Abundant Leadership ✨ Schedule That Time Off

Hello Cadre family. It's Monday. We're here. It's great to have you here. My name is Jane Angels. I'm coming in a little later today. Thank you for holding grace for me. As I move my time back from 9 or 10 o' clock this morning to this afternoon, I'm gonna just give some time for people to come pop in. And in today's conversation, Authentic Leadership. Take the vacation, schedule the time off. I've actually been waiting to have this conversation. Hi Chris, how are we doing today? Excited to have you here.

As you jump into the conversation, my invitation is to pop in the chat. How are you feeling today? What's bringing you joy today if anything? So for me personally, what's bringing me joy? Fall leaves. I love summer so much, but there's something beautiful about the transition into fall that just really feels my soul. I love walking my dog in the outside during the fall. All those things. So welcome to Authentic Leadership. If you haven't been with me before, it's great to have you. If you're listening on replay, type replay.

I always come back in and answer any questions that people post or comments that people post. So happy to see it all. But specifically for today, I'm going to ask the question you can type in the chat or not, but how many of us have unused vacation? Now here's what's crazy. I am an entrepreneur so I don't really get vacation time given to me. It's more of whether or not I budget vacation in. But I remember when I used to work in corporate a long time ago and it was always really cool to like see that bank of vacation time.

And as I was preparing to leave my corporate job, I was so excited that I had all this vacation time and I was gonna get this check and I could do something with it, right? It was almost like a savings account, but not really. And when I reflect back on that, I I have mixed emotions on it. Now I did have the advantage of working at a company at the time that allowed me to work from anywhere. So for me being able to travel and work from my family's house in California, seeing my brother and my sister in law and nephews and working from there like that was a vacation to me that was a perk because I could spend the weekends with them and I could work while they were in school and then I'd have the evenings with them so that to me still felt like a vacation.

But if I fast forward and look into the landscape of today, what I hear often and what I see often is chatter about people feeling burnt out. Maybe that's you. I know that there are days that I feel like that for sure. And even now, as an entrepreneur, I have a really hard time taking vacation because if I take vacation, then that means I'm not going to get paid if I'm doing consulting work or, you know, I just have to allocate my revenue differently. I can be better at that. But here's a true story.

I booked myself to go away for a three day retreat in a couple of weeks. It's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I have the option to add in a free night on a Thursday night. It's not free. I have to, I have to pay for it. Right. But it's not a part of the actual retreat. So it's. You can just get up there, get acclimated, find some time to relax. And I was like, hey, yeah, I'll do that. And then yesterday I realized, well, I can't actually do that because I have a sound bath scheduled. And the next morning I have to teach a class and I forgot to get a sub and the schedule's already opened.

So I had every intention of taking an extra night to just relax. And I already messed that up. I mean, I still get to do the three days, so it'll be great. But I've been also talking to a lot of people on our team at our spin studio and a lot of clients. And it's fascinating to me how much vacation time people have accrued. So my question to them is, why? What are you waiting for? You're telling me that you're burnt out. Some of them are looking for new jobs and yet they hold on to these vacation days as if it's a golden nugget or golden chalice, not to be used just sitting there on a shelf.

So my invitation is to book the vacation. Now, it doesn't have to be someplace big. It doesn't mean you have to fly international or go somewhere huge. Maybe you just spend a night in the city, but you do it in a hotel and you take a spa day. Or maybe you find some place to go glamping. Or maybe there's a cheap deal on a weeknight if you book time at like those little lodges if you're in Minnesota up north, but every community will have them if you book time during the week. Nobody books time during the week.

So if you take a Tuesday and a Wednesday and you say, I'm taking those days off, you go to whatever that lodge or that space is most likely you'll get a deal because they're looking to fill the space that time. Now, here's what inevitably happens when you book a vacation. Let's pretend you booked 10 days off. Let's pretend. Oftentimes what happens is the first two days you go through this feeling of panic. I didn't finish this at work, I forgot to do this at home. And you feel like you need to log in, log into your emails, log into your work, do something.

