Ep #285: Taking a Break, Slowing Down, and Resting Done Well

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey coaches, welcome to episode 285. I am so excited to talk to you all today. I love this topic. I am actively in love with this topic. We’re going to talk about taking a break and slowing down done well. What? And this is really going to be an episode for you to listen to over and over and over again. If you struggle with objections that clients give you where they’re like, “Well, it’s just not a great time to coach because I’m going to be going on vacation. I’m taking the summer off. The kids are at home. I don’t have big goals. I really want to slow down.”

Any of those things, if you are kind of at a loss when people seek out coaching from you or have the opportunity to coach with you and pass for this reason. It will be really interesting to explore your own ideas and beliefs about the value of coaching and being coached and taking a break and slowing down. I think a lot of us have the assumption, coaching is for acceleration, growth, goals, when we will be doing lots of doing.

We don’t often reinforce the value of learning to and having support for the not doing, to take a break and slow down well to get the full benefits. We don’t know how to rest as a society. And we don’t value, typically we don’t value rest in the same way as work. These are all really interesting things to think about. I believe that 50% of the value of coaching is on this idea.

It’s the 50% of the value is doing the slowing down, resting and taking breaks, doing that really, really well. Living and enjoying, really, really well. And so, something to think about is what are the things that you imagine, specifically as a business owner, you could do this, how do you imagine things will be when you get where you’re going. So, for me, I’ve always imagined at every level, when I get there I imagine my free time in my life a lot. It’s 50% of what I imagine.

So typically for me, I’m imagining time with my family. I’m imagining travel. Yeah, you could call that vacations as well. For me, travel is life. I was a nomad for three years. I’m constantly trying to introduce my husband to who I am. He seems very confused constantly. I’m that person that plans another vacation while I’m on vacation, but really it’s because I just love to travel. And travel is a big part of my life and I like to do it really well and I like to be really relaxed. And I don’t like to work and I like to maximize the experience.

So, for me it’s time with my family at home, time with my family traveling, lots of downtime, rest. And a very well managed business that does not require emergencies and putting out fires all the time. And require me to have to miss the family stuff and to miss travel and to not have lots of downtime. Or the downtime isn’t good downtime because I’m stressed and worried. I’m having to do things last minute because things aren’t planned well.

So, I want to have a business that I can take off and employees can take off. And we can all do that free of mental stress or actual work having to be done when we’re supposed to be taking off. And really, when I imagine my future business, I just never imagine a grind and I never imagine rest and taking breaks and slowing down being necessarily at the expense of revenue. Meaning, I’m going to take a break so I’m going to lose some money. It can mean that sometime but I’m not always typically imagining that.

Here’s why this matters, how you get there is how you will be there. So, for me it’s really important that whether I’m working to a goal or not, that the other 50% of the value of coaching, that I’m working that, I’m actively working, 50% of my coaching will be in what I am doing, whether it’s less, whether I’ve slowed down and I’m actually working less. And I’m going to talk about this more, but I want that to be higher quality.

And then I also want my rest to be higher quality and to me those are, that’s the whole 100% of the value of coaching. And I talk a lot about in my 200K and my Two Million Dollar Group, non-revenue growth years. I’m going to do a whole podcast about just that specific concept, but I do think people have misunderstood me. And they just think it means non-coaching years. I’m just not going to be coached this year because I’m not going to have a revenue goal. So, I’m just going to do the same thing I did last year.

I never use a non-revenue growth year to do the same thing I did the year before. I want to do it better, faster and easier. And if I knew how to do that, I would have already done it. So, I’m going to need coaching to do that. So, the only way a non-growth year is valuable is if you learn how to do the same revenue better and faster.

Just for me personally and maybe you find this as well is, for me, how I got into coaching. I wasn’t even thinking about becoming a coach, but why I got started with a life coach is because I wanted peace on the journey. I wanted peace and happiness and fulfillment in this life, and those things, and sufficiency. I wanted to feel sufficiency and abundance when it came to money, when it came to love, when it came to relationships, to everything. Just in general what I have in my life and what my life is, and that is a skill that I have found has to be learned very, very deeply.

