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Time Off - A Sound Business Investment

Written by: Sharon Swords

Article Overview: To have a successful business you must be smart. That is not stating the obvious because you have to be smart with regards to your personal effectiveness. Put simply you need to take the time off to recharge your self employed batteries!!!

Time Off - A Sound Business Investment

“Time off” I hear you Yell! Are you mad?
If you are reading this and thinking – hey I run my own business I can’t afford to take time off, then you might want to continue reading.

Let me put it this way - If someone offered you a common sense way to improve your business then you would listen – am I right?
Well join with me now while I help you do just that - improve your business.

So how does time off help and improve your business. Well if your business is like a well oiled machine, running fairly smoothly, with a few bumps and glitches along the way, what is it that has your business running that way?
Well: Time, Energy, Creativity, Capital, Support, and Learning from Mistakes to name a few certainly maintain your business.

But You are the foundation of your business.
Not your product, not your employees, not your clients.
You.
And if you do not take care of yourself then you are not taking care of business.

No matter what product or ideas you are selling, if you are stressed, frazzled, angry or unhealthy, people will not want to do business with you or buy your product or service.
Even if you are behind the scenes you cannot underestimate the effect You as a person have on your business.
To have a successful business you must be smart. That is not stating the obvious because you have to be smart with regards to your personal effectiveness.

Put simply you need to take the time off to recharge your self employed batteries!!!

I’ve broken this down into a number of key points, some which will overlap. Remember for your business to be a well oiled machine, You need to be a well oiled machine. Here are some pointers on how to achieve that.

I mentioned Time, Energy, Creativity, Capital, Support and Learning from Mistakes earlier. These are important aspects to your business and business strategy and these can also be used to help your Personal Effectiveness.

Time.
We are bombarded with millions of pieces of information through-out each day. Our conscious mind can only handle between 5 and 9 pieces of information at one time, however our subconscious mind holds onto all our memories, and memories of emotions and events.

What we need to be aware of is that our subconscious needs peace and quiet in order to process the information, thoughts and emotions that we experience throughout the day.

If we do not allow ourselves time to process all that has gone on for us, our subconscious, in a way, gets stressed. If you are not allowing your subconscious the time it needs, then it needs to look for other ways to allow you to process the information, thoughts and emotions.
Generally this occurs as physical illness, stress, fatigue, a feeling of panic or worry. These are signs that a body and mind is stressed and not dealing in a healthy way with the stress.

I will give an example of a client of mine Donal.
Donal went through a phase in his business where he had quite a number of stressful business meetings during which he felt under pressure, worried and angry. He would leave with a head ache and just take a headache tablet. Then he’d continue working until late at night, then fall exhausted into bed.
This pattern continued with other business meetings. But he kept working busily, not taking the time to stop and relax, or think about how these meetings were affecting him.
Over time the headaches got worse, the feelings of anxiety increased until the Donal’s quality of life began to be seriously affected. At that stage Donal sought Life Coaching.
The headaches were being caused by the Donal’s subconscious basically yelling for him to stop, take a breather and examine how these business meetings were making him feel. His feelings of anger, frustration and panic had been left un-dealt with and unprocessed so to speak. While Donal felt he was dealing with the feelings by pushing them to the back of his mind, he was in fact not dealing with them. What he was doing was making it worse by delaying acknowledging them.

So by Time I mean spending ten minutes for example at the end of the day to acknowledge to yourself what went well and what didn’t go well. Acknowledge the negative feelings you had. What caused them and ponder on how to reduce their effect or occurrence.

You can fit it into your schedule to take 10 minutes, 20 minutes or half an hour. It is essential that you do this because then you are allowing yourself to process the negative along with the good and your subconscious mind then doesn’t have to come after you to get you to stop and sit and process.

Every day you ensure that the basic essential activities of the business to keep it ticking over are done.
It is important that you apply that same logic to yourself.

Energy.
I define Energy as not simply physical energy to get tasks done but as motivation and mental clarity.
If you don’t have Energy, not only will you be unable to do the physical tasks that running a business requires, but you will be unable to trouble shoot, determine problems, think of solutions, interact effectively with clients, suppliers or employees or represent yourself to the best of your ability.


As it stands now how do you give yourself energy or how do you get your energy. What creates the fire inside of you, what is your passion? Are you allowing yourself to live your passion or are you pouring all your life energy into your business.
If you keep giving all your energy to your business and not replacing it, it’s gonna go.
If your business is your passion, well think of your next best passion. If its golf, are you getting a game in every week. If it’s cooking a gourmet meal, again are you getting to do this regularly?

What is stopping you from doing what you love, what you are passionate about? Well what can you do to change that?
You don’t have to spend a full day or half a day at it, but spend some time doing what you love, starting off small if you are feeling that your time is limited.

Of course I couldn’t talk about Energy and not mention sleep and healthy eating.
Getting adequate sleep to allow your body to self repair, and eating the healthy foods to provide the nutrients to do that is as essential to your business as you are because without one you won’t have the other.
And you’ve probably all heard it, but I can’t emphasise enough how important eating a breakfast within half an hour of getting up is.
If it’s just a slice of bread or piece of fruit, it’s better than nothing. You wouldn’t expect your car to start with out any petrol, so why are you any different?


