233 | How to Find Work Life Harmony by Throwing Out Work Life Balance

Welcome back to the Show Chef.

Have you ever tried to balance your work and life like a scale?

Always teetering, adjusting, hoping it won't tip.

Ever feel guilty for working too much or not working enough?

Do you wonder if there's a better way to find peace, purpose, and performance

in both your kitchen and your life?

Well, you're not alone.

And today we're unpacking the difference between chasing

balance and cultivating harmony.

We'll get into all of that and more right after this message.

Welcome to Chef Life Radio, the podcast dedicated to helping chefs and culinary

leaders take control of their kitchens, build resilient teams, and create

a thriving career in hospitality.

I'm Chef Adam Lamb, your host, leadership coach, and industry veteran.

If you're tired of high turnover, I. Burnout and the

daily grind, you're not alone.

This podcast is here to give you the real strategies, insights, and tools you

need to lead with confidence, build a culture of excellence and craft a kitchen

that works for you, not against you.

Because the best kitchens don't just survive, they thrive.

Hit that subscribe button and let's get started.

Work-life balance implies equal distribution in a constant juggling

act where time is measured and divided like ingredients on a scale.

Always needing to be exact.

It creates an illusion that success in both personal and professional

life requires strict 50 50 alignment.

This mindset leaves many chefs feeling inadequate and guilty, believing they

must constantly choose between work and life, and rarely feeling like

they're succeeding at either work life harmony, on the other hand, acknowledges

the unique rhythms of culinary life.

It's not about striving for evenness, but for alignment.

Making sure that the time and energy you invest.

Wherever you are reflects your values and purpose.

Harmony lets you blend your passion for cooking with your personal life in

a way that feels more fluid and human.

It allows for imperfection.

It gives you permission to show up fully even if your hours aren't balanced.

It's about presence, not perfection.

Chasing balance can lead to burnout from unrealistic expectations while cultivating

harmony builds resilience, clarity, and flow in both your kitchen and your life.

Harmony is about integration, creating a rhythm that works for your

values, goals, and season of life.

The myth of a perfect balance, no day in a chef's life is evenly split.

Harmony allows for dynamic flow.

It's about being fully present wherever you are.

The danger of chasing balance is burnout from unrealistic expectations.

Are you trying to keep the scales even, or are you creating a life

that actually works for you?

I am sitting on the beach in a longboat key Florida.

My girls are playing in the surf.

My wife is next to me sitting in her sun chair, and I am being dogged by my phone.

It's blowing up because I'm getting text message after text

message from the guys back at work.

At one point, my wife looks over at me, gives me that side eye, and then

all of a sudden starts packing up and I'm like, what are you doing?

She looks at me and she says, if this is what it's gonna be like

now, we might as well go home.

And I felt about this big because I couldn't create a boundary between

my personal time and my professional time, and that really stung.

What made it worse is I let her pack us up and I drove that entire

three hour drive in complete.

Silence.

Knowing that I had failed the culinary industry doesn't

lend itself to a nine to five.

Schedule it making traditional work life balance feel out of reach.

For many chefs, the idea of working eight hours and then clocking

out to enjoy a calm, predictable, personal life is unrealistic.

Ideally.

Chaos, chaos, precision, artistry, and adrenaline, and none of that fits

neatly into a corporate style calendar.

I. This is why the pressure to achieve balance can feel like a setup for failure.

It's not just the hours, it's the emotional toll, the physical

demands, and the reality that our passion is also our profession.

The traditional work-life balance model doesn't account for the fact that

many of us choose this life because we love it, even when it's hard.

But that doesn't mean we have to sacrifice everything else.

Harmony invites us to reimagine success.

Not as escaping work, but integrating our work and life in ways that

feel aligned and sustainable.

It asks not How do I work less, but how do I make my work

and life support each other?

Harmony gives permission for some days to be work heavy and

others to be deeply restorative.

It replaces guilt with grace, and it starts by letting go of what doesn't fit

your reality and designing what does.

Harmony is possible even in this high pressure world.

Long hours split shifts, emotional labor, how chef life defines traditional

culture, why flexibility and boundaries matter more than hours worked and

redefining what success looks like.

It's not about clocking out at 5:00 PM it's about finding alignment.

Balance is about hours.

Harmony is about energy.

Now that my children are adults, I carry a certain amount of guilt for

all those times that I wasn't present.

You know, my kids didn't care about whether or not I was a corporate

chef or an executive chef, or whether I had had this event coming up

or that event coming up for them.

It was about time spent with them.

I. And I gotta say, just being there wasn't enough.

There were plenty of Sundays where I was waking up, groggy, hungover, and just

hating life and being there wasn't enough.

I needed to be present to them.

And that's the magic trick I had to learn because I recognized that

there was a whole scope of things that were happening around me that

I was completely oblivious to.

So whether I was at work or I was at home, in both instances, I needed

to be actually present to what was going on so that I could be a full

participant even if there was no balance.

And after struggling and failing or feeling like I was a failure came upon

this idea of harmony, what would it look like if I was completely upfront

and honest about what this week?

This month, this quarter was gonna require from me in order to be successful at work

so that I could also be a success at home, because that meant that if everybody was

clear and the boundaries were set when I was there, I was fully there ultimately.

The price I paid was one of guilt and shame, and let's be honest, that's a great

story to keep me from actually doing what I need to do and be present where I'm at.

Because as long as I'm guilty of feeling shame, I'm actually not

present to what is because I'm actually living in the past in that moment.

So I had to figure out a way to release that.

So that I could actually be present in the present, and that meant forgetting about

this whole idea about work life balance.