And I think that so many people get into coaching wanting that but then when they’re faced with what is the value of paying for that, then it just feels more valuable if I’m going to be doing lots of things. So, I think so many of us, we don’t have the same equation of value for doing versus not doing. We’re like, “Doing is more valuable than not doing and I’m going to spend money to learn to do but not spend money on learning to not do.”

And so again, I said at the very beginning, understanding this, I do think, or not understanding is the reason that you can’t overcome objections. For people who want to start when a break is done, when things are easier, when they have more time to devote to something big, when their problem feels bigger.

And I was thinking of this episode just in general because I just had a call with my coach. So, I’m recording this in real time in June, the beginning of June of 2024. And from January until now I have worked at warp speed, so there’s two things happening. It’s expanding my capacity to do more, which I have totally done in this part. This half of the year I’ve expanded my capacity times 100 for what I’m capable of getting done in a small amount of time and that hasn’t changed.

Even with now that I’m actively going to take a few months to slow down, that hasn’t changed, but challenging your capacity, there’s challenging your capacity to do more and produce more and be capable of more. That is very deep active work in the brain. And I don’t think doing that active work all the time 24/7 is sustainable. I think that can lead to burnout or it can lead to just being really, really exhausted.

So, I choose to expand my capacity and challenge my capacity typically at shorter times than a five month period, but this is what my business required. This is what I deeply wanted and on a timeline that I wanted it. So, I knew what I was signing up for, but I really got to the point, I was like, “Okay, so now I’ve done all the really deep hard work that I needed to do for this year.” And we’ve executed on so much and there is actually availability to take some time and de-escalate, that’s not the right word.

But to go down when you’re shifting down or you’re putting on the gas a little bit in the car. I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. But downshift, that’s it, I’ll eventually get it. There’s an ability here and time here to downshift. And so, I was doing a call with my coach this week and I was talking about this. I was telling her that I’m ready for a downshift and what I want the next few months to look like.

And even, specifically, I’m going on a two week trip that I’m so, so excited about with my child. It’s kind of four trips in one. At the end of June, I’m taking Jackson by myself, on a plane by myself to camp, a three day camping trip with one of my good friends and her toddler as well. And it’s this mommy and me camp for three days, I’m so excited, in Cape Cod.

And then we rented a house in Cape Cod on the beach for my friend and her husband and me and my husband and our kids so that we can spend four days just going all over Cape Cod with our kids and hanging out at the beach. And then my husband and I are going to spend a couple days in Nantucket. And then we’re flying to Brooklyn for my friend Kara’s wedding. And so, we’re going to be in Brooklyn for four or five days and over the 4th of July. So, it’s a really long, perfect summer trip. I have always wanted to do this.

It’s been on my list for years to just take a two week East Coast vacation, just Hamptons, Cape Cod. I’ve been feeling that energy. I love lobster rolls. I love oysters. And I’ve always wanted to go out and just do the East Coast summer life and just have all the yummy seafood and ice-cream cones and do all the beach stuff and just have so much fun. I’ve never ever been to the East Coast in the summer for a summer vacation. So anyways, I’m really excited.

So, we have three weeks between when we ended, really properly ended the 200K launch and two Million Dollar Group. So, what I mean by that is when the launch actually closed and then there is a week or two of onboarding where we’re really just making sure everybody has what they need. And answering customer service inquiries and making sure everyone gets logged in and isn’t having any issues with the member portal and making sure they can find everything okay and they’re on the right path.

All of that takes a lot of time, especially if you have a lot of clients and you’re doing this for two programs at the same time. So once that was done and we’re still doing a little bit of that, but there is going to be a three week period counting now between all of the workload I’ve been doing and then when I come back from when I go on my vacation. So, there’s three weeks before I go on my vacation and then when I come back I have a whole list of things I want to accomplish in the second six months of the year.

And we’ll be doing mastermind week for 200K and Two Million Dollar Group at the end of July. I have some really exciting trainings for 2K coming up. And we’re going to bring ads in-house, which is really scary and also just, I know is the right move. So, my team and I are going to learn, deeply learn ads in a way where we don’t require an ads manager to even place the ads, run the ads, anything like that. So, we have a lot of things.