If you are finding it difficult to switch off at night to sleep then try some relaxation techniques. Now you have to try them a good lot of times to feel them working. If a highly stressed person tries a relaxation technique and it doesn’t work first time, come on - what did you expect??
If you are highly stressed, your body is used to existing in this state, and is in fact probably addicted to these feelings. One relaxation technique tried once will more than likely not work. You have to keep using the technique and allow it to take its time.

To switch off that overactive brain of yours thinking about all the tasks you’ve to do, get a notebook and just before you go to bed, write down what is on your mind. Write down what you have to do tomorrow, safe in the knowledge that that note book will be there in the morning so you don’t have to worry all night about forgetting and trying to remember your tasks.


Creativity.
I briefly mentioned this earlier. How I define Creativity is the ability to problem solve, view your various options and come up with new strategies.
I’m not going to talk about becoming a “hippy” and hugging trees but getting out in nature can help you overhaul your creativity.

Taking time to view nature in all its glory is all about changing your perspective. Again it’s about having peace and quiet to process your thoughts and feelings. If you can look at an amazing sunset, a frost covered garden, a rose in bloom, this lifts you out of the confines of your everyday life and opens the door to a new view point, fresh ideas, and new insights.
How does it do this I hear you ask?
Well you’ll just have to go out there and find out for yourself.
You have nothing to loose.
If you are doing what you have always done, and are only getting the results you have always gotten, well get out there. Breathe in the air. Surround yourself with nature’s bounty and your ability for creativity will increase.



Capital
You inject money into your business and expect to plough back profits. You scan a computer for viruses and pay a lot of money for a security system. Are you beginning to realise where I am going with this point?

When was the last time you had a health check up?
When was the last time you went for a massage, or other illness prevention body treatment?

If you invest in your physical health you will plough back the profits of this. So too will your business.

Again, its all about starting small if you feel your time is limited. If you have a business meeting close by, walk there.
Take the stairs instead of the lift.
Walk to the local deli to get your lunch.
Remember small small small adds up to something.

Do not fool yourself (like I did for so long) that there’s no point in doing something small. There is a point. When I started making small changes I started to notice an improvement in my health. I had more energy, didn’t feel so lethargic. I slept better at night and my physical body no longer felt so stiff.

When you get out of bed in the morning stretch up to the ceiling and stretch down to the floor. That simple act repeated every morning adds up to seven stretches. And it doesn’t even take a minute, yet helps your physical body.
There is no way you can say you don’t have time for that.

You are your own capital. You are your own resource. Begin to treat yourself like an important investment, because that really is what you are.

Begin to write a list of how you would like your body to feel.

For example – I would like less shoulder tension.
Then examine what one small step you could take to help with this – I could practice scrunching my shoulder up to my ears and then releasing.

This is an effective technique in firstly becoming aware of tension in your shoulders, and then exaggerating it in order to reduce it.
Again this technique would only take a few seconds.

It’s important to look for small things you can do or change. That way you are more likely to achieve it.
So do, write down a list of how you would like to feel.
What is stopping you from feeling that?
What one small step can you take to feel good/better/healthier/stronger/more alert?


Support and Learning from Mistakes
In relation to Support I would like to mention relationships. Good relationships support us. Not so good relationships can hinder and hurt us.

What is your relationship like with yourself?

Do you congratulate yourself on your successes, and allow yourself to learn from any mistakes, or setbacks.
Or do you get upset, angry, self depreciating about mistakes, or things that didn’t go to plan?
Too many people only focus on what they are doing wrong, and how they have “failed”.
Do you think the top business people of the past and present wasted energy and time beating themselves up over their mistakes? That just isn’t helpful.

Yes examine what went wrong in all it’s detail but then use it to your advantage to gain a new understanding. If you make a mistake you now have more information on how to do something.

Sometimes you have to learn how NOT to do something before you can learn how to do something.

Writing things down is helpful in that it gets the jumble of thoughts out of your head, and allows you to get some order to your thoughts, and or see connections, themes and areas that need attention.
Write down what happened. Write down what you wanted to happen. In the future, what can you do to ensure you get the results you want?
What assistance can you enlist?
Would you like to upgrade your skills so that the next time you will be better equipped to handle the problem situation?

You always have a choice. You have a choice in how you respond to things, in what you allow yourself to learn, and choice in what you will do to stop the problem repeating itself.

It would be a good time to discuss relationships with other people in our lives, but I feel that that is quite a large subject in and of itself and so I will dedicate a whole article just to that subject alone in the coming weeks.


In conclusion: You invest money in your business. But you are your business. You are the foundation. If the foundation is weak, stretched, unstable this then shows in the rest of your business.

How to look after the foundation of your business
• Adequate, Quality Sleep
• Healthful Eating
• Moderate Exercise
• Rest & Relaxation for Stress Relief
• Fun – follow your Passion
• Health – take it seriously, get it checked
• Prioritise – You are the most important Resource that your business has.

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Article Tags: batteries, business strategy, common sense, creativity, effectiveness time, glitches, millions of pieces, own business, personal effectiveness, pointers, successful business, taking care of business, time energy, time off, unhealthy people, well oiled machine



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