Being at your best is the best way to serve your clients, so let’s talk about what it actually looks like to be a leader in for your clients. Because all of you are leaders in what you’re creating for your clients even if you don’t realise how much they look towards what you do.
Make time for holidays
I’m in Bali as I write this, having a holiday before I run a program here. And I want to talk to you about the importance of making time for holidays.
How long has it been since you took a holiday? Way back when I was running my clinic, it took two years for me to actually take a break.
There are always a million wonderful excuses that sound very reasonable about why you can’t take a holiday. Meanwhile, you’re:
- burnt out
- tired
- not showing up the best way that you possibly can
- unable to be creative
- unsuccessfully chasing flow
- feeling like you’re pushing uphill
I’ve been there lots of times. Some of the stories that we tell ourselves we create in our head as “rules”. In some of my programs, we’ve talked about rules that cause us to believe in something that isn’t actually true, aka BRULES (bullshit rules).
My top “can’t take a break” excuses
For example, here are some of the brules that I used to tell myself about taking holidays:
- All of my clients will disappear and I will have nobody when I come back.
- The knowledge in my head will disappear and won’t come back.
- I don’t get paid if I don’t show up for work (when we’re feeling this one, we’re usually in a little bit of a lull anyway. It’s one of those moments where don’t know where your next client is coming from. You don’t actually have clients, so it’d be the perfect time to be away!)
- My clients think I’m lazy or frivolous.
- I don’t have the money.
Have you ever come up against one (or all) of these? Did it stop you from taking some time off?
The reality is that all of that is just crap. It’s all a load of rubbish.
I know because I used to tell myself these things and now going on holidays is one of my biggest marketing tools.
Reframe your ‘rules’ into positive affirmations
This is a little trick you can use to get past the ‘rules’ your mind is telling you. Reframe and change the way that you’re describing the holiday to yourself into something that is going to create a positive affirmation for you.
Holidays are actually a marketing tool
When truly believe it, and reaffirm it, something strange starts to happen.
Before you leave
When you are planning to go away on holiday, tell your peeps about it. Get on social media and post about where you’re going and what you’re getting excited about. What happens is that people want to come along for the ride.
You’ll get more likes, comments, and interest than you probably have on anything in a while. And, all of your clients are going to want to get their scrips, referrals, and everything else before you leave.
Even if you’re only leaving for a long weekend, they’ll want to get come and refill and refuel before you leave. They want to get that little hit of you.
When you come back
After you come back, you get this massive influx of people because you haven’t been there. They’ve seen you away and now they want a piece of what you’ve got. They want to know how you’ve created this amazing energy and have shown up and looked after yourself in an amazing way, so they can have that, too.
Many people will try to book in the week that you’re away, so often, you’ll actually have one of the busiest weeks when you come back from a break.
A break in routine makes space for creativity
There’s a beautiful thing that happens when you’re away on holidays. You might think you’ll lose your edge because you’re out of the mix. But the reality is that when you’re out of the mix an incredible space opens up for creativity.
New ideas for the problems you’re struggling with – whether in your clinic or with your clients – and the new things you want to create for your business and clients, suddenly come through. Releasing your tension and letting go allows you to create space and time for creative and innovative solutions.
Both your client consults, and the way that you do business, will feel easier.
Being at your best is the best way to serve your clients
Let me ask you – How on earth is anyone going to listen to a practitioner who is:
- burnt-out
- cranky
- short-tempered
- brain-fogged
and hear all of the information they need to hear, when they are, themselves, tired, cranky, and confused themselves?!
Being at your best is the best way to serve your people. And what better way to be at your best than to actually take a holiday?
It’s an amazing thing to fill up your cup and serve from your overflow.
For many of you, actually taking a holiday is taking it to a whole new, deep dive level. It took me a couple of years as well when I first started. But once I did, that was it. I was scheduling in holidays for:
- myself
- my family
- my husband and me (because business can take a real toll on your relationship unless you’ve got time to connect)
- and my business
That’s four holidays a year scheduled in. Those times help shift gears so that you can pull back (like pulling back an arrow) to refocus, then let it go and zoom in a way that you haven’t before.
Start small and build from there
All right, here’s the last one of the “brules”.
If you don’t have money to go on holidays – I’ve been there. Yes, I’m coming to you from Bali right now and it’s absolutely epic and beautiful. But it wasn’t always like this.
The first holidays we took were just a day out. We would go for a big bush walk with our picnic rugs. We would find a place to put the fire on and toast marshmallow.
It doesn’t have to be a big deal. If you need some time out, your first holidays can start as a day out. Then they can go to a night out. We would have long weekends away. I would go by myself to write my book on long weekends away in a cabin. I saw just enough clients to pay for a cabin to go solo to work on my writing and get into a creative space. That helped me things done even if it was just an overnighter.
Later, we took our kids away and stayed at a cabin or a caravan park. Just having some time out to create the space that I needed to get past the burn-out and my cortisol back down so I could find creative solutions to problems I was creating for myself.
Then, it evolved to what it is now which is an international holiday every year. It creates an incredible amount of flow for me.
How do you do it?
You work with what you’ve got. Just figure out what you need to make it happen. Can you take your earnings from one client visit in a month to pay for one day off?
If you’ve got $120 consults and $100 worth of subs, that’s $220 dollars. So maybe you need four of those clients to pay for a thousand dollar holiday. Realise that it’s only a matter of a couple of clients. So do what you can to help and serve a couple of clients to get what you need.
‘You serve, you deserve,’ as Denise Duffield-Thomas says!
The amount of people that you can serve is going to increase exponentially when you have can creatively find solutions to take time out and serve from your overflow. It will enable you to really give to them in a way that they’re inspired by because they see you living it and leading by example.
Take action!
I hope this has been beneficial to you or somebody else. If it has, take the action that you require. Find those clients to be able to schedule your next holiday.
And please share this with somebody that you know – another practitioner who might need to hear this same conversation!
Leave A Comment