So, I was coaching with my coach on this idea of, I have three weeks where I’m going to be working. And even when I come back, basically through the entire summer I want it to be a slowdown period. I have a lot of courses I want to take, not a lot, but I have several that I have signed up for. I just did one over a couple of days. And so, I have a couple more that I want to do that are just going to be really, really helpful. And so, I want to use this time to downshift.

And we’re going to spend some time organizing and just making sure everything is going really smoothly for our next class of our masterminds. We’re also going to work on offboarding for our current classes. And kind of just tidy things up over the summer and give myself an ability to kind of recuperate. And so anyways, I’m having this coaching call. And it was so extraordinarily valuable and I may be a little brief about the call.

And then I’m going to break down what I think is the value that I have received from being coached to take breaks and do them really well, to receive maximum benefits. But we did this call and I just came to the call and I was talking about how I’d been working at such a high capacity for so long. The longest period, probably that I’ve ever worked at such a high capacity, way beyond what was my original capacity. There was the original capacity and then there’s 50% more capacity and then 100% more capacity.

And I felt like I was operating at 100% more capacity this entire year. And so, I was telling her I want to slow down and I want to be really methodical about what I do in the time that I am working over the summer and especially up until my Cape Cod trip. And I want to be highly resourceful but I also really do want to slow down and really take a breath and get filled up again and rest really well. And I was having a hard time with it because my brain is so used to being so sped up and working so hard.

It would be every day my calendar would be completely full and it would be managing my mind to get everything done that I committed to doing and do it really well. And then every day it would be starting that over again. And again, I think that that is needed in business sometimes and I’m very happy to do it. But it’s like if you’ve ever been driving a car and been driving at 80 miles an hour and then all of a sudden you’re driving 30 miles an hour and you feel like you’ve come to a stop. and it’s really weird. And you’re like, “What’s happening?”

And then you have to really get back into the flow of, or the speed of it is 25, maybe you’re going through a school zone. And you go from an interstate that’s 75 miles an hour to a school zone. And you’re like, “Well, this feels weird.” That’s kind of what I was experiencing. And so, we had an entire call that left me feeling so organized, so specific, so intentional and decisive. And really present with this next phase and what I’m going to do, when I’m going to do it, how much rest I’m going to take. Feeling okay to take that rest and all of the thoughts that were in the way of taking that rest.

And then it’s okay to take that rest and it’s safe to take that rest and all of those things that my brain was kind of a little bit freaking out. I think a lot of people I coach, what they’ll tell me is they’re afraid if they take the foot off the gas they won’t be able to get their foot back on it. I don’t have that particular fear.

But I wanted to mention it because so many people tell me that, “I can’t take a break because I’ll lose my motivation forever or it will be so hard to get it back up and going again. And I won’t be able to get back to this pace, so I just have to keep maintaining it.” Which is just not super healthy. So, then I started thinking about, after I got off this call, I felt it was so valuable. Then I started thinking about how much value I’ve received being coached in this way and getting coaching on these things throughout my career.

Then I started thinking about this, was really interesting and I’ve never thought about this before, but it occurred to me in a different conversation that was happening. That I have never since I started coaching, not since I started my business, since I started coaching in 2014, I have never not had a coach. What? Now, I don’t necessarily believe that you have to have a coach, that you need to have a coach, that you should have a coach all the time indefinitely. I am definitely not saying that.

But I thought it was very interesting and I was wondering what that’s about, why that is like. What are my thoughts about it versus people that have coaches sometimes and then not other times. And my answer is that I get so much value from times where typically people would say, “I’m going to take a break.” And I’m going to give some of those examples in this episode as well. But then I was thinking it’s also why it’s so easy for me to sell coaching is because I’ve found such intense value and joy out of being coached.