You don't need to split your life evenly to feel whole Harmony comes from aligning

your choices with your values and recognizing that a fulfilling life doesn't

require rigid balance, but intentional integration harmony means creating a

flow where your work supports your life.

And your life fuels your work.

Instead of constantly switching hats, you're weaving a fabric or

each thread, chef, parent, partner, friend, creative adds to the

same story, not competes with it.

The key to achieving harmony lies in self-awareness.

You have to know what matters most to you so you can make decisions to support those

values instead of draining your energy.

When you're out of harmony, it shows up as frustration, guilt, or disconnection.

But when you're in sync, you feel purposeful, energized, and more

grounded no matter how busy life gets.

And I talked earlier about at that particular point in your life,

almost every decade from job to job, your core values, the things

that matter to you will shift.

And so where you might think that work is the most important thing right now,

that might not always be the case.

And to be self-aware enough to know when that shift happens.

And then to design your life around that, which matters most to you.

In an upscale retirement community that I worked at, I promoted the

sous-chef to executive chef, and after about six months of mentoring and

coaching, he came to me one day and said, I'd like to have my old job back.

I said, what do you mean, man?

Like you're the executive chef now?

He said, yeah, I, I, I don't want the job.

I, I want my sous chef job back.

And I thought for a moment and couldn't quite understand like

why he was asking me that.

So I said, well, why?

He said, my kids are five and seven.

I want to be there to tuck them in at night.

They might not always want me to tuck them into bed, but right

now it's important to them.

So it's important to me.

And I thought to myself, damn, now there's someone who understands his

core values and if I'm being honest, made me feel a little bit guilty

that I didn't make that same decision when my kids were five and seven.

So I did what he asked and the executive chef.

Who was underperforming became a sous chef who was a superstar.

Harmony is a daily practice, not a destination.

It's about building a lifestyle that's resilient, responsive, and

reflective of who you truly are, not who the industry says you should be.

Consider these three elements of work, life harmony.

First thing is identify your core values.

Let them guide your time and energy.

Every single coaching client I have, we start with the same process

around identifying your core values.

Because without those, you are completely adrift and you're going

from job to job, moment to moment without anything really guiding you.

Forward practicing presence.

Be fully in the kitchen at work, fully with your people at home,

and designing the alliance.

It's a phrase I got from friend Kristen Marvin, who's an incredible leadership

coach, and she talks about designing the alliance with her coaching clients.

But I'll bet you any amount of money that she sat down and designed the alliance

between her and her husband as well.

And the first thing she wanted to fit in there were the things that were

most important to her, her self-care, her exercise, her mental wellness.

So once you put those big rocks in the jar, then you can fill up

that jar with other smaller rocks.

Designing the routines and rituals that create margin and protect energy.

So these are your action steps for this episode.

Define what harmony looks like for you, not someone else's version of success.

The easiest way to do that is to get a fresh piece of paper and write out

your perfect day, your ideal day, from the moment you wake up to the

moment you go to bed, because you're gonna end up focusing on those things

that are most important to you.

That's gonna give you a key on designing your life, not what you think

is currently possible, but let your imagination run wild, 'cause that is

going to give you your direction forward.

Audit your week.

Where are you spending your energy?

And does it align with what matters most to you?

Write it out like a schedule, like where you're spending your time doing what.

This is also gonna give you some insight into what you are taking on that can

be easily offloaded to somebody else.

This is gonna be working that delegation muscle.

You wanna be in your A game, you wanna delegate your B game and your C game to

others whose a game are those things?

And this week create one ritual.

To mark the transition between work and home, I actually created a audio

meditation that I call a midday reset because I recognize that taking

the chef home was not a good thing.

As a matter of fact, my wife Jennifer said to me one day, you know, as don't work

for you, and I had to pull myself back.

Like, what?

Like you're talking to me like a chef because I didn't create a

boundary between work and going home.

I created this audio meditation, which you can get.

The link is in the show notes for free.

If it serves you, I want you to have it because it's important to create this

space so that you can context switch successfully, finish up work, and

then be the person you want to be at.

Home.

Harmony isn't about balance, it's about intention.

It's not about having equal time.

It's about being in alignment.

If you've been chasing balance and wondering why you feel like you're falling

short, maybe it's time for a new paradigm.

Harmony offers freedom, flexibility, and flow.

It allows you to be the best version of yourself, both behind the line and beyond

it, 1% better than you were yesterday.

Remember, this industry will take everything you give it if you

don't intentionally carve out a version of life that works for you.

You'll end up running on empty, burned out, bitter, and

wondering what it's all for.

Harmony doesn't happen by accident.

It's built choice by choice moment by moment.

And it's not about perfection.

It's about being present.

It's about knowing what matters and letting that guide the way

you show up in your kitchen, at your table and in your own mind.

So here's the question.

What would your life look like if it wasn't split down the middle,

but woven together with intention?

What would it feel like to be in harmony?

And what's one small change you can make today to move in that direction?

Until next time, stay tall and frosty.

And don't forget the lead with a heart.

That's a wrap for today's episode of Chef Life Radio.

If this resonated with you, do me a favor, subscribe, share, and leave a review.

Your feedback helps us reach more culinary leaders like you who are ready

to take their kitchens to the next level.

Want more connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or join our Chef

Life Radio community for exclusive insights and leadership tools.

Remember, leadership isn't about perfection.

It's about progress.

So take what you've learned today and apply it in your kitchen,

your team, and your life.

Chef Life Radio is more than just a podcast.

It's a movement.

The focus is no longer just on career survival, but on transforming leadership,

creating sustainability, and ensuring chefs can build kitchens that thrive.

Remember the secret ingredient to culinary success.

Isn't just in the food, it's in the leadership.

Keep learning, keep growing, and as always, lead with the heart.

See you next time.