PODCAST TRANSCRIPT - EPISODE 163

THE IMPORTANCE OF TAKING A BREAK

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Annemie Tonken  00:00

If you've been listening to the show for a while, this probably comes as no surprise. But as a firstborn Enneagram Three people pleaser who really, really loves what I do for a living, I often have to actively fight my workaholic tendencies. I was once riding in a car with my friends, and we were listening to Brene Brown's podcast on locking us. And on this particular episode, she was talking about the various ways that different people handle anxiety or stressful situations. And one of the types of ways that she described people doing this handling these kinds of situations with something that she called over functioning where those people respond to stress by basically going into like hyperdrive and doing things like making exhaustive lists, and becoming almost manic in an effort to control what I guess they can control about whatever the situation is. And the further that she got into describing describing this particular behavior, the louder my friends were sort of sort of like snickering in the car until finally I had to stop the podcast, and be like, what, and they were just cackling with laughter about like, that's you, that's exactly you. So once upon a time, this was a thing that I sort of knew about myself, and I was kind of embarrassed by it. And sometimes I would get defensive about it. But over time, I have come to accept this part of my personality as just kind of who I am, it's part of who I am. That said, I have also become more and more aware over the years of how this particular personality trait, this tendency to need to control things and to, when I'm stressed become even more, you know, lean even more into the need to control and let's get super, super, hyper productive. That trait has the potential to cause problems in my life it has in the past, I'm sure it will in the future. Whether we're talking about sleep, my interpersonal relationships, or even just my mental health, that tendency does have a bearing on a lot of different parts of my life. So now now that I have a clearer picture of what it is, and I'm aware of it, and I'm accepting of it, what I try and do is keep a closer eye on it. Now, I realized that not everyone listening to this show is going to be wired the same way I am. So you may be listening to this and being like, that's you. I'm totally different. But I also know that as entrepreneurs, many of us struggle with putting boundaries around our work, and giving ourselves permission to take actual breaks with any regularity. So as we enter what is, you know, commonly the school holidays here in the US, and it's a time when lots of us have more responsibilities as parents and more pressure to you know, just relax. That's what people tell me. I thought it would be a good time to share a few tips and insights that have allowed me to get better over the years about unplugging into intentionally, in a way that doesn't actually add to my anxiety. So if you ever find yourself feeling guilty about taking a day or a week off, or not checking your email over the weekend, or anything like that, this episode is for you.

Intro:

Welcome to this can't be that hard. My name is Annemie Tonken. And I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it. And I can show you how.

As entrepreneurs running tiny businesses, we generally only get paid when we work, right. So it's easy to understand how over time, this cycle is training a deep part of our brains to believe that our act of work is the sole driver of our results or our income. And that quickly can lead to this no days off kind of work mindset. And when I think about it, I actually think that that's what happened to me. I don't think that I was born as this hyper-productive person who was just driven to constantly be busy and be filling my time. I haven't always been, you know, addicted in that way. Even though I've always been someone who liked to feel productive. I'm sure that no one would have described me as a student or me as a waiter and a restaurant or me as a nurse, as a workaholic, I was more than happy to like punch in and punch out was totally different, that whole side of my personality that has sort of come into focus as someone who needs to be productive all the time that really developed starting when I opened my photography business. And I think that part of that just came down to the fact that I wanted my work my business to succeed so badly for years. And I mean, not just one or two years, but several years, I was more than willing to forego sleep, I was willing to work on vacation, I was skipping, you know, watching TV shows or anything like that everybody else would be chilling out for the evening, and I would go sit down at my laptop. And I was doing all that because I wanted to build this business. And in order to do that, I had to kind of work in the margins of my full time job as a nurse, and of my role as the mother of two young kids. So whether that meant getting up super early, so that I could get some work done before they woke up or before I had to go to my job, or, you know, staying up late working on the weekends, you name it, I was doing it.

And the thing was, most of the time, it didn't feel like a huge sacrifice to me, my friends would look at my, you know, insane color coded Google Calendar and sort of voice their shock and horror. But I when they would do that, I almost felt smug. Because I was thinking in the back of my mind, like, Well, my calendar may be full, but I love what I do. And you know, I'm happy to fill my calendar, whereas you complain about your job. When you get home, you call me and tell me like your boss is a jerk, or you can't stand the bureaucratic red tape. And I don't have any of that, because I'm my own boss. And I'm doing all this because I want to, I really, truly felt like I didn't need the extra rest, I didn't need the extra sleep, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Because I felt so fulfilled by what I was working toward. So that feedback loop that I was building at that time, the one that was being created in my head that told me, if I worked more, I got hired more. And if I got hired more, I got paid more. And if I got paid more that led to you know, bigger and better success, that feedback loop met very little resistance.