This past week, I was like, “This is why I love to coach.” Not even that I need to coach, this is just why I love to coach. Because I could have done the break and I could have slowed down, but it would not have been this intentional had I not had this call. And so, I just feel always endlessly grateful that I coach every week. My brain is just constantly cleaned out. And I coach myself too. I know how to do that, but I just think it’s so luxurious when someone else will do it for you. It’s like hiring a house cleaner for your brain.

So, I made a list because I thought this would be really helpful for those of you who maybe you struggle with this. But also, mostly what I was thinking of is all the people who give you this objection and maybe you haven’t exercised these thoughts in the thinking about the value of taking a break and slowing down and resting and doing that really, really well. What it’s like to actually do that well.

Okay, so here is the value. This is my list of the values I have received on being coached when I want to take a break, slow down and rest and to do it really well, to get the maximum benefits of taking a break, slowing down and resting. Alright, here they are.

Number one, I have spent a lot of time again, over the last 10 years. Gosh. I have been getting coached, you all, can we just take a moment. It just hit me. I need to say it out loud. It’s so crazy. I want you to really consider this. For people who think that my success is undeserved or unearned or out of their league or not possible for them or unicorn success or whatever it is, I could never do that. It’s either not her or too much of her. I have been getting coached every single week by someone else coaching my brain for 10 years straight. What?

This is why I feel like I’ve lived a bunch of different lifetimes in this one lifetime. This is it, I have become so many different versions of myself. You all, that is crazy. Who else can say that? I hope you can say it too. Ten years of having my brain cleaned out and offered all the thoughts, offered to me as optional or different views of the truth, new optional views of the truth. My brain has been coached for 10 years straight every single week and sometimes multiple times a week and sometimes for full immersion days.

If you’re going to live events or taking immersive days to go through courses, this is why. We’re getting the math but I’m pretty sure we’re a little over $38 million right now of coaching since I started my business, which is just one result of many results from coaching. But that’s wild you all. Okay, anyways, just had to take a moment to realize that that is so crazy.

So, throughout this time period, throughout the 10 years of being coached for many different phases of my life, for many different breaks and many different rests and many different slow times and non-revenue growth years. This is the value I’ve taken from those calls. So, the first one is deciding and identifying when I need a rest, a break or to slow down and why. Identifying the moment because this is what happens with burnout is you miss the moment. You miss many moments.

Your body tries to give you lots of warnings and you miss them all or you see them all and you tell yourself you can’t slow down. You can’t take a break. It’s not possible and so you don’t. So, deciding and identifying when I need it and then finding the thoughts that allow me to take it and to take it well. That has been huge. So, deciding and identifying when I need it and why. The why is so important. Sometimes, I know in the first year I tried to scale the next year I was like, “This is a slowdown year.”

Because I had tried so hard to hustle to get to $1 million unintentionally. I think it’s very common when you’re going for your first seven figure year. Your brain just can’t understand how you could possibly think your way to seven figures instead of not sell your way to seven figures and so your brain tries to just sell more coaching as the way to get there. So, it’s very, very common.

It doesn’t come from being a money grab or being obsessed with money or being lack and having lots of insufficiency and being a hustler. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. It’s just your brain’s reaction to a really big goal is to try to just speed up to accomplish it. So it was that year, that one was the why mattered, to say, “Okay, so this year my non-revenue growth year is going to be about learning how to solve this, not by just trying to accumulate more sales.”

And how to give myself more energy and then do bigger things and do things differently to get there. And that year I ended up actually doing 2.5 million, which is so crazy. And then sometimes, now pushing my capacity and I know that that’s not sustainable endlessly and forever.

And I coached myself so squeaky clean that I was able to maintain it for as long as I did, which is longer than I’ve ever done before, to get what my business needed and myself needed to reinvent my business. And take over operations and take over management all at the same time and the data study and all the new stuff, that’s kind of been coming out of me. That all came from that. And so, I love that why and also I am actually tired which is number two.

So, once I’m identifying and deciding when I need the rest or the break. Then, knowing clearly if the slowing down or just investigating if the slowing down or the taking a break, typically when people want to slow down and take a break, it’s either from thought errors about how going where you want to go is going to feel. And then resisting how that will feel or how you currently feel working. So, I need to take a break from this because this isn’t working. This way that I’m working doesn’t feel good, I don’t want to do it.