And then you get past the two days and you're like, okay, I can be present with this. Oh yeah, I don't have to do that right now. I have my out of office on. People know that I'm not going to be there. And then you go through the next four or five days and you actually get to be present. But I don't know if you're like me. If you book a trip and you go away somewhere you feel like you need to be on all the time. You might schedule tours or dinners or meals, especially if you're traveling international, but just in general.

And then you have the day before you come home, you start to get back into that work brain. So you start creating your to do lists and you get home, let's pretend it's on a Sunday and you work on a Monday and you feel exhausted. So you took this great vacation. You finally allowed yourself a couple of days in to check out. You kept yourself super busy while you were gone and then you come back home and you didn't take enough time to just like get back home and rest. There's all different ways or all different kinds of scenarios.

However, it doesn't change the same invitation. Book the trip, but book the time off. That's more important. So studies are telling us and there's a lot of posts on social media, news articles, things like that that are talking about a very high percentage of burnout. People are getting over consumed with social media. So maybe you're taking time off, booking the vacation is having a social media cleanse, having a news cleanse, allowing your brain to calm down. Because what's happening is when you find yourself scrolling on social media, we are over activating our prefrontal cortex in our brain and we're getting zips of cortisone just flying through our system and we're getting that dopamine rush when people like our comments or like our posts.

So our brain is just on all the time. Our brain needs an average of 8 minutes, 8 minutes of silence every single day for it to calm down, reset to Normalize. But here's what happens in those eight minutes that we have for downtime. We've been so conditioned to all the other things that we fill that time with scrolling, we fill that time with messaging, we fill that time with news. 5% of our day. It's definitely less than 1%. So giving ourselves that opportunity to schedule the time off. Whether you go away or not, staycations are real.

But what happens on a staycation is you often find all these things around the house to do. So the invitation is to truly allow your body and brain to reset. You're the only one that knows what that looks like for you. But I've been coaching people on my team at Cycle Bar who have full time jobs and they work at the studio as a part time job. And a couple of them really in particular are maxing out on burnout. So I'm actually not scheduling them to work at the studio so they give themselves a break and talking to them about taking vacation days and there are a few of them, I kind of have a little note where I check in with them every couple weeks and I'll say okay, you just accrued two more days of vacation.

Have you booked the next day off? What do you have coming up that you really want to go do? Book a day, take a day off. So trying to help people find more ways to minimize some of that burnout, identify new strategies and allowing yourself to take that mental break where you don't log into emails even if you have access to it on your phone. I invite people that I'm working with to actually hit the log out button. So not only setting your out of office, but actually logging out of teams or Outlook or Gmail, whatever it is that you use to get that work information, literally logging yourself out, doing a detox, taking a detox from social media, you're really not going to miss anything.

And if there are people that you really value in life that you love to see their stuff, schedule lunch on your day off with them or call them facetime them. Do something different to get caught up versus just seeing whatever the latest and greatest post might be. So my invitation on this authentic Leadership Day is to not only encourage you to find bookends of time that you can reset, but as a leader, especially if you're managing or leading teams, when you do that, you model the way for your teams, you model the way for the people who look up to you, who are inspired by you.

So if they see you working to the bone, then that's what they're going to do. But if they see you taking a reset and understanding that that reset is really important for you to maintain balance, quality of life, to reduce the amount of burnout, to increase the amount of connection, they will feel encouraged to do the same. And if you have a boss that never takes vacation, maybe you need to set the model or the strategy for them, or maybe it's an opportunity to just have a discussion because that might be how they're wired, but it might not be the expectation for you.

Self care. Take it. Do what you need to do. Take the time off, allow yourself to reset. And if you have 13 days a year and no big vacation plans, then take an extra Friday and do a long weekend. Find ways that you can reset your systems and allow others to do the same. I hope you have a great day. If you have any vacations planned, let me know. I'll be headed to a retreat mid November. I'm really excited to go up north and just reset, even if it's only for two and a half days. It's time to invest in ourselves because if you don't, nobody else will.

I hope you have the best day and we'll see you all soon. Now go book that vacation or at least one day.