Boost your productivity with Self-care

Hello. This week we're having something a little bit different. We're moving the focus away from your business slightly because today I want the message to be about how sometimes the best thing you can do for your business is to look after yourself. In this week's broadcast we'll explore the benefits of self-care. Welcome. My name is Phil Jackson. I'm a coach and mentor and I've made it my life's work to help you with the skills you need to master to build the business you deserve. Every year I hold a group coaching seminar called Crystal Clear Goal Setting which is where I get together a group of small business owners and we set their goals for the year. We talk about their finances, we talk about their marketing plans, the plans they have for their teams, and every year I encounter some resistance when we start to talk about work-life balance. Now work-life balance has become a bit of a cliché to be honest with you and there are a lot of people that don't people that don't really understand what it means. What they're trying to do is get a balance between the huge list of obligations they have at work and the huge list of obligations they have at home. So I'm going to change our phraseology a little bit. We're going to be talking about self-care because one thing that I try and work into everyone's goal setting every January is a part of their week and certainly a part of their month and their year where they're just improving the relationship themselves. I'm not talking about hitting the gym. I'm not maybe even talking about meditation and yoga. What about starting to schedule some time where you actually just kick back and do things with intention that you absolutely enjoy? What about just scheduling time and having no agenda? What would it look like to have an hour or two in your calendar for you to waste? Because it isn't wasted time. Improving the relationship you have with yourself is an amazing investment and honestly this is what's transformed my business. I've coached myself to become extremely productive. I can set a load of goals, break them down into smaller targets and nail them time after time after time. It's what I do best, that planning and goal setting. But guess what? I wasn't happy. In fact I was almost exhausted, completely burnt out. I wasn't doing my best for my business.

Anything I was doing lacked energy and I certainly wasn't fulfilling my responsibilities at home. My kids definitely weren't getting the best from me. And do you know what turned it all around for me? I started taking an afternoon nap for a while. It was like being back at school again, kindergarten even. I would finish lunch, I would work for about 30 minutes and then I would take 20 to 30 minutes just to lie on a beanbag with a book until I fell asleep. And we're only talking about 15-20 minutes but just that little bit of space for myself. De-stressed my afternoon completely. It meant that I wasn't coming home frazzled and I had some time and some energy to spend with my children. Everything seemed to start to shift in balance a little bit. Now, to be honest with you, it's more than an afternoon nap. I will take a whole afternoon every couple of weeks just to go to the cinema on my own, go and take a long lunch, read a book or just do nothing. And that kind of self-care is so important for maintaining your energy and reducing your stress. And actually, it does improve your business because when you are at your desk, you are performing much better. And it makes swallowing that frog, doing those horrible tasks, just that bit easier if you know you've got some self-care time or you've tapped into the energy that you've topped up while you've been looking after yourself. So look at your schedule. Carve out some time. I don't care how short that amount of time is to start with, even if it's just pulling into a car park five minutes earlier than you have to be at work. So you can just sit and listen to a track, not driving, not concentrating, not focusing on anything. Just relax and enjoy some music for five minutes. You can find me five minutes. So go now, look at your diary, start scheduling some self-care. And if you start feeling the benefit, please join my Facebook page, join the conversation and share with me the transformation that you're enjoying. I hope that's been useful to you. If it has, please hit subscribe. I do a broadcast like this every single week and I would hate you to miss out on the content that I'm sharing. If you've already subscribed, I will see you with a brand new topic again next week. Take care.