Or the current way that I’m doing things is requiring more effort than needed. Or maybe sometimes it’s from lack of belief in big results. So, I’ll see this is very common too, where people will come into one of my containers, 200K, Two Million Dollar Group and they have really big goals. And then they find out what it’s going to take to achieve it or what they think it’s going to take to achieve it. They get overwhelmed and they’re like, “Actually, I’m going to take a step back. I don’t really want this.”

And some of those things are actually not great reasons to take a break. They are reasons to think differently about the task at hand and do it differently. In this case, for me on this call, I was telling my coach, I said, “I know how to work hard and I’ve done in the past, I’ve done all the things where I have figured out how to do it better, faster and easier. And how to eliminate the thought errors and just think about it differently and feel differently and do it differently. And create something that wasn’t working into working.” I’ve done all that.

And so, I know, I just have worked so hard in my career that I know when I’ve hit my point and I can’t work hard anymore. I just know. I know what my point is. I know when it’s time to stop and breathe. And I think this is again, part of the value of coaching is just for me to say it out loud to another person and to another coach. To say, “I know when it’s time to stop and breathe and that time has officially come, it’s now.” My body and soul are expressing a need and I’m giving it to my body and my soul.

And that is just being so clear on what the break is, why the break is happening, if it’s a useful decision to break. What the body is telling you. What your soul is telling you. Just being able to work through all of that and be clear for you, not to get permission. That’s not why I was asking that. I don’t need permission. But just to be able to express it and be really clear for myself.

Then we talked about, so step three or value number three that I receive coaching on things like this is learning to feel safe to do it, to take the break, to rest, to slow down. So that I can experience the break because the break you take, the time off that you take is just a circumstance. And then there’s you and your brain interacting with it. And so, if you don’t get your brain coached, you may not experience that break with calm and safety and sufficiency. It may not be as restful as it could be.

So, what typically happens is you go on vacation, but your brain is spinning the whole time. And you’re still trying to solve problems and you’re still talking about work a lot in a way that your brain is just working while your body is suntanning. So that’s really powerful to take actual time to invest in being able to say, “What do I want my brain to be doing when my body is taking this rest or this time off.” And then checking in to make sure that’s happening.

The fourth piece of value that I’ve received in this type of coaching. I did not know that this was a term, but I have actually talked about this on the podcast before, having a conversation and intentionally working through downregulation. So, to downregulate is to come off of high production mode. Again, it’s to downshift into a low production mode and to find that comfort there, to find that piece there and to find that calm there. For me I do this naturally on the weekends. There’s a whole process. I’ve been doing the process, I didn’t know it was called downregulating.

My coach let me know that that’s a thing. But I do a lot of going out and doing very physical active things, playing with my kid, taking him to the zoo, taking him to the park, going to the pool. We go to dinner almost every Friday night just so I can decompress and it’s my brain’s way of knowing that the work week is over and I’m moving into the weekend. Or if it’s an extended period of time, our whole conversation was about downregulating into this extended time off. Really not time off, a slower pace. So that you don’t take time off and still feel tired and still have your brain again, going while it’s resting.

The fifth piece of value that I have received, and this I think has been, I would say the current coach I work with, Bev Aron, I’ve been working with her for three years, I think. And this feels like a very essential part of the work I’ve done with her that I just typically bring to my coaching calls and the work I do with my clients, which is organizing what’s essential within a slow time or a break.

This is a value of all of my masterminds. So, if you do 200K, Two Million Dollar Group, you’re going to learn about essentialism and you’re going to learn about the three essentials. Even working on a few things and doing them really well if you grow things at a time. So, you will learn this concept with me. But even for me, who teaches this as an essential concept of her masterminds. It is very helpful to have someone else’s brain to go through it and to help me think about it and to offer me new thoughts. I can do it for myself and it’s so helpful when someone else helps me do it.

