Phil Bohol is a founder, coach, and business owner who speaks openly about discipline, leadership, and responsibility. In this episode of his mindset podcast, Phil addresses entrepreneurs and business owners who feel torn between growing their business and being present with their family.
This episode is for anyone building a business while carrying guilt about time, focus, and priorities. If you’re an entrepreneur who feels pulled between ambition and family responsibility, this business podcast conversation offers a grounded, realistic perspective.
Phil breaks down a truth most people avoid. Prioritizing your business is not something to feel guilty about, but only if it’s done with structure, intention, and boundaries. The real problem is not working hard. The problem is being unfocused, distracted, and unproductive during the hours meant for growth, then carrying that stress into family time.
Throughout the episode, Phil explains how guilt often comes from a lack of clarity and execution. When business work bleeds into family time, it usually points to wasted effort earlier in the day. Scrolling, comfort-seeking, busy work, and avoiding difficult tasks all create mental clutter that never fully shuts off. That’s where resentment and guilt start to build.
Phil introduces a disciplined approach to time and focus, including clear work hours, defined cutoff points, and fully present family time. He shares personal examples from early fatherhood, explaining how short-term sacrifice and delayed gratification can create long-term stability when done intentionally. There is no perfect daily balance. There is only honest evaluation, consistency, and follow-through.
The episode also challenges entrepreneurs to take full ownership of their results. Instead of blaming leads, markets, or the economy, Phil encourages listeners to look inward. Confidence grows through execution, learning, and failure. Avoiding growth tasks while staying busy creates stagnation, not safety.
At its core, this conversation is about leadership. Leadership in business requires focus, discipline, and courage. Leadership at home requires presence, integrity, and honoring your word. One cannot exist without the other for long.
This episode reflects Phil Bohol’s broader body of work around mindset, leadership, and execution. It is part of an ongoing conversation about building a business that supports your life, not competes with it.
Listen with the intention to reflect on how you’re using your time, where you’re avoiding responsibility, and how you can lead better both at work and at home.
Here's the thing about focusing on your business. It's a very hard thing to learn how to do, especially when it's your first business, especially when you have kids when they're at a younger age and you want to give them all of your time, all of your attention, but at the same time, you feel this pool to build something for the long term and it sucks.
And should you feel guilty for doing it? The answer's no. You should never feel guilty about. Prioritizing your business, but you gotta do it right. See, a lot of people will make you feel guilty about it. Oh, you're working too much. You're spending more time on your business than you are your family. Your kids are growing up without you type of deal.
And they will think that there is some truth to that. There is a way to grow your business while spending time with your family. But here's the thing. You have to change how you're looking at the entire situation. If you view it as I'm taking away from my family versus I'm delaying gratification where myself and my family have to sacrifice a little bit of time now so I can make sure that they're secure for the rest of their lives.
If it takes you one year, two years, maybe even three years, to really get from where you are to where you're trying to get your business to, to take care of your family. And you do it right where you compartmentalize. It's kind of like you're making a nine to five job for yourself again, but as a business owner, you have to be very focused in your time.
You have to be very focused in your effort. You have to know when to cut off the workload, meaning the reason why you may feel guilty. And it may be true that you should feel guilty is when you start allowing work and business to bleed into family time. So if you're hyper-focused, right? This is what I teach my guys all the time.
Daily battle planning. If you're very focused from 9:00 AM to five or whatever hours you choose, and you have a drop dead cutoff at five, and that's family time for you to rest, recover, recharge for the day, plus spent quality time with your family, let it be so. What happens though and why people feel very guilty when it's try, it's time to spend time with family, is they're unproductive the entire day.
They're scrolling through social media, not learning anything of value. They're like trying to be entertained, being in a state of comfort. There's a difference between scrolling social media for let's say market research or to learn and to grow versus watching and scrolling through social media for the sake of entertainment.
Very different things. So if you do that and you waste these productive hours of your day, of course you're gonna feel like distracted when it's time to spend time with your family. 'cause now you're, you're constantly gonna be thinking about work, man, I have so much to do. But the reality is you spent so much unproductive time that you could have been doing, but you're scrolling, you're doing other things, you're wasting time.