And that went on, like I said, for years. And in many ways, I guess that speaks to just how much I enjoyed photography, I enjoyed running a business, I found it like an endless source of creative satisfaction and, and sort of a way to develop in my life that was sort of outs it was all mine, right? It wasn't my responsibilities to my kids or my responsibilities as a wife or a friend or anything like that. But in retrospect, I also know that that was a way of kind of avoiding some of those other issues in my life, things that I never didn't necessarily have all the control over. Right, especially when it comes to other people. We don't have full control. So when things got hard, in my marriage, for instance, work became a very easy escape. It was an area of my life that I felt justified and putting energy toward, I felt proud about I felt proud of the results that I was getting in the work that I was doing. And I could hold on to that even when other areas of my life felt like those were out of control or failing.

But around the time of my divorce, which happened seven years into my business, I really got to a point where I hit a wall, right, it was more than I could take. I went from frantically overworking in those weeks and months and years leading up to the decision to get divorced to Once that decision had been made. I was barely able to work at all for the first few months of that year. 2017, from like January through May, was essentially a dead zone in my business, both because of my emotional state. But also just because of sort of the practical and logistical demands of moving out, you know, dividing up stuff, all of the bits and pieces that go along with getting divorced. And as soon as I took my foot off the gas and my business, my brain started to panic. Now my brain had plenty to panic about anyway. But it started to focus on this feedback loop. So I would wake up in the middle of the night in like a cold sweat thinking, my business is going to fail. My clients are going to abandon me my friends and family are going to judge me not just about my you know, getting divorced, but also about the fact that like, Oh, she had this business and it was totally reliant upon her having somebody else's income, all of these different things and of course there was kind of the big red line at the bottom. And that panic was I'm gonna go broke, I am going to fail financially. And yet, I continued on this little mini-sabbatical from my work, not necessarily intentionally, but because I just didn't have the brain space for it, I didn't have the energy to put toward my business.

In that season of my life, I had so many other tasks and issues occupying my head. So imagine my surprise when what happened next in my life, and in my business was kind of the opposite of what my brain was pinging me constantly. It was about to happen. Here, I was mentally prepared for total failure, I had sort of started thinking about like, Where can I send my resume? How do I even build a resume since I've been doing, you know, a solo business for seven years, it turned out that that forced period of rest, where I was focused on things other than my business, was the fuel behind one of the biggest leaps forward that my business has ever taken, then or now. So as I started to recover from the acute phase of my divorce, the actual moving out and the, you know, meetings with lawyers, and all that sort of stuff, as I naturally started to feel the energy that I had for my business, returning to my head returning to my heart. And as I turned that energy toward solving the logistical issues that I was facing in that moment, where I needed to make more money, I really wanted to stop doing in person sales, because it was taking up too much time. It was at that point that the concept of the simple sales system came to me. And it didn't come to me because I was like working really hard at figuring it out. It was one of those aha moments that you can't really script you can't force it just has to happen.

In the intervening years, I have had several instances of very similar things happen to me in my business, where I took a break, either intentionally or unintentionally. And then it was in that sort of period, after the break, that I saw these major breakthroughs happen. And these major leaps forward, happen for my business. And the more that I started to notice this pattern, the more it really made sense, right? You know, consider the various activities that we perform in our work, like seeds. Sometimes when those activities feel like they're not having any effect, you're just like, grinding it out, and everything is failing, and nothing feels like it's clicking or working or taking. And nothing is, you know, none of the actions that I'm taking are creating the results that I want them to create. I think about that kind of activity, like taking these seeds, these action seeds and dropping them onto dry hard earth, the seeds might be great. But in order to grow and flourish, these seeds, like any other kinds of seeds need to be planted in fertile soil, they need to be given sunlight, they need to be given rain in order for them to grow and thrive.