So, organizing what’s essential within a slow time or a break. And to me again, if you could just star any of these, highlight any of these, relisten to and these, this to me is the value of coaching when you want to slow down, it’s the name of the game. So, for us, for my call, we talked about over the next three weeks before my Cape Cod trip. We’re going to really make sure what’s on my calendar is about organization, cleaning up, tidying and very specific things.

I have a very specific list of these are the things I want to make sure are buttoned up, tied with a bow, feeling very clean by the end of these three weeks. These are all the loose ends remaining. Things I want to kind of just make sure are done really, really well. And then I’m going to go on a two week break. And within this organizing what’s essential, part of this is redeciding when your to-do list doesn’t match the time you have available.

That is a big part of just work I do every week as a CEO when I get coached, if I’m constantly redeciding my to-do list because it never matches what time I have available. And I also spend a lot of time coaching on the belief that I can do more with less or I can make more with less. That’s the best way to say it. So do less, make more with less. Learning to say no. This one I’ve done personally and professionally. This has been a big piece for me is learning to say no when you don’t want to do something.

Especially now that I’ve become a mom I get coaching just on everything in my life with my one-on-one coach, so personal, business, all the things. And one of the things I did an entire call on this current year was things that I used to do for other people, events I used to attend, things I would do with or for their children or their family or for them, just things. I had so much energy available when I didn’t have kids. And now it’s every hour that I work, I notice that away from my kid.

And so, when I’m off I’m in a place where I just don’t want to do anything, just spend time with my kid. My husband and I just a very quick, short three day trip together for our anniversary to Palm Beach. Literally left on a Thursday and flew home on a Sunday morning. And I have to do it for my husband. He’s like, “Listen, I’ve got to have this.” And I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want to.” I just don’t want to ever be away from my kid. I’m just in that phase. I’ve accepted that where I am. And I just want to watch him light up all the time.

And so, I want that to be most of my free time. So, I don’t want to go do other things that I may be used to do that felt very supportive in other relationships. I don’t want to do those anymore and saying no is very difficult. So really that piece has been so helpful to kind of work through that and learn to be okay with setting that boundary and honoring it.

Also coaching on urges to speed up and do the non-essential things out of lack, fear, compare and despair, staying in and honoring your essentials, honoring your slowdown especially amongst peers or friends who might be speeding up. They might be in a different place in their life. I have a couple of friends and colleagues, and they’re just in a very different part of their life. They don’t have small children. Their children are grown up. They have lots and lots of time, and they’re in. They’re speeding up time and they’re in their just hardcore work ethic, getting their vision and mission out in the world.

And I have had to coach on my brain telling me, you should be doing that too, you’re missing out. And coming back and honoring the fact that I am in just in general a slower period. I still have big goals. And I’m still working towards those big goals. And I still want to create a lot. And also, I’m in a different time in my life where I also want to spend a lot of time with my child and be there for my littles.

Okay, so the sixth value that I have received on being coached in taking breaks and doing them well is increasing the quality of work during a low quantity time. And there’s seven pieces of this, I think. Becoming someone with more impact in less time. Having greater skills while working less. Nailing those essentials, the ones that are the most essential with the biggest impact. So, if I am going to work, what I’m going to do is done really well. I want the slowness to be highly committed and highly intentional.

I want to work through all the scarcity that comes up when I have so many ideas and not so much time to implement. I want to open myself up for receiving rest and time at maximum capacity. And I want to be really, really incredibly nourished when I’m ready to go again. All of that contributes to the quality of my work during a low quantity time.

And then the last piece of value, and I’m sure there’s so much more, but the last one is, it’s not all going to go perfectly when you travel, when you take a vacation, when you take time off, when you slow down. You’re going to have to work through missed expectations, redirect, get back in it, be engaged with what’s available, love what is. And maximize the enjoyment available when your brain wants to be disappointed.

When I travel, I was really thinking about this with travel, but I really think about it with anything. I want to create memories of a lifetime. Even if I just go to the zoo with my kid, I want to create a memory of a lifetime. We feed the giraffes, we do all the things every single time.

