happy with it. They might hold it against me. They might give me bad feedback. So what? The alternative would be the guaranteed failure of burnout I was describing above.

But the strange thing is that not all of the people I politely rejected held it against me.

Some respected it, some understood me, and some actually started trusting me more.

My lifestyle improved, and so did my performance. In fact, both my promotions followed projects in which I had a great lifestyle, not the misery of my first two years.

That’s what I want to leave you with:

Make sure that you are clear on what you want out of your consulting time and find a pace that suits you.
Protect what is important to you even if there are negative consequences because the alternative is actually much, much worse.

In the end, I want to highlight that we tend to think of work-life balance as static. But this is not true.

In fact, it’s a constant act, it’s a balancing act.

Despite our best efforts, some projects will be more intense than we can bear or manage, regardless of our skill. Others will be chill, even if we don’t make an active effort to keep them like that.

Throughout all of this, it’s important to find some sort of equilibrium that you can live with and find joy in on a daily basis. Enough so you can survive. Maybe even thrive.

Until next Thursday,

Cristian

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