You're thinking more about the negativity or the stress that you have versus the actual things that will lead to the breakthroughs that you seek in your life and in your business. So you have to understand the guilt comes from a real place. What you accept as guilt and what you don't like. For example, for me, you know, I sacrificed probably the first year of, of me being a dad.
And I sacrificed it and I didn't sacrifice it. At the same time, I've been able to take my family to Disneyland on really crazy trips, like really bougie trips to Disneyland, but at the same time, leading up to that, we did have to compromise. And I didn't mean that, you know, I'm working from um, 3:00 AM to midnight and I never get to see them.
No. It's maybe one day we get to spend. Two hours I lead, concentrated, present family time together. Some days it's three or four hours. Other days it's maybe 30 minutes or none, but there is no, every single day needs to be X amount of time with family. It's a compromise. At the same time, I also knew if the, if the normal amount of time a father who's also a business owner spends with her kids.
Not even present. It's not even accounting for how present they are is one hour per day. From a week to week standpoint. I was outperforming that metric, so I had to know that. So that way if there was comments that, hey, you're working a lot like, or even spending time with your family, I didn't allow that into my mental state because I also knew what I was building for the future and nobody would ever understand my vision more than me.
So you have to really take a hard look at yourself. Are you being productive in your business? Are you actually doing things to move your business forward? Are you being distracted? Not with just entertainment, social media, scrolling, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but are you also distracting yourself with busy work inside of the business that won't actually grow you because you're afraid of growth, you're you're afraid of success, you're afraid of the next level.
You're afraid to learn these skill sets that maybe you're not the best at. Yeah, there's so many different things, and that's why I focus on the 80 20 rule. The, the, the, the things that are actually gonna grow your business. It's not what you think, it's not the strategies. It's not these external things.
It's really who you are. Because if you think about it, if you are confident in every single decision that you make, that would grow your business to create the life that you want for your family. Wouldn't you have a much bigger business? Won't you be able to have more time? But the truth is you lack that confidence.
Why? Because you lack experience or you lack the knowledge, but more so you lack the execution and failure because you're also afraid to fail. This is why I harp so much on personal development and relation to business and sales growth. If you took the time to be brutally honest with yourself and ask yourself like, where am I actually dropping the ball?
If I were to take full accountability and ownership of where I'm at and where I'm not, what am I not doing? Where am I actually lacking? Where am I not pushing myself? Where am I staying in my comfort zone? These real, raw, brutal, honest talks with yourself is the thing that's gonna cause a breakthrough.
But what happens is a lot of men focus more on, man leads suck. Oh man, business is crazy. The industry's changing. The economy's going crazy, Bob pointing the blame at everything else except self. So if you want to release this guilt of not spending time with your family. Then make it mean something. So like on the days where maybe I would really have like a push, like maybe I had an event and I really had to like study and, and make sure I'm ready for this event.
Those would be the couple days or the one week where maybe I spent a little bit less time with the family or maybe I'd be working while they were, uh, asleep and then I wouldn't be done working until it's basically bedtime, but it's a couple days or a week or so. Of, of that in relation to everything else that I wanted to create and cultivate for them.
You see what I mean? So there, there's a give and a take, but the only way for you to really relinquish this guilt is to know what it is that you're building and making sure on the times where you don't need to build, grow, scale, push, and drive the business forward. You're actually prioritizing family time.
And the thing is you have to respect family time. You have to respect, when you say you're gonna play with your, your, your daughters or your sons, you play with them. You have to respect, when you say you're gonna take them somewhere on the weekends, you do, you can't like tell them, Hey, later, later, later, and then later never comes because that's what leads to more guilt.
All right. This is again, why this whole game of business growth and development and changing your life, it's this ongoing process and staying locked in. So what you allow inside your mind is what the output is that you create in your life and your reality. So what I invite you to do as always, is like, subscribe, stay plugged in to all of my social media, my Instagram, my YouTube, my Facebook, because there's so many different insights that if it just shifts your perspective, life can change.
And I have a great track record with teaching people how to shift how they're looking at business and life that makes these macro changes by focusing on the micro things that they're doing or not doing and doing it better. Don't feel guilty by prioritizing your business over some things for a short period of time.
Just make sure you're also respecting the boundary of family and quality time because there's no point of building a massive business if you lose your family on the way.