And so, I have a really good example of that, we went on a trip to Italy and we spent two weeks last year and we spent a lot of money. We went to the highest end places in Italy you could possibly go to because I’m just not as much of a go visit historical sites person. I’m more of be in the environment. If I lived here, what would I be doing? And it would be hanging out at the pool, eating good food, shopping, doing some bit of doing other things like sightseeing but it’s not the biggest part of what I love to do.

I like to get rest on vacation unless I’m in a big city and then typically we’re go, go, go because we want to do all the things, like New York or LA or something. So, I was thinking about the trip. And I got a lot of coaching before I went on this trip. I got coaching on how I wanted to feel, what the most important things were to me even though they may not be, what other people do.

So, for example, my sister and her husband and family took a trip to Italy two weeks before we did. And they’re the opposite. They went to Rome. They went to Florence. They went and saw all of the things. Their photos were just everything, the Colosseum. They went to all the things. And they went to Venice, all the historical sites. And sometimes I use that against myself and I’m like, “You don’t care about culture and history and you’re wrong. That’s wrong.” I just like to hang out at the pool or the beach.

I can imagine what the Kardashians talk about which is so bad. But is it Kourtney that’s always, there’s a saying in Italy, what is it? I can’t think of it right now. But just living the Italian summer. There’s a saying but I can’t think of which one it is. But anyways, that’s just the vibe that I’m looking for is summer in Italy done really well. I have to get coaching, it’s okay for me to just want to go to the Mandarin Oriental and Lake Como and sit at the beach each day and chill out. And so, I have to get a lot of coaching on that. I know it sounds so crazy, but that was very important to me.

So then once I was like, “Okay, this is my best trip regardless of what I think other people’s judgments might be about it or self-judgments maybe that I have about me not being cultural or whatever the word is.” And then I had to get some coaching on, I’m taking a toddler and why I want to take my toddler. And the experience of a toddler going to Italy versus if just my husband and I went to Italy and the things that could come up.

We could be doing an experience that has to end quickly because he’s throwing a fit or an experience might have to be altered because he’s so young or we might not be able to do something for as long. So, for example, we took a boat up to Bellagio and it’s an hour from where we stayed. And we had to be pretty quick because we wanted to get back and also spend time with Jackson. And if Jackson had been able to come with us we would have done that as a whole day.

We would have taken the boat out early in the morning, walked through the town, done some shopping, had lunch, gone back, maybe gotten in the lake and swam. And we would have just done a lot more, but it had to be tailored to, he takes a nap in the middle of the day and we still want to see him that day and do things with him. So, we’re going to have to really shorten this experience. And so, we coached a lot on this. I know this might sound crazy to you all, but remember, travel is one of my top priorities.

We also invested a lot of money and I wanted to end this trip saying, “This was a trip of a lifetime, we did this really well.” And then there was a day where we went to Portofino and I was so excited. We spent four days in Portofino and we were driving there and the weather shifts. And it shows that it’s going to pour rain the entire trip. And there’s really nothing to do in Portofino except be on a boat and be at the pool and be in the water and shopping, but it’s outdoor shopping. So, there’s just not a lot to do if you’re not outdoors.

And I was devastated, and the entire trip I was texting my coach and coaching myself on getting on board with the fact that our entire portion of our trip to Portofino and our entire experience was going to be downpouring. Also, just as a note, it did not rain the whole trip. It rained a couple of days for a couple of hours. And we got to do a lot more than we thought we were going to. But looking back I feel like that trip, the memories I created with my child, with my husband. It still is one of the best trips of my life because I set it up so well and then also worked so well on my missed expectations of that.

I think about what do people want from vacations? What do people want from trips? They want to create memories of a lifetime. And then think about how many regular people, regular people meaning non-coaching people, go on trips and they tell you the stories of their trips are their kids cried the whole time. It was so terrible. We fought the whole time. It was not what we expected. It was so disappointing. This thing happened.

We went to Disney this year and we had to actually be taken from Epcot to urgent care because my kid was throwing himself on the ground, screaming and screeching in pain and making animal sounds and grabbing his stomach. And we thought maybe his appendix exploded. So, Disney literally rushed us to urgent care. And we missed our entire day at Epcot and our whole last day of vacation.