And what I've come to understand is that all although I can't control all of the elements that affect my business, right, I can't control what other people do, I can't control what the economy is doing. I am not in full control of what people's budgets are anything like that. The thing I can control is the soil that I plant those seeds in. And in this case, if you're following my little metaphor here, that is my own state of rest and energy. Historically, when I have felt like things weren't working, and my phone isn't ringing, and my bank account is hurting, my reaction has always been to work harder to put in more hours and like push, push, push, push until things got better. But over and over again, what I have seen is that when my brain is screaming that I need to work harder, the very best thing that I can do is stop and take an intentional step away. I might be as small as like spending some time working in the yard, or going for a walk or prepping a meal for a couple of hours. Or literally shutting my computer and walking away for the weekend. Like saying that's it, I need to take a break. I need to turn my brain off for a little bit and allowing that period of rest because that period of rest and focus on other things in my life is really essential.

Chill, as it turns out for rebalancing the soil of my mind of my energy and allowing that seed of action or idea or anything else to take root, but I realized that compared to a lot of my material on this show, this is kind of like you might be thinking, honestly, you're getting a little blue here, it's a little fluffy. So I wanted to give you what has really become my best tip for being able to quickly turn that rest into some kind of resolution. Because I don't like just closing my computer and being like, Whatever, I'll deal with this later. That doesn't feel to me like being intentional. It just feels like kicking the can down the road, which I'm not a fan of what I try to do when I hit that wall, when I'm staring at my screen, wondering why my brain won't work, why everything is failing. Or if I'm getting grouchy, and I'm thinking negative thoughts, and I'm feeling burned out, when that occurs to me. And I think, hey, maybe instead of pushing through, what I need to do is step away and come back to this later, which again, I've only recently really started to recognize that and say that intentionally. But when that thought occurs to me, before I do that, before I walk away, I spend a few minutes, like three minutes, or maybe topping out at 10 minutes, kind of brain dumping about what it is that has me stuck. And at the end of that what I want to have is one or two specific questions that I want to answer. It could be something small, right? Like, why did that last post that I put on Instagram flop? Or what am I going to talk about on my podcast next week, or whatever the case may be? Or it could be something really big, foundational to my business. Should I sign up for this course? Or this course? Should I you know, in the case of myself, five, six years ago, how can I make more money in less time without running a business that relies on in person sales, and without doing something that I don't enjoy? Or it goes against my values? Right? I didn't write that question down before I went on my mini-divorce sabbatical. But if I had, that was sort of the that was the question that my brain was percolating on that ultimately, it like served up an answer for me.

 And that's the reason that I like to put this question out on paper or like, write it down on my computer, not only so that when I come back, and I'm ready, and I'm energized to work, I can kind of pick up directly where I left off, I don't have to kind of think like, what was I working on? What was I thinking about? Like, I have the number one question that I was worried about right in front of me. And I've got that fertile mind ready to ready to answer the question. So I like to have it there for that reason. But it also, I think, allows my brain to kind of file that in the back. And, like, start thinking about the answer before I even come back to it in a way that is very passive, like I'm not actively thinking about it, it's just kind of percolating. And bear in mind, you know, the size of the question that you're asking there is probably going to be in line with the size of the amount of time that you need to give yourself to step away.

Those big questions are going to need more time to percolate than something like I'm feeling stuck with an Instagram caption, as just, you know, your brain needs more time to process. And then after you do that, after you write down those questions, one or two tops, this is not supposed to be like 100 questions that you're gonna come back and sit down in front of you, you need to take that time to step away. And so when you are ready to sit back down and get started, you're just going to open up your computer, start right back where you finished. And whether or not you come up with a completely clear answer immediately, you're at least going to be able to tackle that question with like fresher eyes and more energy, the answers that you're going to come up with, which may include you know what, this is not as important as I thought it was when I was feeling so stuck. Those answers are going to be they're going to help you move forward more quickly. So whether you plan to take time off this summer, or you just need this little reminder to keep in your back pocket for the next time that you're feeling stuck. I want you to give yourself permission to intentionally step away sometimes it does not need to be a weekend. It does not need to be planned time off. And not only is this stepping away, okay. I have come to truly believe that it is an essential requirement of the energy crew Creativity and focus that are needed to run a successful business.

See you guys next week.

Outro:

Well, that's it for this week's episode of This can't be that hard. I'll be back Same time, same place next week. In the meantime, you can find more information about this episode, along with all the relevant links, notes and downloads at this can't be that hard.com/learn If you liked the podcast, be sure to hit the subscribe button. Even better, share the love by leaving a review on iTunes. And as always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.