And I still, because of coaching, look back on that trip and think about what we did get to do and memories we did get to create. And even how that is a memory and time of Jackson’s childhood. And how I want to tell him that story one day and all of the things. And so, I think it’s really important to think about that value. It may seem small to you or not valuable to you. I don’t know.

I want you to really question it because I have really experienced and been given extreme value in coaching on these things and in these situations. So again, there’s time off, and then there’s time off done really, really well, being present, engaged, work properly delegated, not holding space for things that haven’t been done while you’re off. A plan for coming back and knowing exactly what’s next and doing it so well that you just get back to work as soon as you’re ready. And you go boom and your momentum skyrockets.

So, I really want you to think about what if downtime felt more rested and fulfilled? What if on your calendar during a slow time or all the time was only your top loves and priorities? What if you could say no and feel safe and calm and say it with love and hold your boundaries and repair rifts created when you say no to only be doing what you love and to be able to give yourself rest and to take breaks? What if you could become an expert on essentialism?

What if you make sure when you were resting and slowing down that you stayed in your slow lane, that you’re like, “I’m driving in the right lane and I don’t have to compare to people driving in the fast lane, the left lane, getting there faster?” What if you got 100% out of your slow time, exactly what you wanted? What if it wasn’t picking back up where you left off after an extended break, but starting somewhere completely different?

This is how I feel about breaks. It’s not, I’m going to end, I’m going to take a break, I’m going to come back, I’m just going to pick up and be exactly who I was. I take breaks and slow down so well that when I start back up, I am someone who is completely different. I have new skill sets. I have a new way of thinking. I’m fresher. I’m more ready to go. I get up quicker and I reinforce this really, really healthy rest and then getting back going. What if you were downregulated, downshifted and fully relaxed when you wanted to be?

I mean that one right there, you weren’t trying to rest while your body is not regulated properly and you’re having lots of thoughts and feelings about it. What if you were fully relaxed? What if you had someone to talk through the hiccups along the way? And this one, I’m going to end with this one, but it’s one of my favorite things that all of my coaches in the past have done so well is, have someone point out the miracles that you’ve missed while you’re doing it, actually, even when you’re busy, even when you’re working hard. Any time this is really valuable, to have someone point out the miracles that you miss.

I want you to consider this for you because I think if you change, many of you might agree with me totally. But if this is a blind spot for you, when you really work through this and are very clear and are able to get this much value out of resting and taking a break. It will be so easy for you to see that value and then know when you have a client that says, “Well, I’m going to be home with the kids for the summer. I’m not going to be focused on work so much.”

You’re going to know exactly what to say like, “This is actually the perfect time to start. And here’s why, you’re for sure able to start whenever you want to start, but I just want to offer here are the eight pieces of value or however many it is for you, here’s the five big lessons that we could work on. Five pieces of value that you would get if we started now even though you’re not going to be working as hard and working as heavy. And these are the other things that we could work on or the value that you can get because, actually because you aren’t in a heavy time. Let’s make sure you enjoy that time off.”

There’s a reason if you’re taking a slow time with work, there’s a reason you’re taking that off. You want to enjoy that time with your kids over the summer. Me too, for real. I’m so excited about the summer. I love taking my kid to the park and the splash pad in the summer and the zoo and all the things and going on trips. And just we’re going to do swim lessons. We’re going to do all the things. There’s what you want to get out of that, and let’s make sure you get it. Let’s make sure you think about work in a way that allows you to get that.

Let’s make sure you prioritize work, you are able to really give the essentials the most, that you’re able to have those boundaries. Let’s check your brain when your brain wants to be stressed about it, when your brain wants to cave and say yes when you really mean no. Whatever it is for you with whoever you coach, just think about it because I think in my world there’s so many coaches that are missing out on this value.

But then when I think about the coaches missing out on this value then I think about the people in the world that they are coaching, who are also missing out on this value. I think as a society we don’t rest well, and we have the ability to do it.

Okay, I hope this episode was really intriguing and fun and opened your mind to some new possibilities. Have an amazing week. I’m going to do the same. Talk to you next week, bye bye.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.